Bitcoin Forum

Before I write a full argument for why the core developers should consider asking the mining community to freeze Mt. Gox’s stolen BTC (the coins mentioned here, for example, http://www.coindesk.com/gox-money-moving-through-block-chain/ ), I would like to ask your opinion.  What is it?  Yes, you.

No, the idea of the dev team becoming the police of bitcoin is awful.  If they were to do it in this instance, where would they draw the line?

I lost 95% of my wealth in this goxxing and I still say NO

at least I got my health still tho right ..sniff :'(

I will say fuck Blackhats and fuck mark and if bitcoins going to reach mass adoption its going to require something to stop low tec users from living in fear and getting screw every time they even think about the internet. That or it will be a bloody road we go down. Hey just look back at the road already...yea plenty of bitcoiners dead along the wayside.

That would be against the model of bitcoin..! one of its key feature that is no regulation and decentralized currency, how they will justify their actions?

No!
Thread no.47 on this subject gets the same answer as the others: blacklisting bitcoins will destroy the value of the currency.

Let's pick a line that is somewhat arbitrary but be guided by praticality.  So for arguments sake let's start at 1% of existing bitcoins.

Why no?

That's one of the big misconceptions I hear over and over again on this board, that bitcoin means no regulation.  Regulation and decentralization are two different concepts.  Bitcoin's strength is its decentralization, not its lawlessness.

Where is it stated that the model of bitcoin is no regulation?  Should not the model include agreement of its users?  A currency is only as strong as the trust in it's controllers (miners in this case) (and its utilitarian characteristics).  No regulation doesn't mean letting potentially convicted felons spend the money they stole, does it?

Law is one of the foundations of civilization.  If bitcoin is anarchy then I'll pass.  If bitcoin is anarchy then another more lawful coin will overtake it because the anarchists are in the minority.  (Not that minorities are wrong and that they can't have their own coin; I just didn't know that bitcoin was that coin.)

Freezing is not the same as blacklisting.  Why not let the community vote?  The developers and miners will release a statement that they will freeze the stolen bitcoins.  If the value drops then they will decide against that action.  If it rises they will continue.

Post a link or two of the better threads on this subject.  Thanks.

No, why should the developers have an obligation to the people who make mistakes and lose their money on their own terms. Not to mention, it completely breaks the system by giving control to the devs as to the wealth of everyone else and would all-in-all result in the death of Bitcoin. I'm sorry if you lost anything, but that's life; you cannot expect someone else to fix your own mistakes.

no, but they can help with getting justice, preventing this from happening again, and tracking the funds.

I wholeheartedly agree with this post and while its painful as hell to say it yes I played a large part in the loss of my coins and I do not expect someone else to fix my mistake.

I do however expect law enforcement to at least pretend they give a shit since I pay my taxs. If the stock market got robbed they would be crawling all over the place well my little exchange just got robbed for 0.5 bil ow.. what was that?... ah I see btc are not real sorry to bother you police officer I'll let you get back to catching people braking the speed limit on this deserted road.

Until there is fear of punishment these exchanges can just rake in the cash until something goes wrong then stroll off into the sunset.

It's OK when the developers provide help/tools to track the blockchain. It's not OK to change the protocol.

So they implement that.  Criminals start to only steal 0.99% as they know they can get away with that.  So it now changes or we just accept it? 

No.

If it was even possible (it isn't: you'll never get all miners to comply, it only takes one dissenter to push a transaction through), freezing funds would destroy everything that Bitcoin stands for.

And so would any dev (or bitcoin foundation) acting as 'government'. They cannot make decisions like this. Even if users went along instead of laughing in their face, that would be politically very dangerous and radiate that they are in control of the network (and thus be open to other demands and threats and bribes...).

Cryptocurrencies need to be fungible to be useful. Progress should be toward making them more fungible, not less.

I'm very sorry for MtGox victims, but we cannot abandon our principles every time that disaster strikes.

Why should the developers develop?  Answer:  Because they love the concept of Bitcoin, want Bitcoin to grow, and enjoy the respect of their peers.  (And for my question only, they love coding).

It does not give control to the developers.  The control is in the hands of the miners.  It was and always will be.  (If you exclude the thief hackers.  ;)  )

Thank you for your concern, but this isn't about me.

One answer could be vote.

“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
― Benjamin Franklin

As a Brit it irks me I had to post an American quote  ;) but yea what this dude said.

If the bitcoin foundation or any organisation was able to do as the OP said I would drop Bitcoin in a second.

This will simply destroy its regulation, decentralization and value. SO, NO

Yea because voting in most democratic countries has worked out real well for the common man's personal finances.

Edit: Not bashing Democracy.

I don't think a 6% disaster is likely to strike again.

Devs have made decisions like this before and the block chain has been rolled back.

Freedom as in letting thieves roam free, or as is free to be ripped off?

Are you dropping your UK pounds?

Lawlessness and decentralisation aren't the same thing. We could have a structure that allows for a decentralised decision to freeze these coins. Call it a "democracy". Miners vote, majority wins.

There's a real legal issue here, in that stolen goods remain the property of the victim. Imagine these coins enter general circulation and a credible law enforcement agency goes after them. (Edit: With half a BILLION dollars in play that's not such a far fetched scenario). Every satoshi you buy or receive as payment has a 7% chance of being a stolen one, and is recoverable by your national law enforcement in the US/EU/Asia. Bitcoin is super traceable. So the criminals will launder the coins and you and I will end up with them in our wallets and then comes a knock at the door with a legal order to reposes them. Unless you live in Nigeria.

Yes it sets a precedent. A really healthy one. Where do you draw the line? I don't know, but somewhere lower than 7% of the entire economy. Let the miners vote.

Not changing the way we do things after a disaster is really stupid thinking. You think after the Turkish earthquake they didn't upgrade the building code? After the Indonesian Tsunami they didn't create an emergency evacuation plan? Bitcoin is in it's infancy. It's not in it's final state. It's allowed to evolve. Regardless of how you were effected by Gox, or what you think of the victims decision making, this incident is a massive crisis for Bitcoin adoption. I think its sets the currency back years in the eyes of the next wave of adopters.

Creating a system that's perceived as fairer, and self policing would reverse that set back. For the future of bitcoins I say yes. Freeze them and return them.

Edit: punctuation

I suggest reading this: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
There has been one block chain rollback ever, and that was after a critical issue in the block chain parsing itself, allowing infinite amounts of coins to be created.
It was a technical issue and bitcoin wouldn't even exist anymore without that fix.

Do you really not see the difference between that and an exchange that is mismanaged and screws up?

Mostly on btc and mining hardware yes and I do hope that's OK with you.

Its an ugly world out there full of all shades of grey not just black and white buddy.

Why should the devs not freeze "stolen" Inputs.io coins or "stolen" 50btc coins (and many others) and freeze "stolen" Gox coins?
Because the amount is higher? more users involved? foundation members lost coins?
For whatever reason there is, the principle is the same:

Should not blacklist any bitcoins, fungibility is essential

The scariest question is not should they but CAN THEY FREEZE coins?

If they can I am going to sell all of my Bitcoins at once. It means that USA can buy off entire Bitcoin ecosystem for a 3-4 days worth of money printing.

There would be a fork and the bitcoin foundation would lose any control over the client if they tried something like this.  

The devs can't, but all (51%+) miners could work together to censor transactions. They would not be able to seize the coins, just prevent any transaction spending them from being confirmed.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.  This is exactly the same conclusion that I came to last night after I logged off but before I read your post.  This is exactly the crux of it.  Bitcoin is semi-democratic.  The 51% "attack" is not an attack but a vote!

This is so important that I think it warrants its own discussion, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=509778 . (Or perhaps this has also been discussed before?)

In short, no, because it destroys fungibility.

Some questions to keep in mind:

Who is able to freeze coins? (You already said miners)
What happens in disputes?
Who has the ability to unfreeze coins? Only miners?
How do you propose miners keep track of the stolen coins?
How can coins be unfrozen?
Who pays for this system?

As an example, what happens if coins I hold are unjustly frozen? What do I do?

It would also be near impossible to achieve consensus for this type of change in Bitcoin.

Everyone can refuse service, and you may pressure them into refusing service if you don't like the particular bitcoin or want them to implement some kind of taint analysis engine using some kind of blacklist.

Otherwise, feel free to waste your time trying to fork it yourself.

I think it is around thread 47,000!   :-)

Freeze-coins are not bitcoins, but an alt-coin.

fungibility is not the issue here.

What happens in disputes?  A judge decides.
Who has the ability to unfreeze coins? Only miners?  The miners will unfreeze coins on the decision of a judge.
How do you propose miners keep track of the stolen coins?  Perhaps the miners will place the coins in a temporarily locked wallet.
How can coins be unfrozen?  The coins are returned to the rightful owners after a democratic court determines who they are.
Who pays for this system?  A percentage of the stolen coins may be used to pay for any management of the system.  Similar to the taxes we pay to support our justice system.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Goldcoin (GLD) must remain decentralized. This is a really bad idea in my opinion.

If the Bitcoin developers and the Bitcoin Foundation would like to address some of the design deficiencies in Bitcoin, they should totally do this.

The effect would be to severely damage and possibly completely kill Bitcoin and allow systems which were architected with more brainpower and more benefit of hindsight to get a toe-hold and rise to the top.  This may very well be the most efficient way of getting robust cypto-currency solutions into widespread use.

Fungibility most certainty is the issue. Under these rules, if miners believe that coins I hold are stolen and freeze them, I can no longer spend them. These frozen coins would differ from other non-frozen coins. Who would accept any coins if they could be frozen some point in the future by a third party?

So miners can decide to freeze my coins, then I have to prove my ownership of the coins to a judge if the miners are wrong?

The question was more about how miners will determine which coins are stolen and which are not. I should have made that more clear.

What defines a democratic court? Keep in mind that the person defending ownership of the coins could be from any country.

So a portion of the coins pay for administration of this system and I assume the rest goes to the person they were originally stolen from?

Generally you will find that current bitcoin users will be against a system where their coins can be taken, without permission, by a third party. Decentralization is a very important benefit of bitcoin, creating a taint system (freezing/blacklisting/whitelisting/ect) greatly diminishes that benefit.

Just like in every other incarnation of this exact same suggestion, we reach the point where the OP is asked to spec exactly how this would work. You say vote, sounds like you have it all figured out, so why not ask any of the major mining pools right now if they would consider taking your suggestion on board.

If they say yes, then maybe the idea is worth exploring. If they say no then you aren't going to get what you suggest.

Everything else is just going to be posturing.

Who, me?  Posturing?   ::)

You (and the rest of you who keep saying this) don't know what the hell you are talking about, do you?

If 51% of the miners refuse my "dirty" transaction that still leaves 49% that will accept it.  So my confirmation time goes from an average of 10 minutes to an average of 20 minutes and you have done nothing.

Repeating over and over that getting 51% of the miners to refuse the coins you don't like will stop them from moving does not make it true.

Learn how something actually works before you try to fix it.

I think posing is a more accurate description than posturing.

Agreed, the link you provided in the other thread explains it very well.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=352734.0

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/posturing

Prove it's not just posturing by taking the next step: ask the mining pools if they are interested in your proposal.

Three glaring example of how you have no clue as to how the thing you are trying to "fix" operates at a fundamental level.  None of this is even possible.

NOT.  POSSIBLE.

Miners cannot "place the coins in a temporarily locked wallet" because they can only send them where the owner wants to send them (or not, but then another miner will).

NO ONE can return "coins .. to the 'rightful' owners" except the current owner.

It is not possible to take "a percentage of the stolen coins" unless the current owner gives them to you - and they may not want to do that.

+1

zylstra: Keyser actually read the thread I gave you.  It appears that you did not.  What is the matter?  Did the facts of how Bitcoin works, as detailed in that thread, not jive with your fantasies of how you think it works?

I couldn't find a posturing happy face.  : )

No because then we are placing our trust in "the core developers",. Trust in anyone is slippery slope.  Bitcoin is supposed to be trustless system

In order to make any meaningful inferences about what might happen in the face of an attack on miners, we really need a characterization of what the actual hashing landscape looks like.  e.g., how much hashing happens on USB sticks and how much occurs in liquid coolant submerged datacenter facilities.

The reason that this is important is that people with a large and static investment are not likely to do anything but comply with a directive to honor a tainting authority's output.  At best their option would be to shut down, but that would lose more money (in the short-to-mid term at least) than to simply comply.  I suspect that a lot of operators who have a large capital investment would simply comply.

Perhaps there have been surveys of the different varieties of hashing power.  Dunno.  I don't follow it as much as I probably should.

In any event, I believe that it would/will be unnecessary to bother the miners at all.  If taint directives are aimed exclusively toward retailers I believe that economic principles will lead to taint being widely observed (and the economy damaged accordingly.)  If Bitcoin did not tie it's fortunes to success as a widely used exchange currency it would not have this particular Achilles's heal and an attack at the mining level would be more likely.

Absolutely not. This is the kind of bullshit Bitcoin was designed to prevent. I've personally lost thousands of dollars due to stupid mistakes, just like Mt. Gox users, but I would be mortified if someone suggested that we override history to get those coins back.

Lawlessness and Anarchy are two very different concepts.

Bitcoin is anarchy (for want of a better word), more specifically crypto-anarchy.  I, for one, still welcome you to use Bitcoin, but I can totally respect you abstaining on principle.

Nope, that's a bad idea.
They develop the protocol, they are not police.

OP meet Protocol, Protocol meet OP.

**Later that night**

Protocol:  Why did you introduce me to OP!?  He's stupid and doesn't understand anything about me.

Short answer: They can't. Even if they release an update the network has to accept it.

I for one would not accept it. You snooze you lose your bitcoins. That's that.

No one has EVER asked this question before.

That's not how it works.

If 51% or more of miners decide that they will not accept the transactions and not build on blocks that have the transactions, they will outrun the miners that do accept them.

The 49% miners could have a longer chain temporarily in bursts, but statistically over time the 51% miners will win.

The experience for users would be ugly if the numbers are so close together (transactions may seem confirmed for a while, then unconfirmed again), but by denying that transaction censorship is possible you're just as well deceiving yourself (personally I don't like it either). Wording your message angrily doesn't change that.

Frustrated much?

Look, I'm glad you know more about the protocol than I do, but I'm not here to debate the protocol with you.  I know if the devs and miners decided to freeze the coins they could.  If they can't technically do it, everyone else (with a wallet) would do what they say because they carry too much weight.  I'm simply stating an option that may be better for bitcoin and bitcoin society as a whole in the long run.

Just as a technical point, are you stating that the representation of the stolen bitcoins could not be re-encoded (sent, outputted, or however you want to call it) with a new key pair in a new block?  It appears that someone else who appears knowledgeable says its possible:


I am doing something about it by talking about it.  Bitcoin does not have to be thrown under the bus to be more just.  The devs and miners simiply have to lead the way.

Are you stating that you never purchased coins at an exchange?  Or that exchanges haven't played the most important part (by far! other than the code itself of course) in bitcoin's short successful history to date?

If you don't believe your trust is already with the core developers you're sorely mistaken.

Is this on topic?  Do I need to understand the protocol to suggest a better way?  One can code anything one desires.

I'm going to call bullshit on you here.

Finally to all those who keep saying something to the effect of "please stop talking and go do something about it":
For one I am; I am discussing it with you.  Secondly, I am not forking the chain because I do not have the technical capability at this point nor do I have the leadership role in the bitcoin community that would make it a success.

Individual exchanges could theoretically 'taint' coins, but if the developers tried to implement this it should be rejected.  If the developers can block transactions they don't like, then the government can force them to block any transactions they don't like as well.

Regardless of how and if they could do that, it would ruin bitcoin. Period.

This is a really scary thought. It better be impossible.

no. stupid idea is stupid. someone with more patience than me explain why please. I'm sure someone already has.

First let's get on the same page here.  When I said:


My assumption was that the majority miners were not including the "dirty" transaction but still accepting all valid blocks per protocol - including blocks with "dirty" transactions produced by other miners.  Given these assumptions I stand by my statement.

When you said:


You correctly desribed the situation based on the assumption of a malicious majority hashing attack in which the majority of miners refuse otherwise perfectly valid block per protocol that happen to contain transactions they consider "bad".  This is a different scenario.

This is true, but miners would destroy Bitcoin value if doing this, so not in miners interest at all. Any blacklisting of Bitcoins is terrible idea, unless you want destroy Bitcoin

Next, I would like to appologize.  This noob and his thread about the same damn subject, again, set me off more than most.  Instead of:


He glibly said "it is not an attack it is just a vote"!  Yes is is "just a vote" in exactly the same way voting for the Nazi party in pre WWII Germany was "just a vote".

I did get worked up a bit and due to that I made a few technical errors in my posts.  Not in this thread but in the other one.  I have re-read all my posts in this thread and stand by all of them, including this one.  I will now correct my errors in the posts in the other thread.

So have you contacted any mining pools about your proposal yet? If so, what did they say?

Or are you waiting to see if you can find someone with a leadership role who agrees with you?

You don't appear to have found one yet. At what point will you concede that no one with a leadership role considers this a good or workable idea?

I have not heard back from Eligius, http://eligius.st/~gateway/contact .
I have not heard back from BTC Guild, support@btcguild.com .
My questions to GHash, https://support.cex.io/hc/en-us , have been forwarded to the CEX.IO supervisor.  I have not heard back from the supervisor yet.

I have emailed each lead developer listed here, https://bitcoin.org/en/development .

If you have a closer connection to any of these people please ask them their opinion on the stolen coins.  Of course I would be interested to hear it.  My letter is posted below in case you would like to use it.

I will update you on any responses I receive that I have permission to share.  


When I hear/read something to that effect that is spoken/written by them.

Thanks for doing that zylstra.

Thank you!

If you do receive any responses from any mining pool I actually think it may justify starting a new topic along the lines of "I asked mining pools about freezing stolen coins and this is what they said" because I don't recall any other similar thread getting that far recently, and a lot of people are probably writing this topic off as being the same as those.

If there was a like button I would use it here.

This seems to be seriously lacking in the BTC community which is hurting it.  The "if you were so stupid as to keep your BTC in MtGox, you deserve to loose your shirt" mentality stacked on top of the silence when it comes to any attempt at justice is read by the general public as a protocol that could never be trusted.

Regulation is not the same as centralization.

I think that BTC developers should feed the poor, cure all diseases and of course freeze stolen mtgox btc....

The Bitcoin core Devs don't need to get into the middle of a fight between people and the exchanges. Such interference would look bad to as many people as it would look good. Then there would be people who would attempt to sue the core Devs for the interference.

While I never used MtGox, I also was taken in by what seemed to be their stability. Their crash is a good reminder to me that Bitcoin is FREE to use, and that means free from standard security as well as free from the banking industry's supposed security. Since Bitcoin is free for me to use without interference, if I use my freedom, I need to learn to take responsibility for my actions.

If we all had done the secure thing, if we all had transacted in small amounts so that we wouldn't lose much when failure came, Bitcoin would not have had the wild fluctuations that it has had. It would be far more stable as a medium of trade. Its foundations would be stronger, and we would have more people moving into it for buying and selling, rather than for speculating.

Keep the core Devs out of the battles. They have enough to do simply considering the technical side of things.

:)

None of the pools responded.  Four of the seven developers responded.  One half-heartedly gave permission to share his response.  Three others did not give their permission.

Some responded that they couldn't freeze the coins, others that they would if the rest of the community decided to freeze the coins.

Developers, if I have shared too much of what you shared with me, please PM me and I will delete this post.  (I figure if I didn't include your name then I'm adhering to what we agreed, but if that's not how you read it let me know.)

I think even if it were easily possible without horrible code changes that it would set an extremely bad precedent and put developers in the firing line (as others have pointed out). Gox had some kind of weird authority about it despite being next to useless for the best part of 2013 and having warning flags written all over it. Many other services that have lost coins due to hackers have been, or at least seemingly been, far more professional and secure. Just because it is a large amount of coins I don't see that the case is any different to that of a tiny little exchange/site.

Hopefully this is the last of the infancy hacks, dark net hacks will continue but I hope that the rest of us on the clear net are kept safe from it all and that everyone starts to think more carefully about their coins (who on earth would have had more than a couple of months salary on Gox!).

Keep your long trades on paper, not an exchange.

OP, what you're suggesting isn't possible in Bitcoin by design. The blockchain can't just be altered by the dev team in the manner that this scenario would require.

The block which contains the MtGox transfers also contain numerous other legitimate transactions that occurred around the same time period before that block was solved.

The hash of a block is a long string of characters representing the entire hash of the previous block, a time stamp of when the current block was created, and all of the transaction data contained within the current block. If a single transaction is changed, the resulting block hash will be completely different. When a block is solved, a new block is instantly created and the cycle is repeated.

All of the blocks solved from then up until now rely on the hash of the block containing those MtGox transactions. Every block is dependent on the data contained within the previous block remaining concurrent. Changing something in a past block would cause a cascading failure event. The change would be rejected.

Each and every block uses the hash of the previous block in its algorithm. If you change the content of a block, the hash changes with it. If the hash of the next block does not check-out against the hash of the previous block it will be discarded. The blockchain from that moment forward and every transaction that occurred from that block onward would need to be reverted as if it never happened for such a change to be accepted...

The protocol will not allow the coins to be "frozen" since the act of freezing them would destroy the concurrency of a known good chain where the inputs and outputs are proven. The alteration would be discarded the same as a "double-spend" attempt.

Bitcoin can't do what you're asking it to do regardless of what the core devs think about the Gox situation... Bitcoin has no conventional "core" in that unilateral "source-code" alterations are not possible. If the community wishes to implement an improvement they must do it by consent. Community consent has limits in that it still doesn't mean they can change the content of a previous block. Improvements can only be implemented from an unsolved block onward. The only way to go back would be to discard all transactions that took place in the chain between the block in question and the current unsolved block.

Bitcoin isn't about Anarchy, it's governed by the most absolutely infallible system of law on the planet; math... The problem with math is that it cares nothing for emotion. If you have unspent outputs and the private keys to control them; nobody can stop you from spending them. That's not Anarchy, that's equality and neutrality...

I'm against about forking bitcoin and freezing the stolen funds what is the difference between governments freezing bank accounts?

More people would lost trust to bitcoin if this happen. Price would crumble and I'm seeing a new coin will replace bitcoin.

thank math.

Just thought I would re-visit this thread to say:

NO

...in response to the OPs question.

In addition to "NO!" I would like to add:

Massive thefts are an inevitable and necessary part of Bitcoin's evolution. Too many people are overlooking the primary goals of Bitcoin, namely being a decentralised, trustless, digital currency. The majority of Bitcoin users are trusting centralised authorities. This requires a mental shift which will be facilitated by pain.

We need decentralised exchanges as a priority.

Really sad to hear this. No one will use Bitcoins if they are frequently stolen and resold. Just look at the past 3 months or so. More than 1 million coins (including those in Mt Gox) have been stolen and their real owners have been left with little or no support. Some people will claim that this happens with the fiat as well. But in fiat, does this much amount (8% of the total money in circulation) gets stolen in just 3 months?

They can make a list of addresses to blacklist.

If people were giving cash to street vendors for them to look after, I guarantee that the theft rate would be 90+%. The problem is that people are giving their Bitcoins to any old website operator for them to look after.

If you don't control the private key to your coins, you don't have your coins. This needs drilling in to people.

I agree to that its not about undesentrilising bitcoins. if bitcoin is going mainstream it needs to evolve. Keep the desentrilisation, but its not said that there can be introduced security measurements and other that makes sure if you steal large amounts they get freezed and useless. This will slow down the blackhats and other bad people.

A other option could be to create a ideal organisation, and the bitcoins that get seased immediatly after a big theft like in MTgox before inocent people receive them.  The coins that were stolen, and will not receive them back, but the thief will not enjoy them either. But the humans threw the organisation benefits. This will in the long run teach the professional thievs that its not worth time to use time on this, and this behaviour would disappear and be history.

In general I think its wrong to think about bitcoin as a Anarchy heaven. I do not sure if the anarchists even know what they want to achieve with anarchy. With anarchy society totaly brakes, down, for instance no food production and other. Where will you as a anarhyst get food. Where will you get electricity, noone are producing it or the equipment needed to produce it. Go and live as a farmer in the stone age, then you can not sit with the computer and enjoy programming. Also in general to get anarchy to build a new society does not work, because the society need to be broken down completly. The only thing it leads to is pain and suffering, then war, then death and more war before a new order is growing with the survival of the fittest mentality. And the new order will in the long run somehow look similar to something that already existed previously. Somehow there will be leaders, governmental looking structures and so on and things just repeat itself. In general the strongest and meanest and the one with biggest muscles or weapons becomes the chief until the next one kills him. Anarchy will lead us toworse times we hopefully never will see again. Some parts in the world its still that way. Look at north korea for example where citizens been killed, starved and even worse where an elite dictates how thing will be...Just my unedited thoughts.  
 

This would really hurt BTC as it would no longer be decentralized and people would have more faith in fiat.  It isn't fair to people who received stolen funds without knowledge.

The thing is, with Mt. Gox, they didn't even notice the coins were missing for years (supposedly.) So at this point, isn't it likely that those coins have been transferred many times and could be in the hands of completely innocent people who were not involved with the theft but received bitcoins as payment or purchased them, and didn't know they were buying coins that were stolen from Mt. Gox? I mean, are you going to prosecute someone because a $20 bill in their wallet was used in a drug transaction 2 years ago? Absurd.

As soon as a private key loses the ability to access the relevant funds - Bitcoin is broken. Game over.

It's the user mind set that needs to change, not the protocol. If you wouldn't send cash in an envelope to a PO Box in Poland, why would you send Bitcoins to the same guy if he ran a website?

Bitcoin will never become mainstream, if you limit them to the tech savvy. And for heavens sake, a lot of people who lost their money in Gox were actually tech savvy! The difference between theft using fiat and that using Bitcoin is:

1. Theft using fiat: Strong chance of the perpetrator getting caught and sent to the jail. The victim gets support from the society and the authority.
2. Theft using Bitcoin: Almost no chance of catching the perpetrator. The victim is shunned and accused of carelessness.

Generally in whatever happens the human is the weak link. If you drive a car, Paying the bills online, using bitcoins. If not car had evolved we would be driving T-fords still. I understand the concept of bitcoin, but in generall should the bitcoin exist regards to the founders ideology, or the users demands. I think with so smart programmers that created this, they can evolve bitcoin without lose the desentrilized ideology. Security measurments and desentrilisation is not the same thing. Somehow it should possible to get security protocols that is not monitored by governments and other, at least with as huge amounts as robed in MT.gox.

Being tech savvy does not automatically mean that you are financially prudent or wise in any other respect. Keeping significant funds on remote sites has never been sensible, the risks have been repeated countless times and anyone who failed to be aware of them just wasn't doing their research. You look pover in Service Discussion and you see tales of people being incredibly, insanely reckless with money they can't afford to lose. There is no fixing that in a protocol of anything.

Yes, people should not have to "do their research" if the goal is mass appeal. I 100% agree with that. But that's not where we are now. Bitcoin is not ready for mass appeal. The services and infrastructure still need to grow up.

The fact that people need to do their research turns people off. The fact that people who don't do their research are getting ripped off turns people off. But if you start banning coins then this will deal a far more crippling blow to Bitcoin than a few early adopters realising they are out of their depth and a bit of bad press. It will cause desertion by the people that are currently making this thing work.

I've seen you posting the same line enough now to understand that you will never agree that this point of view is the correct one. Likewise I'm not willing to agree with your ideas of the inevitable death of Bitcoin if the scams and thefts are "allowed" to continue.

Both of these arguments have some merit, perhaps we can at least agree there. You must now agree that this debate has been running long enough to see that the "ban scammed coins" camp has very little support and it's just not going to happen. The MtGox loss/theft so far hasn't persuaded anyone in a position to start rejecting transactions to do so, and it's hard to imagine a bigger loss.

So please can we let this one drop now?

no this would not be a good idea and it goes against what people have come to expect of Bitcoin.  The media would have a field day with this type of thing happening and Bitcoin would lose alot of interest form it's users IMO.

Bitcoin should always stay in control of the people using it. Not by any small group of people. Thats how it starts losing its reputation, if people start controlling it.

I think the main point here is that Bitcoin is not going to change in this way.  Ever.

So if you want a coin that can be frozen if stolen, etc. then you will need to move to an alt chain that does what you want.

No amount of posting, no matter how spirited, will change the fundamentals of Bitcoin.  

I wonder if anyone has created an alternate coin that has the properties you desire?

Perhaps a government backed and controlled coin is what you are looking for.

as above, agree 100%

If Bitcoin can be freeze will you be using it ?

The question already obey the rules for Bitcoin .

I'm pretty sure what he's looking for is something called... fiat. Trying to convince people to have the option of 'freezing' coins goes against the whole fundamental concept of decentralisation and Bitcoin. If it could be frozen power would then reside with the developers. Not to mention, even if they did agree, I doubt the miners and nodes would accept and implement the change and without them good luck.

And who is to say if the developers do "take power" that they wont get greedy and start extorting people by threatening to freeze bitcoins in an account if people dont pay a ransom... Worst case scenario of course..

This, I see as a major flaw in bitcoin's model.... hear me out...

It looks like bitcoin mining is becoming increasingly difficult to the point that only a few rich with huge server farms can mine the coins. When there comes a point when there are like 10 major server farms that mine 90% of the bitcoins, which looks to be where it's going...

You'll then have 10 very rich people basically in charge of bitcoin. I'm sure these now powerful and influential people will have meetings and discuss various ways to control bitcoin. The rest of us will be pawns in their game. It would be very easy for this group to come to a consensus and control bitcoin to their whims.

I can't see how we wouldn't end up with a few large server farms mining most of the coins, controlling most of bitcoin. Can anyone steer me to not believe this?

I doubt whether they will do anything like that. If they do so, then it will harm the reputation of the Bitcoin, and the exchange rate will tumble to near-zero. In the end, it will affect these powerful mining cabals also. But I agree with you, it is theoretically possible to do so. One of the fundamental flaws of Bitcoin. But as of now, we don't have to fear about it.

Yeah this is somewhat unfortunate when you consider how it was designed and intended. I don't think they foresaw how fast the jump would be made to more advanced mining technologies, especially ASICs, which kind of took bitcoin away from the diehard geek enthusiasts and put it firmly in the hands of whoever can afford to spend 5-7 figures on mining equipment.

If this happens, would developers develope changes to bitcoin so to block big farmers?
If not tools to avoid big theft of bitcoins is going to happen, is there also a resistanse towards developing a other mining strategy for bitcoin?

Evidently. Perhaps some editing is in order.
What the hell are you talking about? Throughout the free world, the government does not produce food. The government is an impediment to the food producers - dictating how and when and where and in what manner they are allowed to produce food, how and when and where and in what manner they are allowed to transport their food, how and when and where and in what manner they are allowed to sell their food, and on and on. It is the people working together according to their interests and desires that do the producing - the rulers (i.e. the archy) merely get in the way.
Bullshit. Did the government decide it would be Maxwell that would formulate the mathematical basis for the wave propagation and interrelation of electricity and magnetism? Did the government tell Edison to invent the light bulb? Dictate that Tesla was to develop the A.C. transmission system? Sure Franklin had his kite and key, and was also instrumental in the founding of the USA, but this is a coincidence, not an act of government. Some governments run electrical utilities, sure. Other electrical utilities are privately developed, owned, and managed.
Again, humanity abandoning the concept that there can be an authority exempt from the morality that binds the rest of us does not extinguish all the forward progress and technologies not only already in existence, but that are continually developed. These are developed not by edict of government, but by individuals working alone or together in free collaboration.
Now you've stepped off the deep end. War is nothing but opposing _governments_ engaged in mortal combat. By definition, one cannot have war without government - IOW, there can be no war in anarchy.
Well, that would not be anarchy then , would it? an : lack of - archy : rulers - anarchy : lack of rulers.
Another jump off the deep end. North Korea an anarchy? Are you even thinking about what you are typing?
Look, I'm not about to pretend that having a go at anarchy would be all unicorns and rainbows. But to go off equating it with all the pain and suffering the world has ever known is foolish, deceitful, and ultimately counterproductive. I don't know if you are being foolish here, or being deceitful. I suspect the former, as I suspect that you're the victim of indoctrination via public schooling - a system of programming managed by the very people who are 'in power' under a system of government.

But please, at least think about what you're saying.

I think the situation may not be as dire as you think.

1. Even if there is a small group of large miners, those miners still have to sell the coins
to cover their mining costs, so how are they really "controlling" anything?

2. One of the key metrics of the mining business is cost per GHs.  Perhaps
large mining operations can achieve a lower $/GHs, but I haven't seen
any evidence to suggest they can achieve an exponentially lower rate.
Therefore, smaller miners can still achieve results over time.  

That's why we have all these pools, as well as mining contracts.  

I don't know that much about how decentralized things really are,
but the ecosystem seems healthy, at least on the surface.  Maybe
someone with deeper knowledge on this point can jump in.

Bingo. The sky is _not_ falling.

Finally, after wading through all the other comments to convince myself there's got to be at least ONE freaking post that can explain the ridiculousness of OP's question, finally found it and only after 5 freaking pages no less. The level of ignorance regarding Bitcoin in one of if not the most prominent Bitcoin forums is quite frankly, scary.

I tried to explain the utility of checksuming files which people put up for analysis the other day.  In that case it was the .zip archive which was supposed to cointain Mt. Gox data and a bunch of exploits.  Most people simply could not see how it could be useful to tell two different files of the same name apart.

Most user-level folks here should not even be trying to use Bitcoin, much less trying their hand at monetary system design.  The number of people who get ripped off via fraud or lose their keys to exploits is ample evidence of this.

I was surprised at this observation so I re-read the OP and guess what? It is completely rewritten from the original! This is an argument for the quoting of an entire OP in the 2nd post, so that people who ask a question on a public forum do not waste the time and good efforts of others who answer them.

Bitcoin need to be more user friendly. It is true that mostly those who are tech-savy use Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. We need to introduce Bitcoin in a way that even someone who knows nothing about technology etc can use it.

I agree Joshuar!  I think the atmosphere is good for market-driven entrepreneurs to deliver solutions that are user-friendly for the masses.

If a coin freezing mechanism exists, or if a certain group holds some type of black listing rights, the value of a bitcoin will go to zero.

Bitcoin has no value outside of exchange. If you modify its fungibility it becomes worthless.

Sure.  The same can be said for a manned submersible capable of diving to 1000 feet.  The bad news is that it is not ever going to be a good idea to give a retard a submersible.  The good news is that it is really not necessary for such a device to be 'successful.'


There really is no solution to ignorance, and the deck is stacked against the average Joe successfully keeping his data private (specifically, his secret keys.)  Sad news:  It's not getting any better.

'Market-driven entrepreneurs' have been hard at work for a long while coming up with 'user-friendly solutions for the masses.'  Inevitably they have, and probably always will, involve handing one's BTC over to the proprietor for 'safe keeping'.  The results have been as expected.

There is a huge market segment for 'market-driven entrepreneurs' to interact with one another in a reliable manner.  The thing which differentiates this class of users from 'the masses' is that they are perfectly capable of watching out for their own asses and not getting ripped off.  For this reason Bitcoin would be a perfectly suitable solution to fill this segment.  Bitcoin has a natural edge should it target this segment and still has the chance to be successful here.  If it neglects or fails to do so, something other crypto-currency will end up filling this void.

No.

+1.

There should be a simple and secure way to store the coins, without the risk of robbery. We should advertise the benefits of Bitcoin to common people, such as low fees and protection from inflation among other things. If we really want Bitcoins to go mainstream, then we should aim for at least 20% of the world population by 2025.

Not that I agree with the idea of the OP, but technically it is possible no?

The updated patch in the main client will have code that checks for the stolen addresses and does not verify any block that allows them to move after a certain date in the future (perhaps next week). This will force the miners to either fork or accept the patch and choose not to allow the funds to flow.

The code would simply not accept a block that has a transaction from the known stolen funds addresses after a certain date.

I don't agree with that, but it's still possible, no need to go back in time and fudge the chain up.

Freeze, no. Alarm, maybe.

It might be useful to have a program watching the block chain and posting widely (Twitter, perhaps) when there's a transaction involving stolen coins. And sites which want to check the stolen coin list should be able to do so. 

It is almost certain that checking with such a tainting authority as you describe will be mandatory to obtain a 'Bitcoin License' and it won't matter a whole lot how bogus the tainting authorities analysis happens to be.  At least the legislators will be able to claim than they are doing something about the 'problem'.  Call it what you like, but this is a direct attack on fundamental fungibility of the Bitcoin monetary solution.

Tainting is potentially an entirely separate system to the actual Bitcoin protocol and it's probably the biggest failure mode risk for the Bitcoin solution.  To the extent that the 'core developers' will have much to do vis-a-vis 'tainting', it would likely be along the lines of adapting the protocol to make tainting more of a challenge as a matter of self-preservation.

Well said.  Hear, hear!  I coinjoin all my transactions now.  So should you - and by you I mean everyone that is reading this and everyone that uses Bitcoin.

Ideally we can get coinjoin or some variant of it into the code and coinjoin all transactions automatically.  This would make taint analysis pretty much impossible for all practical purposes.

I wish that the protocol was designed to join all transaction at the blocks from the get go but here we are.

If you want to see Bitcoin succeed and wish to support it here is what you can do:

1) Run a full node
2) Coinjoin all your transactions.  Multiple rounds even better.
3) Stop reusing addresses.  Use a different address every single time!
4) USE BTC to buy things when you can.
5) Mention them to vendors.  Every time I buy something I ask if they take Bitcoins as a payment method.  You don't have to explain the whole thing to them just ask.  If enough people ask that in itself will get them to wonder about it.  If they ask you about it then you have an opening to chat with them about it.

Have they solved the problem with CoinJoin where the accumulator could leak who wanted what to go where?

I can understand why one might think this is a reasonable method of stopping the transfer of these coins.

There is a major flaw here though... The coins are identified by the outputs of every single Satoshi. The velocity of Bitcoin is high enough that there will likely be outputs in every future Bitcoin transaction that can link back to one of those addresses.

You would be blocking nearly every block from that moment forward. Since you can't just reject the outputs of a single Satoshi from being included in a block the entire block would need to be rejected...

For instance; if you own Bitcoin today, then the chance of owning the output of at least 1 Satoshi from the Laszlo Pizza purchase is close to 100%.