Yes but in Bitcoin like mentioned you can ignore those coins and never use them. In Ethereum one could argue you are using them whenever you are doing your next transaction because there is no concept of coins that can be differentiated.
It's like the difference between someone telling you the password to some bank account filled with drug money and someone sending you a wire transfer to your bank account plus the bank not being able to prevent it. In the first case you can just forget the password and not touch that account. In the second case suddenly it's on you to know what incoming funds were bad and distance yourself from them (sending back or burning).
In the bitcoin blockchain each transaction includes the originating address, destination address, and amount.
In the ethereum blockchain each transaction includes the originating address, the destination address, and the amount.
Both blockchains have all the information you need to avoid spending tainted coins, and it would depend on the wallet implementation to do that for you.
There are plenty of bitcoin wallets that just present the total coins present in an address and it's on the user to look at the lower layers or use a wallet that does that for you.
This whole thing seems like a distinction without a difference.
Hopefully a judge would see it that way as well, until it's tested in court we'll never know.
In Bitcoin transactions are not just "from", "to" and "amount" even if some wallets abstract them in that way.
In the simplest case there are coins that get marked as being spendable by some public key (address). That's the analogy with the password to a bank account was refering to. As long as you don't make use of that privilege then you can't be reasonably criminally convicted. That doesn't mean law enforcement wont come and ask questions.
In Ethereum it is more like you said where a certain amount is actually credited to an address and at that point cannot be distinguished from other funds in that address.
I agree both systems have enough information to handle the situation but again (I start to feel like a broken record) - there is a clear difference between them in that one needs active work to distance yourself from the funds while the other just requires not touching the tainted coins. You could also in Bitcoin go the extra step and actively burn those coins. Ideally the sanctioning body would provide an address of theirs where tainted coins can be sent and the sender then reimbursed for the fees or even awarded a small amount.
Hopefully a judge would see when someone innocent received tainted funds but it would be a tad more difficult on Ethereum than on Bitcoin.
Thanks for explaining that. I guess I have only used bitcoin wallets that abstract this, and I thought that bitcoin and ethereum were more similar than they actually are (at least when it comes to addresses and transactions).
I tried to search for this before my last post but I just got a bunch of trash results, SEO spam and articles aimed at non technical people.
It's like the difference between someone telling you the password to some bank account filled with drug money and someone sending you a wire transfer to your bank account plus the bank not being able to prevent it. In the first case you can just forget the password and not touch that account. In the second case suddenly it's on you to know what incoming funds were bad and distance yourself from them (sending back or burning).