I find it encouraging to read all of these responses. Everybody in the community understands that removing the fungibility of coins will most likely lead to Bitcoin's demise.

I'm going to repost this because I think Melbustus is spot on:


I think we should all be thinking of how best to direct our attention towards projects/innovations which will solve this problem.

+1

@OP, recognising this issue goes some way to redeeming that epic fail in your last thread.

@oda.krell

You are obviously quite smart, I don't think any of the 'idiot' comments were directed at you.

Hello Steveia.

Welcome to the speculation sub forum.


 

I want to make my voice heard here.

After reading the post, I've come to the conclusion that Mike has good intentions with this. Unfortunately, I have to say that it is still a terrible idea. The idea of marking coins will completely ruin their fungibility, and will end up destroying Bitcoin.

Mike, if you're reading this, please please reconsider. There must be another way of solving the problems that you have brought up. Problems caused by implementing this idea will be worse than those you are trying to solve.

One chicken costs 1 bitcoin, and the dollars become worthless?

Two halves of a brain? They would be like, a genius or something! Much more intelligent than a mere mortal with only one single brain anyway...

$266 ATH and crash is already starting to look like a blip in the bigger picture:

I'm not saying they should drop their national currencies. Just that they don't move to ban the use of crypto currencies. They just take a hands off approach and allow it to develop and run its course.

Oh sweet, have we started posting rocket pictures again? I love when this happens!

So you're telling me that if I want to sell something for 1 BTC, you're gonna come along and say, 'Yeah, I have 1 BTC but I'm gonna divide it into 10 pieces first and give you one of those, because 1/10th is just as good at conveying the information as 1 whole BTC'. And then I'm gonna be like, 'Yeah sure, just give me 0.1 BTC because that conveys the information just as well...'

No, I'm gonna say, 'Sure you can divide it into 10 pieces, but you'll still have to pay me 10 of those smaller pieces because I'm not a fucking retard'

Fuck me I hope you are trolling.

Bitcoin is already divisible to an infinite number of sub units. For now, only 8 decimal places are displayed because we simply don't need any more than that. In the future, we may add more decimal places for convenience.

You can't increase the total amount of something by dividing it into lots of pieces. You still have the same overall amount, but there are more pieces of it, and each piece is smaller

It is not possible that anyone can be too stupid to understand this, and yet capable of turning on a computer and typing words. These people are trolls. Congratulations, you have successfully trolled for four pages now.

Can we all just ignore these guys now please.

revans, go and do a basic maths/numeracy course before getting involved in any more discussions about numbers.

The China/America thing was only to illustrate a point. You also have Europe, Russia, Africa, South America to consider - Basically all it takes is one country to say, 'fuck it, we love Bitcoin - do as you please' and they become the hub of all Bitcoin activity overnight. Then the fact that Bitcoin will still be functional in every other country means that there will probably still be people in those countries using it regardless of legality (as is observed with the prohibition of cannabis, for example)

Governments currently are allowing Bitcoin to compete with their local currency. It seems there's something of a stand off going on - governments are aware of Bitcoin, and you would expect their immediate reaction might be to try to ban its use. Unfortunately for them, they only have jurisdiction over their own territory, and Bitcoin is a global currency. So if, say, America were to ban the use of Bitcoin, there's nothing to say China wouldn't simply continue to encourage adoption. At this point, all BTC related business would move to China, leaving the U.S. behind as the rest of the world reaped the benefits of this new technology.

Is it volume in BTC or in fiat that you are looking at? I haven't been paying attention to volume but I'd expect the volume in BTC to decrease as price increases.

The problem is, it will be difficult or impossible to prove exactly which coins were yours that were stolen. There's no way of knowing exactly what happened to the coins after they were stolen - maybe the thief sold them for cash on localbitcoins? Would it then be fair to go to the buyer and ask for the coins back, so that they end up taking the loss? This is different for stolen property, where you can definitively say 'this is my stolen watch, and still belongs to me'. Bitcoin is designed as a fungible currency (all bitcoins are interchangeable with one another). What you're suggesting is the equivalent of going to the bank and saying, 'someone stole my wallet last week with £100 in it, please give me £100 because I believe the thief deposited the money here'.

I think the answer to the 'deflationary problem' is quite straightforward.

I bought my first coins at less than $10 each. Now that 1 bitcoin is valued at more than $300 I'm more than happy to spend some of them on things that I want. I bought some silver, I've bought vouchers using Gyft, and I've bought a few things from bitmit. At the moment I still can't buy everything that I'd like to using BTC directly, but I'm expecting that to change over the next few years.

So I imagine this is the same for most other people. People buy bitcoins either as an investment, or because they agree with the idea of an alternative to government fiat - there are many reasons to get into Bitcoin, and probably for most people its a combination of several reasons. But most people are happy to start spending coins once they've seen some profit, the same way as most people are happy to 'cash out' some of their coins to lock in profits (spending bitcoins is the same as cashing out. You're just cashing out into goods/services instead of into USD/EUR etc.)

This seems to be a very simple observation. It makes me wonder how this 'deflationary problem' came about in the first place. Simple observation shows that its a myth (people are spending coins) and a few minutes of considering one's own behaviour should provide a simple enough explanation as to why there is no deflationary problem.

Okay, so transactions consist of inputs and outputs. Say I want to send 10 BTC - I have two addresses in my wallet, one with a balance of 6 BTC and one with a balance of 9 BTC - Both balances will be used, to create a total input of 15 BTC. 10 BTC goes to the address that I'm sending to, and 5 BTC goes back to a 'change address', which is another address in my wallet which I control. (minus the transaction fee, which goes to the miners). This is why you see coins being sent to and from multiple addresses at once. It also makes it difficult to determine exactly which coins were sent where.

blockchain.info has a 'shared send' feature, which allows multiple users to combine inputs from their various addresses, and send to each of their desired output destinations. This makes it impossible to determine which input was destined for which output, effectively mixing the coins.

It looks to me like the thief may have been using this shared send feature to obscure the path of the coins through the blockchain. It is also quite likely that somewhere along the chain of shared transactions, somebody using the shared send feature may have been sending coins to SR, making it very likely that you would eventually end up at the seized coins address (which you did)

I'm afraid its very unlikely that the FBI, or anyone else, would have the time or resources to be tracking every transaction since the coins were stolen, especially for such a small amount (yes, 8 BTC is a lot of money to an individual, and I'm sorry for OP's loss, but in the grand scheme of things its pocket change. I imagine the cost of tracking it down would be much more than 8 BTC/$2500)

Sure, I'll have it. Address in my sig. Cheers.