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Mt.Gox claims (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20140228_45.html) that someone gained illegal access to their systems and stole 850,000btc. They filed for bankruptcy protection.
Three weeks ago Mt.Gox closed their withdrawals and reported (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xicu6/mt_gox_update/) that someone was using transaction malleability to steal their bitcoins. A couple of days before the public statement we had a new peak on days destroyed:

http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed.png

If, and only if, what Mt.Gox is claiming is true and those bitcoins were stolen three weeks ago, then we can assume that right now there is a single entity (could be one single person or a group) owning ~7% of all the btcs mined until now, and since many old wallets are lost forever this percentage could be much significant in relation to the current market cap. Which means that there is a new single entity with a lot of power over Bitcoin's economy.
Please check out the depth chart of the biggest exchanges to understand how bad is the current situation: if this entity drop all those coins in the open market the price would go close to 0, literally. And even when an event like that could last maybe just a couple of hours, I believe that most people would lose all their confidence and Bitcoin could die as a currency. Actually, the 850k could be divided in 3 parts and just use the first part to send the price to single digits, and keep the rest to make everyone scare. You could even write and sign some message to terrorize the community. I know that all this was already discussed, but now the thing is real...


Is there anything we can do? iff Mt.Gox still have their private keys then yes: Bitcoin is a consensus network and we can fork the blockchain whenever is necessary. We need Bitcoin to be useful as a currency, and sometimes we will need to take extreme measures. Specifically, what we can do is pay miners to double-spend the illegitimate transaction and recreate the last ~3000 blocks. There may be people affected by doing this (ie people who received coins from the thief), but if the amount is not something huge then Mt.Gox should be able to pay for their loses.

The only thing we need is consensus, we must analyze what is worse: a fork or a shady entity owning too many bitcoins.


tl;dr: to fork or not to fork, that is the question

This could be a solution for some coins. IF Gox immediately and completely releases information with respect to the stolen coins and the transactions. Then at least something could be investigated. Maybe there are some recently taken that could be recovered. Maybe a huge amount.

More likely the coins have mostly been taken for a long time and over a few years so by this time the theif is so good at tumbling botcoins that any recovery if completely beyond figuring out.

Fork at will and enjoy your nothing coins at your new fork.

Sorry for your pain but Bitcoin is Bitcoin, not Bailout coin. The latter would be the USD and such. Also there are many topics around suggesting this that you can re-use.

Explain why you think miners have this capability.

Thereby invalidating around BTC75,000 in block rewards. If you want to repay that, be my guest.

Don't forget everyone who received coins from the now invalid block rewards I was talking about. These are people who had no connection to the stolen coins whatsoever and are now BTC75,000 out of pocket all because you think punishing innocent people for events outside their control is a good idea.

Considering that a fork means nobody really owns any bitcoins because they can be forcibly taken from innocent people for crimes they had nothing to do with, I say we go with the shady entity owning too many bitcoins. How many is "too many", anyway? Is it okay if a shady entity only has, say, BTC50,000? Does it depend on exactly how shady they are? Is there an acceptable shadiness/BTC ratio that we should be enforcing?

Ok, I'm not being a 100% serious with this thread, but only because 3 weeks may be too much for doing it... anyways:

Miners have the capability of creating new blocks :) that's how Bitcoin works. Actually something like what I described happens all time in a much smaller scale with orphan blocks, but it doesn't happen because someone is trying to double-spend but because mining is a competition.

It could be much more actually because rewards from the old chain will be lost, so they would want to be paid for the old chain and for the new one. We should track those new coins to know the impact, fortunately afaik the last BTC25,000 (from the last 1000 blocks) are not expendable yet.
Mt.Gox, with some help, could pay for this. They could actually use part of their 850k and give bonds to their users, and most of them would accept (right now people have 0). Actually, if what they claim is true, I think that from those 850k they own 150k and the rest are from their cold storage, which is 75k * 2 ;) but they should pay for those who may have bought the first 50,000 new coins from the old chain.

Finally I have a question for you Foxpup. This 7% could be actually 20% of all the expendable bitcoins. Explain to me how people will trust in a currency that could go to 0 any time because there is a thief owning much more than the current demand in all the exchanges together? this person could destroy the economy not one time, but three times. I think the current situation is critical. If you believes that this thief is not going to use those coins to manipulate the market you are being naive.

pera,

Please read this entire thread:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=352734.0

Then come back and we will talk.

I believe you are describing a different situation: my suggestion is to recreate the whole blockchain except for the thief tx's, but this could happen only if most of us agree that it would be really bad for our economy to have a single bad actor owning a huge fraction of the current market cap.

but please go on :)

Do we have any idea where 800,000 BTC are located on the blockchain?

We know at least one transaction from June 2011 (with 42424.24 BTC or something like that).

the idea of dumping stolen 800k coins on exchanges especially all at ones doesn't make any sense. why would a thief go to all that trouble to identify himself in relation to electronic (read traceable) fiat transactions.
much less of why go though all the trouble in the first place to steal 800k coins to devalue it along with it's future spending power

while we at it lets include all other stolen, missing and lost coins. this is not going to fly, Bitcoin wouldn't be what it is today if it did what you are suggesting

My thesis is that Mt.Gox lose 850,000btc three weeks ago.

What you are talking about is an altcoin. Please move to the altcoin forum

if they lost their BTC 3 weeks ago they sold me BTC they didnt have 1.5 weeks ago

bitcoin is a consensus network though, if people agree then it happens

I would very happily buy from that person at a near-zero price. I don't see a problem with that situation.

Furthermore, why would he sell off at low prices? He will not do that.

No, I am not talking about modifying the protocol, nor maintaining a parallel blockchain. Please read my posts again.


I think you don't understand the situation: the bad actor have a huge power over our economy, if only 1/3 of that amount is sold in the open market every exchange will go to near 0, and who will buy when there is another +500k awaiting?
Actually, the bad actor don't even need to use those coins, but only buy shorts and sign terror messages in Twitter like "In one hour I will dump 50k in BitStamp". Even more, the bad actor could have financial incentives outside Bitcoin's economy.

Mods: this topic goes much further than the latest events with Mt.Gox. Bitcoin's economy is based on centralized services that could get stolen from too.

No. Gox lost those years ago. They've been in deficit since.

How do you know that? I based my thesis on what they said in their last press conference.

No, this is essentially an alt-coin called goxcoin. The real Bitcoin will go on and no one will ever mine or accept such a stupid coin. Well, maybe you can try to trade it on bitcoinbuilder

You do understand you will never convince miners to erase 3,000 blocks of the blockchain however if you did, then Bitcoin is done.  Remember over those 3,000 blocks, newly mined coins have been involved in transactions and this action would double spend all of those.  The coins originally minted would never exist and thus the coins spent wouldn't.  Merchants, other users, exchanges would all see the downstream transactions (which have 6 ro 3,000+ confirmations) suddenly go unconfirmed and invalid.

While this in theory could be done at any time it is generally accepted to be impossible.  If miners by decree can double spend transaction not 1 or 2 confirmations into the blockchain but 3,000 blocks deep then no receiver can ever be sure that the transaction is irreversible.  There is a certain level of faith in all currencies that create the perception of value, and Bitcoin is no exception.  Among those faiths, Bitcoin users believe that while it is possible in theory to 51% the network and undo transactions thousands of blocks deep, that it would have such an economic cost that it infeasible.  All users accept this faith or they wouldn't be using bitcoin (or would require 10,000+ confirmations before concluding the transaction).  Your proposed action (although I think it has no chance) if successful would break that faith.  Without faith in the irreversibility of transactions, there is no value or utility to Bitcoin.  Bitcoin would be dead.  I am not talking the exchange rate goes down a bit and recovers, I mean completely abandoned as a worthless experiment and development moves on to future systems which don't have the vulnerability (likely some floating checkpoint system which acts as a check to the proof of work).

How do you use a currency that at any time could simply be "undone" and erased from your wallet by the actions of a third party?  Would you use that currency?  I know I wouldn't.  I genuinely feel sorry for those who lost significant amounts of money by misplacing their trust in MtGox but this is a situation where the cure is worse than the disease.

Desperate goxcoin holders want a fork to get their coins back, and what they will get back are worthless coins.

I don't know that, it's just my guess. Another thread around here was speculating the theory, sounded good to me.
I've been suspicious of Gox for a while, too many red flags, something didn't add up, hence my post last year:


I would take anything Karpels says with a large pinch of salt.


Anyway, it doesn't really matter what theory is correct. The end result will be the same.
Any coins left on Gox won't be returned to their owners. That you can be quite sure of.

I think we went almost a week between threads suggesting we fork the block chain for someone pet complaint or another.  A new record.

I agree with the above - every single one of the hundreds of threads suggesting a fork for one reason or another should be burried in the alt section of the forum.


You many not know it but you are talking about an alt coin by definition.  You could try to call it Bitcoin but that would be a lie.

This.

These blockchain 'rollback' threads keep popping up clearly illustrate the lack of understanding why bitcoin has any value in the first place.

I am not so sure.  If there is anything there then some of it may be returned to the verified account holders, but I would not hold my breath.

On April 15th of 2011 the poker site I was using, Full Tilt Poker, was taken over by the government.

Today I just got notice that the government will be returning the full value of my account.

It took a while for the case to grind through the justa-system but I am very happy with the outcome in the case!

So, you never know.

You are all missing that we ALREADY had hard-forks, do you know that right?

And also if you think that a fork is an alt-coin you are ignorant: as I already said every day we have several small forks (ie orphan blocks).


I understand your fear DeathAndTaxes, but the reality is that Bitcoin is already fucked: it's not distributed anymore, it's just decentralized. We have big mining pools with huge percentage of hashing power, we have few exchanges saving hundred of thousands of bitcoins, we have web services with virtual wallets getting hacked every month...
But Bitcoin could still be used as a currency if we stop being so archaic. Sometimes you need to fork ;) core devs + mining pools already did that.


I have a question for all you: would you use a pre-mined cryptocurrency? because right now we have practically the same shit.

No fork and no Bitcoin Code Authority please !

Bitcoin is Bitcoin not Gox-coin !

It isn't a "fear" (your proposal was DOA before you wrote it) but you are talking about wilfully double spending wealth (let me use simpler words STEALING) from existing users in order to "undo" a mistake which has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself and everything to do with the actions of a private party and the people who mistakenly trusted them.

That is your solution?  The solution is a thousand times worse than the problem and the problem has nothing to do with Bitcoin and everything to do with a private party that people voluntarily chose to use.

Saying the network has been forked before that is a strawman.  Orphans are short lived and are known in advance to miners as a cost of mining.   Patches to the network normally do not produce long running forks and have been used to CORRECT FLAWS IN THE NETWORK NOT COMPENSATE THE LOSS OF A NEGLIGENT OR CORRUPT PRIVATE PARTY (i.e. NOT A BAILOUT).   The one notable exception was the berkeley db bug which caused a long run split in the network.   Miners did decide to switch to the shorter fork however it is important to note that the abandoned fork was only 78 blocks long which means the coins were immature and couldn't be spent.  No user could have received coins from miners and then had those coins erased by the miners as a result.   Making the fork before block 100 was a big factor in the decision to move when quickly.  If the major fork had gone longer than 100 blocks it is very likely the other (older) fork would have been abandoned instead.

You are talking about STEALING FUNDS from innocent third parties by undoing 3000+ blocks of transaction data.  "Fixing" the losses from MtGox, by cluster fucking the entire network.  Merchants, users, and exchanges who did nothing wrong and had no connection to MtGox would suddenly see coins vanish and you think that will be ok?   You think that will make people trust Bitcoin?   You think that anyone would use a currency where a user can do everything right, wait 3,000 confirmations and still have wealth erased by a third party through no fault of their own?  Are you insane?  Would you use that system? Would anyone who is informed of the risks?

Bitcoin. Bailout free since 2009.

Maybe you say that because you think that 850,000btc is not so relevant. What would you say if BitStamp, BTC-E, Coinbase, and Huobi get hacked or "gaged"?

Let's say that now 40% of all coins are owned by one single hacker, would you fork?

NO. Absolutely not.

What would happen if I legitimately bought £10,000 worth of coins 2500 blocks ago? According to you it would be okay for the transaction to be rolled back. Now I don't have my coins or the money!

chill out dude, you looks mad.. I already said that I am not 100% serious with this thread because three weeks is too much.

But forget about "my fix", just tell me please why anyone would use a currency when the current price is totally controlled by a thief?

I said that Mt.Gox should pay for that.

IIRC last year the Foundation rewarded those affected by the hard-fork.

Do you seriously think MtGox has all user fiat ballances on bank account and just missing Bitcoins ? I doubt, and Im not sure who is bigger thief, if MtGox or the transaction maleability exploiter.

Well put D&T

Well that is an unproven assumption.  MtGox has provided no clarity.  We have no idea how many coins were stolen.  MtGox has never explicitly articulated how many coins were stolen, by how many people and over how long of a time period.

As for "controlling" the exchange rate.  So they dump it, ok now they don't have the coins anymore and the exchange rate will recover.   Bitcoin rewards the "smart" thing to do.  If an attacker had 800K BTC they could sell it off slowly and be rich for the rest of their lives, or they could dump it all, very likely never be able to cash it out due to AML/KYC type requirements, and cause a short term drop in the exchange rate.  Are you always afraid of every shadow?  There is no evidence that a single attacker has all the coins, and if they do there is no evidence they would be downright idoitic with them.  

I mean do you really believe that Bitcoin can be completely annihilated by a single entity acquiring 800,000 BTC and selling them?  If so why are you here?  If Bitcoin can be destroyed by one person selling too many of them too quickly then it was worthless from the first day.  Even if no thief current has that many, at current exchange rates buying a million coins wouldn't be beyond the abilities of a well funded malicious entity.  It would be a tiny fraction of the cost of a 51% attack and your claim is that short of a network killing fork there is nothing that can stop them from destroying Bitcoin by just clicking the sell button.

Some of us believe Bitcoin will do just fine, and the biggest risk is rushing to implementing some dubious "fixes" based on little more than "we have to do something".

Then why make the thread to begin with?  Don't bother I won't be able to see it.  Life it too short.

In my first post I gave the source in which I based my thesis (Mt.Gox lawyer explicitly said that someone stole 850k from them).
I thought this was not necessary but I just want to make it clear that I don't know if what Mt.Gox is saying is true, in fact Mt.Gox PR have a long history of bs so I don't trust them. I only created an hypothesis based on what they claim.

The problem is that 850k is more than the whole demand of bitcoins in all the exchanges combined. Actually I think it's almost three times the current demand. We don't know the intentions of this bad actor, the only thing we know (in our universe of discourse...) is the amount stolen. The bad actor could manipulate the market for years, for example one could mix those coins and sell otc just small fractions (best case scenario), or send everything to one single address, write some scary message (like "in one hour I will drop 100k in BitStamp") and sign it, get profit from shorts, or talk with some external entity who hates Bitcoin and make some real deals with them. If I were a big bad bank I would try to find the hacker right now, create an alt-coin, destroy bitcoin's economy with occasional drops, let people speculate about future drops.

you should try to relax asap, otherwise your life is gonna be shorter....

Bitcoin has value specifically because things like bailouts are not possible.

OTOH it is important that the majority of coins do not end up in the hands of a small group of malicious actors. For most people securing their Bitcoins is hard and opportunists/scammers/hackers have exploited this fact. The sooner we can make Bitcoin safe and secure for mainstream users the better.

This may end up being the issue in bankruptcy court. These transactions after the point where they didn't have the coins they claimed they were selling may all be declared invalid, before any payouts are made.

it looks like either you're full of fear yourself or trying to spread fear in 'masses'.

you have no idea what the real true demand is at any price point below current, you only see demand that is on display on order books. at the very worst or best, depending how one looks at it, 850k btc priced at $0.01 for instance costing $8500 would be snapped in an instant.

that's your worst case scenario which btw has close to 0 chances to play out in reality

In the light of possible collapse of value of Bitcoin, what do you people think it will happen to strongest alt-coins out there: LTC, PPC... Would they suffer the same fate, or they will shoot up so hard?

Why would that happen? Has network security been broken or something? Are transactions not being processed?

It is simple.  If you believe this buy them.  If you are right you profit.  If you are wrong then not so much.  What does the opinion of random people have to do with it?  Make your own decision and go with it.

I don't understand your point. Obviously when I said "demand" I was referring to the bids in the order books.
If the bad actor sells only 10% of its loot in BitStamp the price would go to $1. Could people start buying coins like crazy? of course yes, but would they do such thing when someone with obvious bad intentions is dropping massive amount of coins? I don't know.

The reality (in our universe of discourse) is that now there is a single entity with a lot of power over the economy. I am not trying to spread FUD, I am just trying to analyze this hypothetical situation.

What I now understand is that Bitcoin can be perfect, but our ecosystem is far away from being perfect. We took an amazing distributed technology and we are basing its economy on centralized services (exchanges, virtual wallets, mining pools). While some of you may think "fuck Mt.Gox, I have never used them, this doesn't affect me" the reality is that we are all tied together.

All things considered I don't know whether or not this situation should warrant a fork - I'm inclined to hope that the idea would at least be discussed seriously by the community and devs although having been Goxxed I must be somewhat biased - but surely the possibility should not be excluded on principle.

On the contrary, given consensus it should in principle always be an option - to nullify huge fraud, criminal manipulation or catastrophic loss on behalf of the majority of actors in the ecosystem.

I can't see why this is seen as a dangerous precedent. Most of the people saying this are also probably happy to say that Bitcoin sets a dangerous precedent to the current financial hierarchy. It's all about setting groundbreaking precedents.

I just wish these folks who start all these "let's fork the blockchain because ______" threads would stop talking about forking for their favorite reason du jour and just get off their ass and do it.

I for one can't wait to cash in all the alt coins created for me and buy real Bitcoins with the proceeds.

I have a suspicion that the reason that it is always just a bunch of hot air and no on every actually does it is because all these "fork the chain" folks know that their alt forks are doomed out of the gate and it would be a total waste of their time to even try it.

Yes, those who want to fork please do it yourself, and convince miners, investors, and merchants to accept your bailout coin.

The point is that you are wrong and the price would not go to $1.  Not even close.  

First, there are a lot of orders, a lot of large orders, that are not listed in the public order books that you are using.

Second, many people have large sums of USD and other currencies at the exchanges that are not currently committed to orders, it is just sitting there not in the order book.  I personally, and many others, have a large stash of cash at the exchanges just waiting for a meltdown.  In the case of a meltdown we jump in and buy from all the panic sellers.

You cannot use the order book to make any realistic assumptions about where the price would go in a large sell off so please stop trying.

So what you lot going to call this new fork? Obviously you can't call it Bitcoin, as Bitcoin's transactions are irreversible, which is why we trust it, hence giving it value.

And even the price is going to $1, this is not a reason to fork.

RollbackCoin, GoxCoin, BailoutCoin, ForkingCoin (because once you do this once you will do it again and again) all come to mind.

Call it goxcoin or bailout coin, and will be traded on bitcoinbuilder.com

You are wrong. Transactions are reversible but it's "computationally impractical" to do so, though in some extreme situations the network agrees that it's better for the majority to reverse/fork the blockchain. As we already discussed in this thread last year a technical problem within old clients "splitted" the network in two, the longest chain was abandoned by the consensus of the miners in order to join the network and give time to people to update their clients. IIRC the Bitcoin Foundation retributed bitcoins for those who lost money.

So we are using a hard-fork of the blockchain, did we changed the name of Bitcoin? nop.

If we already hard-forked the blockchain for technical (and in many ways economical) reasons, why we shouldn't consider to fork when some potential catastrophic situation could destroy our economy?

btw I am amazed that some people here thinks that a currency could work with one bad actor owning 40% of the market cap.

how is 850k of 12+million of existing coins is a 40% "market cap"? it looks to me less than 10% and less than 5% of all 21 million coins

as i said earlier back on first page of this thread if we do this rollback by forking, lets also roll back all other stolen, missing and lost coins although even from simple, pure logic perspective that task is impossible, technically doable but realistically no way in hell.   
please provide one single reason why mtgox missing funds are worth of blockchain forking over any other hack, theft, loss, etc? there are some large instances of btc's disappearing in bad faith in the past, not as big as 850k but nonetheless pretty substantial, so why 850k deserves a fork in your view and others do not?

IF by some weird strange accident we end up with a fork over this issue here's the outcome that will happen: fork #1: genuine authentic Bitcoin blockchain; fork #2: all those missing 850k mtgox coins.

btw we don't know anything about missing 850k, i'm not sure how you came to conclusion it is a single bad actor as being an already known fact.   besides, by your logic, if this bad actor comes to exchanges - it will be pretty easy for law enforcement to track him/her up and lock up while freezing these funds at entered exchanges.

I tend to agree with you. It's impractical of course, and it won't happen. The principle is sound enough, though. But as far as I understand it, Gox swiped the coins over a couple of years. Maybe it siphoned coins every few weeks or so. It wouldn't surprise me if there were also others behind it (Karpeles as one of a group, perhaps coerced even).

It amazes me that people still place such moral value in BTC actually. It's hardly how I view a free market, more a "war of all against all". Ever since it hit $30 it has been insane, with the few controlling the masses, who in turn are terrified that the masses are cleverer than them and are able to turn the tables.

I wonder how many of the so-called Whales got burnt in the last pump. I am guessing the hierarchy changed somewhat even before the Gox fiasco.

But anyway, let's move on, it's probably the government's fault at the end of the day. That Obama guy, plus bankers and financiers, masterminded the whole thing. You see they're scared of bitcoin ..... lol

such a fork is only debatable if a large amount of coins were lost (e.g. if  a government destroys coins from a seized wallet etc.)

the stolen coins still exist, and how would you fork those, huh? you could only create some more coins, so that there are not 21 000 000 coins but 21 800 000, and then you have a currency that is increasing its money supply everytime there is a major theft.

hmmmm....reminds me of bank bailouts  ;D

Bitcoin is free. As in speech, not beer.

You are free to fork the blockchain however you choose.
You are free to rollback the blockchain to whatever block height you choose.

But remember; others are free with the choice of using your fork or not.

Can't get much more free than that.

Nothing is free of consequences, and bitcoin is not even free to own or compete to own. It currently costs $530, making more than half the world not at liberty to purchase it. They don't even have the liberty to open bank accounts and verify their identities to current standards asked by the exchanges in this free trade paradise.

"Free" is such an abstract concept anyway, especially when it gets onto trade.

NB: I don't want to fork the chain. I said the principle was fine but implied the timeframe was too wide.

Definitely LTC. Buy LOTS while you still can!

This is totally on its head. Even people without bank accounts are free to aquire and use bitcoins. This is an essential trait of bitcoin, one of the reasons we have so much hope for its success.

How do you know that's really a hack? What if MK sold 850k bitcoins to a mega whale for cash, gold bars, and litecoin? Now MK claims it was a hack. So you want to rob the mega whale to pay for your stupidity in trusting MK?

Does it depend on exactly how shady they are? is a good way to put it, thanks.

fork you

Great post!
On the other hand it'd be great to have a way to "invalidate" the stolen coins, that would only affect the thief that could not spend the coins anymore...
All the other coins would increase in value, so that's good for the community as a whole, even if it does not repay the people whom the coins were stolen from.
This invalidation/block could be optional of course.
I think if something like this could work, it would also reduce the potential issues in the future.

No, there is no "on the other hand".

Create an alt with this ability and see how many people would use it.

How to judge and who will judge? The court? Then why don't you simply use fiat?

I think you will find that in the case of destruction of a serious amount of fiat, the central bank will print new, but will not give them to the unlucky guy (unless it is a bank).

Maybe each user could judge for himself?
Or maybe we could have blacklist plugins that can read list of "blacklisted coins", kind of like AdBlock Plus can get various list of Ads to filter. Then users would just opt in or out of these.

How do I refuse stolen fiat money? there is no way for me to know that any coin/bill is stolen... but with the blockchain it may be feasible.

Why is that?

How about the thief sold the stolen coins to innocent people, immediately after the theft?

How about the coins were transferred legitimately, while the sender is such an s-hole, saying that it was a theft?

This story is very confusing, very hard hit by bitcoin




_______________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________
Next Coin Lite - Fair Distribution (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=498662.0)

@jl2012: Yes these are correct questions.

1- In the non-virtual world, I believe that person would lose anything gained from a thief (in case of a suit of course), that could apply to a virtual currency. You could add delay between being able to send newly received funds, but that seems like a major hassle for the overall population so maybe not a good idea.

2- Well that's part of the risk of course, would the cons be greater than the pros? maybe.


3- If it is done at the user level, I doubt people want to manually keep up with small stuff it'd be a hassle.
Probably the same if some organizations are in charge of "blacked lists".
I suspect it would be mostly focusing on the BIG ones, like Sheep, Gox, etc. In these cases it probably makes no difference if the claim is legit or not (ie if an external thieft came in, or it was an internal job, both end up with the same result)


But you didn't reply to my question about the fiat, why?

In no part I assumed I knew exactly how something like this would work, I am merely asking the question.
(most of us didn't know how to get a P2P currency and yet we have one now...)

Because if the fungibility of Bitcoin is lost then Bitcoin is lost.  See my signature and this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=340272.msg3652657#msg3652657

Also, reading this entire thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334316.0

is a very good introduction to the fungibility issue.  There are many very good posts by gmaxwell which explain why this is so important.

I'll read that thank you!