[Cryptography] Bitcoins and lobbyists

[Henry Baker]

At 12:57 PM 2/27/2018, Bertrand Mollinier Toublet wrote:
>> On Feb 27, 2018, at 05:19, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
>> 
>> (I'm going to use the term "Bitcoin" here as the best-known examplar of many block-chain-based cryptocurrencies.)<br>
>> 
>> It occurred to me that she was performing -- by hand -- many of the same steps that a Bitcoin miner has to perform, by tracing the sources and sinks of the various money flows through individuals, corporations, LLC's, law firms, etc.<br>
>
>I'm not sure I understand the implied relationship between mining and tracing money flows?  Henry, can you clarify what you mean?
<p>

Bitcoin mining accomplishes two useful tasks:<p>

1) continual consistency checking of the entire blockchain and<p>

2) mining lottery winners extend the blockchain & collect modest fee<p>

Task #1 -- together with Bitcoin address identification -- makes transaction tracing trivial.<p>