You can call anything property, the trick is getting enough people to agree.

In my opinion any of these WoT ideas so far always had an inherent problem - anonymity. If anyone wants to convince me that they really came up with a solution for how to reward the responsible members of the community and effectively deal with the bad apples while allowing for anonymity, they'd first need to convince me that accountability isn't needed when it comes to responsibility and trustworthiness. I think anything else is just pissing in the wind.

If you ask me, YES it sucks that we would prefer to remain anonymous because of the threat to our well-being for simply voluntarily providing a good or a service but I think there is no way to eventually end up with a true WoT without some sort of unique ID, whether it's photo, finger print or maybe even DNA. And although I detest the government issued passport I have to have in order to be allowed to travel around the world, open a bank account, stay at a hotel, buy a house, a car, or anything really valuable (making it practically mandatory), I see absolutely nothing wrong with opt-in voluntary IDs in privately owned and managed databases. And I strongly think that that's the only viable direction we have to start to move in.

I'm simply astounded at the level of complexity you two seem to enjoy to conjure up to fit your complicated inapplicable concepts.

Of course multiple people can own the same bitcoins i.e. the same unspent outputs.. It's like multiple people can own 1 car. The fact that multiple people can't drive it or sell it at the same time is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is an agreement between multiple parties that the limitations and restrictions imposed on the property don't apply to them or apply to them differently.

When I compute a new address and it's private key and receive some bitcoins to it, those bitcoins i.e. the unspent outputs attached to that public key are arguably mine because by keeping the private key a secret information I have limited and restricted the use of those unspent outputs. IF one wants to respect my ownership of these bitcoins, even if they should somehow learn the private key without my permission, they cannot spend the bitcoins. However if I give them my permission and voluntarily share with them the private key then this is no different than a shared ownership of a car. Depending on the agreement of ownership once one of the owners of the bitcoins spends them, the benefits of that transaction will be divvied up between the owners as agreed just like money from a car owned by multiple people and sold would be.

Of course without multisig you open yourself up to the risk of being defrauded and robbed, but that's just the same with sharing ownership of anything else.

Go there and try to redeem your share then.

Ever heard of: Possession is nine-tenths of the law?

What you are saying is the same as saying that because everyone knows where the Mona Lisa is held everyone owns it. And yet that's not true because the picture although it's location being public is held under lock and key in a museum in Paris. It all falls back to how you define a property and how you define ownership.

Here are my definitions:
– property: a scarce tangible entity, corporeal or incorporeal, of which the access to and control of has been restricted and limited
– ownership: the freedom to restrict and limit the use of a scarce tangible, corporeal or incorporeal, entity

These definitions might not be what is generally accepted but they are what I thought of myself as the most sensible ones. And to answer your question, clearly just knowing about the unspent outputs means nothing if you don't have the information needed to turn them into inputs and spend them i.e. if you don't own them.

I cannot express how much I agree with this.

Either that or a far more simple explanation is that the private key is just information and the actual bitcoins, the property are the unspent outputs.

It being free or not is irrelevant, what is relevant is that it isn't scarce but can be infinitely perfectly copied at virtually no cost.

Yeah.. it doesn't.

But thinking about our universe in such a way is not how we experience it so I really can't see the point in doing so.

Again, it doesn't matter what the tangible, corporeal or incorporeal entity is, what matters is that it is one and that it is scarce. In EVE those are spaceships as entries in a centrally managed database, in the physical world, those are gold coins for example and in Bitcoin those are the unspent outputs i.e. unspent transactions that can be spent based on a distributed database and a private key.


How I define ownership and property the above makes no sense. Perhaps you should start by defining ownership and property before you draw conclusions.

It doesn't matter what is true officially that's why I said -effectively- which they are, they are effectively regulated given their actions of requiring their customers to provide all sorts of personal identification and are required to follow strict rules how they may access their site. If they're doing this out of fear of regulations preemptively or because they have agreed to these measures is irrelevant.

Although it's well known that I'm not a big fan of Bitcoin foundation, I think your question here is a bit unfair to Jon, especially since mtgox is likewise effectively heavily regulated. I think what you read is Jon's view that he really believes in and I don't think he had alternative motives writing about it.

I disagree with your reasoning.

I don't think these record entries i.e. bitcoins have value because they're part of that record but because the "space" in that record is scarce and I think it's quite irrelevant what sort of record it is. Even in games such as WoW or EvE you have scarcity. If my account is hacked (pw is information not property) someone with access to it can then destroy my tangible incorporeal scarce spaceship (my property) or they can transfer it to another character. It doesn't matter that in EVE this digital property has a virtually non existent production cost, what is important is scarcity and the items my toon owns are definitely scarce even if only artificially imposed by the designers of the game.

Come to think of it, the artificial scarcity imposed by the game designers is no different than the artificial scarcity of Bitcoin unspent outputs. The only difference is the production cost of the two which affects the time and chance for this scarcity to remain.

I strongly think that when it comes to property scarcity is the most crucial property, without it no property ownership makes a lot of sense because if a thing isn't scarce it's irrelevant if someone claims it be theirs because anyone can just get some of that thing without the claimed owner even noticing anything.

In my opinion all words are subjective, and their understood meaning is basically a generally accepted shared subjective definition. So it depends on how you define property..

I define a property as: a scarce tangible entity, corporeal or incorporeal, of which the access to and control of has been restricted and limited

The important part of my definition is scarcity. I do not regard entities that aren't scarce as property for example such as information that can be easily and cheaply perfectly copied without causing a loss what so ever to the original medium it was carried by.



So given my definition in Bitcoin only a Bitcoin transactions(more precisely the unspent outputs as was alluded to above) fits it. It is a tangible incorporeal and scarce entity that I restricted and limited the use of by keeping my private keys secret. When someone steals my bitcoins what they really stole is the irreversible and non double spendable and therefor scarce transaction that can be made with the private key and that I have restricted and limited the use of.

So they may copy my private key which is just information which isn't really a property and that alone does nothing to me, I mean I don't experience a loss what so ever. But if they then use this private key to steal my scarce transaction then that's when the loss to me actually happens and they stole my property.

I mean if you really think about it the same happens with say a gold coin that you own. Someone may learn where you keep it and how to turn of your security measures in order to gain access but they haven't inflicted a loss on you with the access to this information alone, it's when they use this information to take possession of the scarce entity that you experience the loss i.e. theft.

I speculate the more appropriate translation is "medium of exchange".

I too would like to see them cite their arbitrary rules (laws) which this classification is based upon or did they just pull it out of their asses?

Barely any article about Bitcoin explains mining for what it really is. I suspect noobs who just learned about Bitcoin are also easily confused. I mean sure, anyone who wants to know can find out the specifics, but I just thought it might be a good idea to make it easier. I'm fine either way.

Asking for permission to be free, yeah, that's definitely going turn out well for him! 

I find this quite amusing actually, it's like watching a bad theater show where the stage of the theater is the failed organizational structure that is a legal fiction - the personhood of a corporation.


When will actors in this market learn to abandon what only the state could have perpetuated and start doing business in their own name under their own personhood with full liability? How many more of these kind of farcical tragic and destructive breakups between business partners which in the end always end up hurting the consumers the most will it take?

Oh that actually is interesting and I didn't know that, was under the impression he picked the term mining to describe transaction validation / issuance of bitcoins. All the more reason to add a clarification to avert unneeded confusion IMO.

And thanks for the bump! 

FYI the entire discussion in this thread will with the arrival of hardware wallets soon be irrelevant. I hope that even blockchain.info will make use of them.