Bitcoin Forum

MtGox, for example. Or silkroad.


Or if/WHEN a government "cracks down" on several exchanges at the same time and takes a large % of the worlds bitcoins. Is there a plan for this? Has it been discussed? Shouldn't the techies and community try to "fix" it somehow?


I'm talking about finding the bitcoins and "blacklisting" them and thus deleting them ofcourse. What problems could this have? That it takes a ton of time that theese people have to do for free?


What if 1 country with many exchanges does this(Steal all the bitcoins inside the country they can get their hands on). Couldn't this lead to other countries doing the same? I mean, if bitcoin is going to blow up to 10,000/BTC or even 100,000 as some actually expect, this could very well become a reality.



Is this a danger and/or what is preventing this?


thanks for your time,
/Guru

For a gov to literally take the btc without a good reason especially in the US I belive there would be a repayment to those who were on that exchange.

Well, in the history books there's many examples of government stealing from their People. And if BTC would skyrocket many times over before this event it wouldn't be hard for them to justify it because Bitcoin would be 1 of many reasons why this supposed governemnts own currency is declining.


Edit: Imagine a Cold war or WW3 scenario. Then even the media would clearly state that the People that's been changing their own currency to e-currency are to be considered traitors or terrorists. And this is not far fetched, many countries today have a really really hard "climate"..

Oh sht. I just realized that this is why they're not banning Bitcoin. Because a ban means person to person trade and use and thus no big Exchanges to hijack(impossible to steal from wallets, basically. At least on a big scale)



 Or...?  :-\


I just keep asking myself: Why is it legal?   ???




Surely, without a doubt, if bitcoin is not banned then sooner or later Bitcoin/E-currency will be a real heavyweight fighting for the belt.



/Guru

They all ready did that to a guy from North Carolina i think. He was creating gold coins and they called him a financial terrorist and seized his wealth. He followed the letter of the law but still got hammered. Great country we live in eh?

It's already happened.

MtGox had over half a million coins stolen.

Life goes on.

well the Gox coins counted for about 7% of total bitcoins atm.

bitcoins theft though it initial hurts the direct victims.. the long term picture is not harmed. eventually the thieves/hoarders/authorities sell the coins, and the coins circulate again. thus equilibrium returns.

the only impact of bitcoin ecosystem's long term effects is if coins are put into a public key, whereby the privkey is lost. deleting coins or making them permanently inaccessible is not the path anyone should take

And ban bitcoins used in Russia and Iran too!

Great idea opening this ban door!

Who else to blacklist...hmm, what race or religions?

On a semi related note, how the hell did the United States Dept of Homeland Security have any jurisdiction whatsoever over a Tokyo based exchange run by a guy from France. He wasn't IN the US was he? Even if he was, how could they pull it off?

I'm seeing a disturbing pattern to all these hacking horror stories - they all start sounding like BS when you look a little deeper at their details which never actually add up.

HLS has zero jurisdiction in other countries. Would we let Chinese government security do shit to anyone in this country?

And why shouldn't the bitcoin community blacklist and delete theese coins? If that is not standard procedures to the extent it is possible, more goxes will occure. Even state-seazing of "assets" in hard times(As said, check your history books. Gold/Silver has been confiscated hundreds of times).




How can deleting coins be more harmful than say a 5%(of all btc) theft? What I mean to prevent by deleting is ofcourse the theft, so that nobody steals because they know it will result in holding a ton of keys that's already been deleted.





Why would we ban/delete them? Because you're tellie tells you their evil?  :o

I'm talking about deleting coins that everyone knows been stolen. In case you didn't know, bankers once had a problem with bank-robbers.

Their solution? Deleting the validity of the bills. Didn't work that well I think but for Bitcoin? Well, 100x times easier.



Does listing in practice not mean the coins are deleted?



I just think that for example Russia's way to go about it is better. Their media and government says "Bitcoin is better than real money" yet their banks don't touch it. That's a great thing! The people themself will create networks of users and personal exchangers which means it is basically unstoppable by government even if they'd change their minds.

If Bitcoin in USA or any specific country is built around big online exchanges, atm's, big buisinesses etc then what will happen to bitcoin when government ban it? The whole ecosystem of bitcoin gone in 1 day. Left is ofcourse millions of users but they'd have to start building the user-network from scratch.

If in 5 years Russian government on the other hand, which have not let banks/exchanges develop, ban bitcoin. What will happen? They cannot take the peoples bitcoin because that's stored as secure for them as it gets. They'd have to accept Bitcoin because there'd be no way to take it away.

The US govt likes to think if your business crosses their borders, virtual or not, they have the authority.

stealing funds is just moving them, eventually the theif or athority will spend them.. (moving them) which will bring them back in circulation.

stealing is just hoarding, it does not mean they are permenently out of use and locked out never to appear again. they are just held for a length of time until the entity holding them decides to move them. yes bad for the victim.. but in 1,10,50,100 years those coins will be in circulation and other people will use them. those looking at the big and long term picture, the coins are in circulation and not lost.(meaning NOT less then 21mill coins available ever).

but deleting coins by strategically putting coins into a random public key where the private key is unknown/lost. is making those coins inaccessible to anyone, and owned by no one. meaning they will never go back in circulation EVER again. in short reducing the total bitcoins in circulation to be less then 21mill. which is worse.

every coin will eventually pass through a darknet (illicit) service, a scammer, an authority. thus deleting coins that are stolen or used for illicit activity over the next 100 years will mean all coins will eventually be permenently lost.

imagine it this way, they say a large percentage of bank notes has drugs taint. imagine if police stopped innocent people and while standing infront of you. they burned every bank note you own that has drug taint.

your $100 may become $80 and it wont be your fault. its the fault that somewhere in the past that money touched the hands of a druggy

The very basic arguments behind blacklisting coins is preserving the fungibility of BTC and also the question of who decides what gets blacklisted.

As said though its been discussed as nauseum.

in bitcoin, stolen coins ... are not loose.  ;D

In my opinion, there should never be a way to blacklist bitcoins. The whole idea of Bitcoins is, that nobody controlls them, because we don't trust governments, we don't trust Banks, we don't trust big corporations.
Why should we trust any other authority(BTC-developer-Team)?
People trusted MTGox, a nice Company, that played a big part in making BTC popular. We all know what happened.
I can't think, of an example of a Person, that came to great power and didn't screw over a lot of People. Can anybody else?

Exactly. People that do not understand the fundamental importance of unhampered fungibility should use government fiat only. Blacklisting would render bitcoin unusable.

Can u plz point a link to this incident ? Would like to know more about it...

Letting governments come in and blacklist coins is a very bad idea.  One of the big benefits of bitcoin is that no one controls it.  If you take that away, you would be greatly weakening it's utility and appeal.

But I'm talking about the bitcoin community somehow banning Bitcoins that the GOVERNMENT take. Not the other way around  ;)

You cant have it both ways, as soon as you've undermined the decentralized trustless system, its ceases to exist.

In the 70s, an individual allegedly took a high dive out of a passenger jet in the middle of winter, in the middle of a storm, in the middle of the night, wearing only a suit, carrying a messed up parachute with money stolen as ransom during the hijacking, and disappeared somewhere over or into the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

They call him D.B. Cooper, and while the whole notion of what happened sounds like a fishy hoax perpetrated by the flight crew, reality is all that perfectly good money has been lost indefinitely, out of commission...

And we all dealt with it and moved on.

Difference is more fiat can be printed. More bitcoin won't be made after the cap so with coin out of commission and MIA, it would make them even more valuable in the long term.

For the record, I also lean toward no sort of decentralization. The entire premise of Liberation and Freedom is responsibility for one self, accountability to and for one self...that means you take 100% full responsibility for securing your wealth. If you still need some other guy to do it for you, you're simply not mature enough to handle your own finances and shouldn't be involved with bitcoin outside nifty gyft cards.

Freedom requires vigilance.

That requires a clear, sober head and an intact spine.

1. Tell people that using an exchange or Silk Road type entity as a bank is stupid. People should learn from Gox and sr1. If you don't have the keys, you don't own the coins..

2. As BurtW said - blacklisting is a bad idea and it has been discussed to death many times.

3. Dark Wallet, CoinJoin etc will hopefully help prevent blacklisting prior to it starting.

4. Make your alt-coin that allows blacklisting, but it won't be bitcoin.

Mostly agree, but if you need someone to secure your wealth, free market options are and will be available.  It is up to the individual to decide, and whatever they decide they still must take responsibility for their choice.

I think he was talking about Liberty Dollars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar

I don't think he was talking about Casascius coins since Mike is in Utah:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/13/5207256/casascius-maker-of-shiny-physical-bitcoins-shut-down-by-treasury

I was all for Liberty dollars and kept up with the case until the whole thing kinda just faded into oblivion. When I first heard of bitcoin, I thought it was the reincarnation of the liberty dollars - same people and it really excited me to death. I see now, though, that bitcoin solves the liberty dollar problem. The government being allowed to print money...and that's the catch.

Money and currency are not the same thing.

It came down to a sort of surrealist nonsensical sort of "trademark infringement" at the end of the day. Government said it and only it is legally allowed to print "money" and liberty dollar couldn't call it money, couldn't call it a dollar, couldn't assign it any point value, so they got taken down for counterfeiting. They tried to get around it by going with silver/gold "rounds" or coins but by then I think the government just needed to make an example of them and scared people away from it. My personal take on it is that the government won that round due to the simple fact the people, no matter how much they believed in the concept as an alternative still had no ultimate security that they'd ever see any silver/gold, that it couldn't be confiscated from their own mints and it'd be a rip off.

Bitcoin solved that problem entirely, which is why it's gained more traction and the government trying to assign it as an asset or property over currency is just shooting themselves in the foot.

Here's the thing though. By the time the government recognize just how "disruptive" bitcoin will be to global currencies, it'll be too late. They're in a catch 22 zone right now...too small to be an immediate threat so they can't outright ban it without giving it legitimacy as a threat...so they can only fear monger to hopefully scare people away like they did with the liberty dollar. Once enough adoption has set in, not just in the US but globally, where legitimate businesses have changed their payment infrastructure and are doing business with it, the government can't outright ban it without causing chaos in the economy...so they'll either have to grin and bear it or implode.

What's the story with the Silk Road coins? Aren't those going to be dumped on the market soon by the feds?

Nothing. That is either the good or bad thing about Bitcoin, depending who you ask.

As an anarchist I am 100% for blacklisting any nation-state government owned coins.

Starting with the wealth the FBI stole from all those innocent drug dealers on the Silk Road.

In the world according to Beliathon, stealing isn't a crime anyway, because there
shouldn't be any laws (anarchy), and no one can own any coins to begin with,
because private property is an invalid concept.  ::)

Blacklisting bitcoins stolen by a government is/could be done by consensus of the whole network, not centraul authority.

Good luck "enforcing" a general consensus.

lol

"Could" is the operative word here.  Everyone COULD decide to make me king and
send me all your bitcoins, but it aint gonna happen. 

Heck, we can't even agree on whether to use bits, millies, zibs, satoshis, centoshis, etc.
We're never going to agree on blacklisting coins.

I'm pretty sure certain events could change that though. You're all being narrow minded here. Take no offense, please.



Theoretically this is perhaps hard(But far from impossible) to pull off atm, but: What if US government would get their hands on 20% of existing BTC? By stealing from exchanges / kidnapping holders and extorting their keys. They could then basically drop the price to 1$. They could very well call it a terrorist act to buy/sell/OWN bitcoins. Then they, BY LAW, can put you in a cage for the rest of your life. Not even 1% of americans own bitcoins so even putting you all in theese cages isn't even that hard.


Why would they do this?

To preserve the dollar / prevent monetary revolution

Be real folks. If you can imagine what Bitcoin can do for humans(and how rich you'll get along the way, which is what most people seem to focus on) please at least put 10% of that time imagining of what government/FED/Rothschild could do to prevent it from happening. A huge well-cordinated crackdown is not a paranoid fantasy. It's a possibility.

But ok, let's put our head in the sand and brush it off as crazy.. I mean, governments and the elite are good people right?  :-\

If you think it is needed, fork the client, and fork the blockchain.  Then see how many people agree.  It will be a perfect test of the theory. No one is stopping you, the code is on github, the blockchain is everywhere, and then you can see how the consensus of the network is.  No one knows what the consensus will be until someone does it - then it may put an end to the repeated threads arguing for blacklisting.

At worst, fork the code, test it, and release the blacklisting code - then it can be used at any point in the future for whatever purpose requires blacklisting.

its more likely that government will outlaw bitcoin or try a 51% attack than it is for bitcoin to adopt blacklisting.

That does in fact say nothing. Governments will outlaw bitcoin and try a 51% attack.

when you get done using that crystal ball, i'd like to borrow it. thx.

I'll upload it to thepiratebay.org so everyone can use its awesomeness don't worry  :D

Because we all know the Feds are actually gonna pay the IRS some hefty capital gains taxes on all that property they confiscated, right.  ::)

Reading in threads like that just makes it clearer for me:
There are no good guys. There is no authority you should trust in, especially not people in this Forum.
We have a lot of egomanic-cowards here, which compare themselves to Ghandi(Ghandi didn't hide from the government), but in reality just want to increase there own wealth and don't care about anybody else.
We have people here, who calls themselves anarchists, but want there own set of rules, rules that benefits them. That's not anarchism.
We have people here, who spread the same bullshit arguments over and over again, using the same words, but don't really answer you, when you challenge them: See here: A simple question that was never answered (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=572437.msg6434131#msg6434131)
Those people using the same methods politics and media uses: Repeat something often enough and people will start believing it.

Please people, think for yourself. Bitcoin is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that everybody who associates himself with it, is a good person.

What thread do you think this is, turvarya? Because clearly we're not reading and writing in the same.

Who compares himself to Ghandi? Guru?  :D

And why so many insulting degrading words of other bitcoiners? Nobody here have used foul words or personal insults, until now. Maybe someone had a bad nights sleep? Or already got their sore feet stomped somewhere else?



Or perhaps you're a troll because this thread just got ready for dustbin.



/Guru

Just realized you get paid for every post that's not obvious bullcrap. Primedice should have you off the payroll though, because that post doesn't make any sense at all..

Governments can try and outlaw what they want but who cares.

For a start they cant all agree on anything let alone all simultaneously banning BTC.

The US government tried to outlaw gold in 1933, during the time it was banned to own the price went from $20 to $195. The key difference as well is that you can catch someone with gold but good luck trying to prove someone knows a private key.

I am not just referring to this thread, but many others, I have read since I am here. You may have noticed, that I am longer in this Forum than you
Here an example of someone comparing themself to Ghandi (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153202.msg1628690#msg1628690)

You also may have noticed, that I am not really writing that much. I am more reading and if you had read as much as I in this forum, you might realize that my post makes a lot of sense.
I don't want to offend you, but keep your eyes open and think for yourself. Don't believe everything that is written in here.

I'm pretty sure they weren't comparing themselves to "Ghandi"[sic].


Please tell me more about these people, this set of rules, and what you think anarchism is and isn't.

It's legal for the same reasons the internet is legal.

Have you even read the thread you are posting in?


But I know, that you are asking this stupid question, because you know, you are one of this hypocrites I am talking about.
How far are you, with revoking your citizenship and moving into the wilderness, where you don't have to pay for the streets you are using every day?

That's not a rule. Nor is it anything to do with anarchism. It turns out anarchists can have opinions too.


Can you point to something I have said/done which constitutes hypocrisy, in your view?


Why do you believe that I should accept the state's geographical dominion any more than I should accept any other injustice? Where would South Africa be if Mandela had just left and gone somewhere that didn't practice apartheid? Where would the US be if King had just left?

When faced with injustice, my instinct is to confront it, and to resist it. Yours, bizarrely, seems to be to run from it.

Yeah, no. This concept in relation to theft has been brought up many times before. The problem with this idea is who is given the power to decide which coins should be 'deleted/blacklisted' as whoever they do give it to basically has everyone at their mercy. It breaks the whole decentralisation by placing a single entity with all the power regardless of whether coins should be 'deleted' or not. People could even do it against people they hold grudges against and not for the intended purpose.

lol
Thanks for comparing yourself to Mandela and King. That is exactly what I meant.
Sorry, I haven't read about you openly confronting US-government. I must have missed that in the news.
Hypocrite ...

Can you cite where I compared myself to Mandela and King?

You seem to be struggling with basic semantics. Mentioning someone, is not comparing myself to someone.


Why would I be confronting the US government?

With the greatest of respect, you're a bit of a muppet.

If they are running their exchange properly, they won't allow their coins to be seized.

They would hopefully use a 2 of 3 system. If the government comes asking they will very quickly send out the coins to those they belong to.

I see. You are one of this people, that don't even understand what they are self saying.
You compare, your not leaving of the USA to Mandela's not leaving of South Africa or King's not leaving of the USA. Therefor you compare yourself to them.
Is that really so hard to understand? Didn't you have any kind of education, where you learned that?
Seriously? Do you really don't understand what the words mean, that you are writing?

This is really quite basic stuff. I am trying to illustrate the importance of not running away from injustice, and am citing notable historical examples of this importance. This has nothing to do with comparing myself to the examples I cite. It would be a pretty strange world if one couldn't cite historical figures without being accused of comparing oneself to them.

If I was a Christian, and used Jesus as an example of why we should be kind to people less fortunate to myself, do you really think I would be comparing myself to Jesus? :)


You're struggling with really basic semantics here. See above, before questioning my education.

I should also point out, I don't live in the US.

From where you'll draw the line? Tell me why a 1% robbery of the coins should be treated any more differently than someone stealing 0.5% of the coins. If we block or destroy the Stolen Gox coins, then people will ask why this was not done earlier, in the case of Silk Road and other robberies.

Bad example. According to the bible, Jesus told us to be kind to others.
Where do Mandela and King say, that you should stay in your country and hide from the government, like you do?

You ask:
Therefor you say: "Where would my country(obviously not-USA) be, when I would leave it?" I think, it would do just fine.
Staying in their country isn't the main thing, that defines this people.

Where would Cuba be, if Che hasn't killed a lot of people? According to your logic, I should kill some people.

Well if the government takes the btc then i think that they wud pay the people for their lost btc. but this might affect the value of the btc and then it wudnt be beneficial for the government itself.

Well overall I'm with you on an anti-blacklisting mentality because it's the use of and storage of bitcoins that should change more than the protocoll itself. And 1% is at least to me no longer a problem, it's unsignificant for what I'm talking about. I am still concerned about what could happen if any single entity would acquire 10% or more though. I think, however, that's nothing we can do anything about since the mightiest men walking this earth could easily just buy that even with a skyrocketing price.

I'm just thinking, in the future, e-currencies could very well replace fiat. Either way if its that or just 1% of world economy whatever it is it's a revolution. And in at least my historybooks revolutions are always a bloody mess. Something we haven't seen so far.

Could he?
Basic of economics say, that for a demand there has to be a supply. So, if "the mightiest men walking this earth" wants to buy 10% of all Bitcoins, there have to be people who own that 10% and want to sell it.
There are enough stories in Stock Markets, where companies thought they have enough money to just buy, enough stocks of another company to take control but failed horribly.

Wait, are you comparing yourself to Jesus? You mentioned him just now!


Can you cite an example of where I said I hide from the government? Seriously, how many straw man arguments can one poster erect in one thread?


You're now combining the straw man with the non-sequitur. I am saying - where would we be, as a species, if everyone ran away from injustice, like you advocate.


I do believe you're getting it! Staying in the country isn't the main thing. Resisting injustice is the main thing. If that means staying in the country, then it means staying in the country.


...please, on behalf of everyone, don't ever take a job which involves logic.

Edit: In fact, it's probably better for everyone if you avoid firearms, pointy objects and heavy machinery.

There would be no real way to "destroy" the stolen GOX coins, nor any other stolen coin.

Almost all bitcoin robberies have coins moved around several times, often through tumblers, and always with some kind of miners fee.

Some of the stolen coins would be in the hands of the miners, some would be in the hands of tumblers' shareholders and the rest cannot be traced with 100% certainty.

You don't have to read a history book for examples of government stealing from their people. Fiat inflation IS theft (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0). They're doing it right now. They were doing it yesterday. They'll be doing it tomorrow.

That's why the dollar is a dead thing walking.