[Cryptography] Bitcoins and lobbyists

[Henry Baker]

At 05:17 PM 2/27/2018, John Levine wrote:
>In article <E1eqn7P-0002yL-VO at elasmtp-curtail.atl.sa.earthlink.net> you write:
>>>> 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. ...
>
>>Task #1 -- together with Bitcoin address identification -- makes transaction tracing trivial.
>
>It certainly makes it trivial to track payments to wallets, give or
>take laundering your bitcoins through tumblers.  So I've made a
>breakthrough, and here are the identities of Roy Moore's top five
>contributors:
>
>1C8cQXBp5FKjzAwHo3FH9pwVJtysJTcnft
>6CHkNwVVzL1yn68wBTsj3tQ4P61D5ePB1N
>22W83FarXmaPcPezedQQVc3zrBgmRAgeZB
>5KUmVfYPcTPeDFUTTrAtitLYA3P7d4G8RQ
>1HXxQV9GKBWgYv6YU1BByxdEJifgMuFQNN
>
>What am I missing here?

A lot.  You might start by reading my original post:

"If these money flows had all been Bitcoin-based, her job would have been trivial: the government would simply require the disclosure of the Bitcoin addresses of the various participants, and the Bitcoin miners (and the various Bitcoin tracing technologies) would do the rest."

The various government disclosure forms already exist; but as you point out, they aren't terribly useful w/o requiring the disclosure of Bitcoin addresses.

The FEC already gets to paw through the various campaigns, and registered lobbyists would have to disclose their Bitcoin addresses in their disclosure forms.

Add another line to the various 501 tax filing forms, and you start to get a decent picture.