So, a thought.
Like so many, I often get spam sent to my email, containing threats and a BTC address to pay a certain amount of BTC to otherwise “oh noes”. Now this is all obviously a scam, and I will often copy the address and then use blockexplorer.com to see if anyone has paid any BTC to that address, and often the address has zero activity.
Here’s my thought. Would it not be useful for a site like blockexplorer.com to allow users to add comments about an address. Like, it would be useful for me as a user to be able to label the address as a scammer, and attach a copy of the email I received as proof.
Like, ok, BTC is supposed to be decentralized, but surely someone could do this externally?
Also, a second thought. Wouldn’t it be useful if the protocol itself allowed this, labelling of addresses, and then maybe even a protocol of suspension/cancellation? It would have to be controlled obviously, but once cancelled, couldn’t all the transactions to that address be reversed? Not easy I’m sure, and I’m sure I’ve not thought of every possible abuse of such a system.
But it seems to me that at least we should be able to label an address as “suspected scam” so that people could at least be warned when they try and transfer funds to that address.
To me, an address with no activity on it is immediately suspect.
Posted by malacosa
1 Comment
The first thing is feasible, but the people that fall for such scams are not savvy enough to go look up the address on a block explorer anyway, so it wouldn’t really help much. Not to mention that new addresses are trivial to generate. Besides, scammers could easily make such a solution useless by flagging as many addresses as possible via bots.
The second thing definitely no. The ability of freezing addresses and revert transactions goes against the core principle of sovereignty.