Bitcoin Forum

So, earlier I was thinking about the SR auction situation we have now and I had a few thoughts that I'd like to discuss.

As one of the people who joined the network because of their libertarian values, the auction bothers me because

  1 - It might cause the bitcoin price to plunge if one or more of the groups that win the auction sells their share or part of it.
  2 - Even if the coins sell at $250 each, the government that basically stole them still gets to be $7 million richer.

I was thinking about ways to stop this or at least make those coins worth less, and my mind went back to ideas that were proposed before, like merchants blacklisting coins from "tainted" addresses, which would need a lot of people to sign on, making it impractical.

Another was a hard fork with an alternate blockchain where those coins are unspendable. Again, this is impractical since, unless it becomes the main chain, the fork coins would need their own exchanges and merchants and so on and judging by the forums, most people don't care enough about this issue to go through the trouble.


Finally, I had my third idea. I am sure this was proposed before in other situations but the timing couldn't be more right for it.

Mining pools like Ghash.io could refuse to include any transaction spending those coins in their blocks. If 50% or more of the miners believe it would be a good thing for bitcoin if those coins are never spent then we could easily collectively choose to keep them where they are.

I realize that I might be too late proposing this solution, but I thought I might as well put it on the record in case there is still time or if something like this happens again in the future.

To test that last idea, I added a poll (for miners only). The question is this:

If you could switch to mining a blockchain that treats the SR coins as unspendable in just one easy mouse click, would you?

Keep in mind: mining that chain would only be profitable if 50% of all other miners do the same.

No I wouldn't.  If people find out that bitcoin can be manipulated by a group of people it would just do harm. This is a great lesson to be learned that you have to keep your private keys safe. We are in the wild west stage where people can break into your house or business and steal your bitcoins if you do not hide or encrypt them properly.

If I ran SR, I would have all my private keys bip38 protected and hidden very securely. If Bitcoins are stolen or confiscated from you then it is your own fault. It's time we take responsibility for our own money.
 

Absolutely not, leave them alone. Now get lost.

How would you know which are SR coins?

theoretically... ill tryto explain how i see the OP's idea work/not work

if ghash had 50% and was getting 3 of the 6 blocks per hour
if eligius had 33% and was getting 2 of the 6 blocks per hour
and unknown pool had 17% and was getting 1 of the 6 blocks per hour.

now lets say both ghash and eligius both devilishly decided to tweak their code and to look at the mempool of tx's and if there was a TX belonging to a known SR hoard. Ghash and eigius wold delete th TX from their mempool so it wont enter one of their blocks.

the TX would continually get relayed for 24hours+ meaning ghash/eligius would continually delete the tx from their mempools... but..
but.. unknown pool would add it to their block, as they were not devils.. thus the end result..... the TX would finally get added to a block maybe after 50 minutes or so after the tx was first sent, as the other 5 blocks before ignored the TX because they were mined by ghash/eligius.

so all it would do is delay it.

and as for people saying that mining pools should not play with the protocol to block transactions....

im sorry to tell you, they already do. luke JR admitted already that the eligius pools ignore free transactions, fill-up with tx's that have fee's and then only let a small amount of fee free tx's in after that.

so tx's are already being hand picked allowd/disallowd based on pool miners preference. which in luke jr's case is greed. which shows it is possible to make it done for other reasons.

No

It can be "manipulated" if and only if 50% of miners decide that it's desirable.
I don't see this as manipulation, I see it as miners being aware on a large enough scale of what makes bitcoin work and acting in its interest. It's basically voting with your hashpower.

I thought the address they confiscated was already known. I could be wrong.

No. Mining pool #1 makes a 2 block long addition to the blockchain that includes the tx, mining pools #2 and #3 make 3 blocks in the same time that do not contain the tx, everyone's client chooses the longest chain (chain #2), tx doesn't get into the blockchain.

Actually, "greed" works in favor of what I proposed. If we knew with certainty that the bitcoin price will tank after the auction, miners would definitely have an interest in stopping that tx in order to protect their profits, and in doing that they would also be protecting bitcoin.

0 out of 10 for the effort tbh lol.

yet another sinister  moron troller

remember noobs, selecting tx based on fees is straight forward.

Other than that, you're just fcking around without knowing jack about TXs.

Actually, I wrote my own python-based bitcoin client a year or so ago. and that's all I have to say about that.

Even if miners agreed with you (and >50% of the hashrate belongs to miners that don't care about Bitcoin at all), that would be too dangerous a precedent to set.

Maybe, but even those miners care about their mined coins being worth something in $.

I get what you're saying, but if it always takes 50%+ of the network to make things like that happen, where's the danger? This is democracy in action.

Even if I wanted to (which I don't) no.
If there were ever any coins that I'd like to control it would be Gox coins, to give back to the owners but still...No.

Any dip in price would be temporary: an opportunity to pick up some coin if you can.

This is 100% true.

Even if the auction is determined to be illegal or otherwise wrong in the future Ross or the "true owner" of the coins can sue and force the government to give their money back to the rightful owners.

No, this is potentially much more damaging than the SR coins being released on the market.

no. If any pool (gaining most of the hash power) denies any specific amount of Bitcoin to enter the blockchain for any reason, others probably will copy that to do that again using justified reasons for their own interests. It will certainly damage the Bitcon concept. So I don't agree mining pools should play with the protocol to block transactions

The damage to bitcoin would be tremendous. Also what do you say to the people that bought these coins in good faith? Denying them something they purchased would be a form of theft.

This again?

How many times does it need to said?

Fungibility is an essential component of a digital currency, and we reject anything that threatens this.

the govt is not really $7 million richer
they can get federal reserve to print up $7 million, 7 mil is a drop in the bucket in their budget
i rather they divest from bitcoin, giving more cheap coins for early adopters

If there is one thing Bitcoin is not, it's democratic.  Don't mess with the B-T-C!

And your python-based client (which is mostly done already on github) does jack shit about what you're proposing.

We've discussed about tainted coin analysis long b4 your "own client" being worked on.

Moving on noob.

Hell no. Assuming you cod accurately identify which coins are under the control of the government (you probably will screw some poor sod on the other side of the world in all likelihood) it sets up an extremely bad precedent that could be abused in the future. For better or for worse these coins have ended up in the hands of the government and you can't do anything about it lest you destabilising Bitcoin in the future. If what you've stated was implemented, the select people who had control over the pools and held a crude could effectively steal someone else's coins with no moral/ethical justification. It gives all that power into the hands of a few.

I swear many of these noobs need to read about currency and its characteristics. One of which is fungible.

Absolutely not!  Are you freakin kidding me?!  Who the hell thinks like that?!!

Well not sure what planet you're from, but here on Earth, idiots dont think.

"The government" is not a person.  It is not even a clear entity of any sort.  "The FBI" is also not a person but is at least a slightly more specific moniker that can refer somewhat more easily to the real people involved.  The proceeds of the SR theft and coin auction will go one way or another into the pockets of individuals just as they always do when uniformed gang members rob entrepeneurs. 

Does it not harm the currency more, if BTC are taken out of circulation? {More BTC = more transactions.

I'd rather have people spending it, and using it, than having it somewhere, where it's doing nothing. Too many coins are hoarded anyways... And then we have the 1 million Satoshi coins too.  :(

The Fed cleaned them for us, we {BTC community} just borrowed it to them. 

The fact of the matter is, the negative publicity of those coins, hurt us as a community more. Reputation is not a cheap commodity.

No. Effectively blacklisting coins for whatever reason = bad and most likely end of Bitcoin.

agreed, the whole point of bitcoin is freedom, and by reacting to fed coins, you would break the very thing that makes bitcoin so unique.
we all hate feds, but this wouldnt justify interfering with blockchain.

cheers

No, no. And - most importantly:
No.

Stop making stupid threads please.

but the trolls need to make up stupid threads, because they are running out of quality threads to post on to get the 4000 posts a month quota for their footer adverts...

i prefer they waffle and make 20 posts in useless threads, rather then waffle nonsense in quality threads

JeromeS you ignorant slut.

This idiotic idea has been proposed in dozens of threads and, no matter how many times it is proposed, it is still one of the worst possible ideas ever proposed.

1) It would not hurt "the man" at all, not even a tiny little bit.
2) It would hurt and rip off all those nice people who buy the coins at the auction because you have made the coins they purchased totally worthless.
3) It would damage the fungibility of Bitcoin making all bitcoins even your own totally worthless, see my signature.

Think before you post.

No, as you said this would only delay the transaction.

They would rather put a (soft) forking change in their code that considers any transaction or block using SR coins invalid. So if anyone else mines a block with these coins, they just get forked by ghash + eligius again and again until they learn the hard way that they should not include these transactions. This is just a normal 51% attack.

Four people voted for this proposal?  Fucking morons.

well it is after all just a hypothetical debate. its not like the results would actually do any real world change/prevention. so its not a real world decision people need to make. just a question of opinion, thus some dont see the point in voting

Never will I support blacklising coins it is a VERY dangerous idea.  Things will go bad if we do, never support black listing.

It is similar to the idea of "if you are doing nothing wrong why do you care if we monitor every single aspect of your life".

Simply, no.

The way I see it, even if they cause the price to temporarily go down, it'll rebound if we just follow one of the primary rules of "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" and simply Don't Panic. So there's really no use making them unspendable because such a thing can do worse damage than simply allowing the sale to go through.

Just say NO to black/whitelisting and the like.

I'm not sure you understand libertarians.

Or values, or auctions, or Bitcoin.

I think the community should take this as a lesson learned and move on.

Or how to use the search button

IMO the debate is real. This is something that could actually be done.

It would be very much against the principles behind bitcoin but from a technological standpoint it would be possible

OP you're ignorant. If we stop/blacklist these coins, then the whole point of Bitcoin would be invalid wouldn't it?
A bank can blacklist you, and stop your money from moving. Don't you see the similarity here?
If the price has to plunge, let it plunge.

obviously its against the whole ethos of bitcoin, .. but the 'debate' what is it achieving.. has this topic even asked people to flashmob pools to never attempt such a task that would break bitcoin.

has this topic asked for any solutions that lock miners out of tweaking the code, by having more node consensus preventing transactions from being ignored

and your own words "something that could actually be done"... what is this "something" you propose that would be the solution..

all i see is a debate of a few people saying in laymans "lets stick it to the man" and the majority saying "stick one man, ruin it for millions"

No.

SR was already shut down. 10 replacement sites oepned in its place.

What would be the point ?

i'd stop it if i wanted my coins to be worth 2cents

It would probably do more harm than good, i would not risk it.