Theymos: “Bitcoins Belonging to Satoshi Should Be Destroyed”

[David Rabahy]

When do bitcoins deserve to be wiped out? Are we going to destroy Hal's next because they are just going to get stolen? Death = bitcoin destruction?

I have taken steps to pass ownership on when I am no longer able to control them myself.  I am going to improve my plan by directly the new owners to move my/their coins to re-secure them (we don't want anyone thinking they became orphaned).

I don't think this makes sense at all. That's like saying because someone hasn't moved their coins 10 years down the road they should be removed/deleted. That's just stupid. If you leave a lot of money in your bank should they just 'get rid of it' if you don't use it for a period of time?

If one's bank has potentially weak locks on their doors then shouldn't the owner move their funds to a more secure place?  If the owner doesn't then shouldn't the community act to thwart theft?

Down the road if brute forcing private keys becomes possible with quantum computing or other means, then countermeasures would have to be put in place to secure the blockchain. But I have a feeling that before this can/will happen, there will be a means to secure it against such attacks. I am willing to bet that 'quantum-proof' cryptography will be available and used around the same time quantum computing becomes more feasible for the masses.

Only non-hashed signatures put the coins at risk.  All modern transactions secure signatures with hashes.  Only old enough transactions lack the hashing security.  Quantum resistant algorithms are an active area of study already, e.g. hashing.  Not using hashing to secure things now is dumb.

*If* one were to generate new coinbase coins now without securing them with hashing then essentially they are putting them up for grabs.  I propose we enhance Bitcoin;

After some point X, all subsequent coinbase transaction must be secured with hashing or they will be rejected.

This should be very easy to gain consensus for.  Someone would have to work to generate non-hashed coinbase coins now anyway.  If they want to throw new coinbase coins up for grabs then they should find another way to donate them rather than encouraging theft.

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[thoth-Atlantian]

Destroy peoples coins...

LOL...


 

[huggybear]

confirming once again the strange views of theymos

[digaran]

So what happens when we have 21M bitcoin in total? and people wanting bitcoin and those who have just wont sell?
Is it going to be just for a few and not for all the people?

[andulolika]

So what happens when we have 21M bitcoin in total? and people wanting bitcoin and those who have just wont sell?
Is it going to be just for a few and not for all the people?

Everyone spends, usually the more you have the more you spend.

[David Rabahy]

So what happens when we have 21M bitcoin in total? and people wanting bitcoin and those who have just wont sell?
Is it going to be just for a few and not for all the people?

Someone will sell at the right price.  Also, Bitcoins can be divided into portions less than a whole.

[Dabs]

So what happens when we have 21M bitcoin in total? and people wanting bitcoin and those who have just wont sell?
Is it going to be just for a few and not for all the people?

Ask me in a hundred years. (Or ask anyone in a hundred years.) Literally a hundred years.

[Yipdard]

We have to protect bitcoin, not to destroy it.

[jbreher]

I don't think this makes sense at all. That's like saying because someone hasn't moved their coins 10 years down the road they should be removed/deleted. That's just stupid. If you leave a lot of money in your bank should they just 'get rid of it' if you don't use it for a period of time?

If one's bank has potentially weak locks on their doors then shouldn't the owner move their funds to a more secure place?  If the owner doesn't then shouldn't the community act to thwart theft?

Thwart theft by stealing? Yeah, that makes sense. Not.

Again, the only moral position is that personal property is sacrosanct. The community has no rightful claim upon those coins.

[amine14madrid]

This is one thing that Theymos will have to respectfully disagree about. I can't support any activity that allows control over another persons coins. To me, this is antithetical to the unassailable ownership of bitcoin.

[David Rabahy]

I don't think this makes sense at all. That's like saying because someone hasn't moved their coins 10 years down the road they should be removed/deleted. That's just stupid. If you leave a lot of money in your bank should they just 'get rid of it' if you don't use it for a period of time?

If one's bank has potentially weak locks on their doors then shouldn't the owner move their funds to a more secure place?  If the owner doesn't then shouldn't the community act to thwart theft?

Thwart theft by stealing? Yeah, that makes sense. Not.

Again, the only moral position is that personal property is sacrosanct. The community has no rightful claim upon those coins.

My preference would be to move the non-hashed coins for safekeeping; does come with two big problems;

1) who can be trusted?
2) how do we know when the rightful owner steps forward to claim?

The alternative is to make them unusable.  This is *not* taking them to be used; that truly would be stealing them.  Making them unusable protects the community.  Look, someone is going to steal them eventually.  If the original owner won't act to secure their own coins then the community would be remiss to leave them to be stolen and wreck havoc.

Anyone that believes letting them be stolen and used is the right thing to do is either naïve or doesn't care about the good of the community.  No, give plenty of warning; watch carefully for developments; be prepared to act *before* the coins are stolen.

For what it is worth, I will withdraw from Bitcoin if this isn't adopted in time.  I imagine many others will too.

[Swimmer63]

So just because someone has not moved their coins for a few years, some other person is going to declare them lost?
Who the F%^& are they to make decisions about someone else's property.  I don't know if this idea is really attributable to Theymos.  But whoever's idea, it's coming from a warped sense of authority.  Bitcoin is encrypted to prevent unilateral decisions like this from people who think they know better.

[BurtW]

My preference would be to move the non-hashed coins for safekeeping; does come with two big problems;

1) who can be trusted?
2) how do we know when the rightful owner steps forward to claim?

The alternative is to make them unusable.  This is *not* taking them to be used; that truly would be stealing them.  Making them unusable protects the community.  Look, someone is going to steal them eventually.  If the original owner won't act to secure their own coins then the community would be remiss to leave them to be stolen and wreck havoc.

Anyone that believes letting them be stolen and used is the right thing to do is either naïve or doesn't care about the good of the community.  No, give plenty of warning; watch carefully for developments; be prepared to act *before* the coins are stolen.

For what it is worth, I will withdraw from Bitcoin if this isn't adopted in time.  I imagine many others will too.

1) Bitcoin is trustless - that is what makes it Bitcoin
2) Great point - so don't do it.

Even if it is not stealing by your definition, destroying someone else's property is still wrong.

Color me naïve then as I believe it is in the best long term interest of Bitcoin to just let the coins be stolen and placed back into circulation.  Everyone will know they were vulnerable, being stolen just proves that, having them stolen will wake everyone up and get them to move the rest of the vulnerable coins.  Short term buying opportunity on the dip.  Recovery, etc.  

Taking/Destroying/Stealing coins would lead to a mass exodus to a coin that does not do that.  Long term destruction of Bitcoin value, values and ideals.

It is almost guaranteed that this idea (destroying coins) will never be implemented so I would invite you to cash in now and leave.  Everyone else that wants this idea will also be disappointed.  Why wait?  If this is your idea for Bitcoin (destruction of other people's property) then please get out now while the getting is good.   And don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. (too snarky)

[andulolika]

I don't think this makes sense at all. That's like saying because someone hasn't moved their coins 10 years down the road they should be removed/deleted. That's just stupid. If you leave a lot of money in your bank should they just 'get rid of it' if you don't use it for a period of time?

If one's bank has potentially weak locks on their doors then shouldn't the owner move their funds to a more secure place?  If the owner doesn't then shouldn't the community act to thwart theft?

Thwart theft by stealing? Yeah, that makes sense. Not.

Again, the only moral position is that personal property is sacrosanct. The community has no rightful claim upon those coins.

My preference would be to move the non-hashed coins for safekeeping; does come with two big problems;

1) who can be trusted?
2) how do we know when the rightful owner steps forward to claim?

The alternative is to make them unusable.  This is *not* taking them to be used; that truly would be stealing them.  Making them unusable protects the community.  Look, someone is going to steal them eventually.  If the original owner won't act to secure their own coins then the community would be remiss to leave them to be stolen and wreck havoc.

Anyone that believes letting them be stolen and used is the right thing to do is either naïve or doesn't care about the good of the community.  No, give plenty of warning; watch carefully for developments; be prepared to act *before* the coins are stolen.

For what it is worth, I will withdraw from Bitcoin if this isn't adopted in time.  I imagine many others will too.

Even if id try i couldnt make any decent post in reply to yours, you are so close minded or simply just doing fud for a reason that pisses me off instantly, there is people that may keep their calm and answer nicely to you but not me. GO FUCK YOURSELVES with all the bullshit that only keeps spreading uncertainity without any sense. The worst is that people actually ends up believing you. Time ago i realised that cryptos are filled with people that are around exclusively for their own interest, the nicer and the more helpfull you try to seem the harder shit you are, good luck with the spread. Please dump n go.

[franky1]

there are gold coins sat in museums.. no one is sure when someone wil steal them and melt them down into bars. no one is sure who actually owns them. so lets fire them into space so they evaporate in the sun.

.. um no thanks.

the owner does not matter
the short term price drama of the shock that coins are stolen does not matter.
..
the guaranteed 21mill coin cap and fungibility DOES MATTER.

anyone else suggesting to destroy coins should destroy their own coins first and then go back and play with their fiat debt notes because all they care about is the short term fiat valuations.. not the long term stable currency that cant be destroyed.

to be honest if 99% of people move to d-wave prevention encryption. and d-wave "steals" 1% of coins and then moves them to d-wave prevention encryption to spend later.. its al good because atleast there are still 21 mill coins in circulation.

if d-wave themselves decide to destroy the coins they "steal" then thats another option..
but for the community to say coins in blocks 1-21000 should be destroyed simply because they are old.. is something that makes no sense at all

[hermanhs09]

Firstly I don't think Satoshi will ever access his coins nor will it be hacked. After all he is the creator of bitcoin and he wants to bring good to the community. He has no vested interest in dumping the coins all at once and crashing the market. If he does sell his bitcoins, he'll sell it one by one. Not a million at once.

I don't think he'll get hacked either. Being the founder of bitcoin will surely mean that he has good security measures? Worst case scenario that 1 million coins are dumped... That's not a big deal either if you look at the leveraging going on inside exchanges.

[The00Dustin]

It is almost garanteed that this idea (destroying coins) will never be implemented

The quote above absolutely SHOULD be true, and I hope it is, but what do you read into the quote below?

All of these hypothetical desires fail right out of the gate based on the fact that any fork of this nature creates a new coin and this new coin is no longer Bitcoin.

Destroying coins is a softfork. Everyone would automatically accept it.

In many cases, this is a huge problem. For example, China could right now freeze all the bitcoins of people who haven't been ID-verified by the Chinese authorities. (Since the vast majority of mining power is in China.) The defense against this is:

 1. Improve anonymity features so that specific coins can't be tied to specific people.
 2. Be prepared as a community to immediately hardfork to a different PoW if miners do anything like this. In fact, I think that a document should be written and signed by all of the major players which would specify exactly the lines that miners must not be allowed to cross, to avoid ambiguity/chaos if it actually happens.

But in the case of deleting insecure BTC, it seems possible to me, especially if quantum computers and coins being "un-lost" start looking more like a big looming threat and less like a theoretical discussion, that there could be sufficient support for the action that the risk of any substantial hardfork effort splitting Bitcoin would be low.

It seems to start out cocky and almost imply that it doesn't matter what the early adopters / true believers think because the core developers have their own agenda, but then it ends looking like double-speak when also mentioning a hard fork.  Does this mean the only way to prevent a soft fork is with enough support for a hard fork against it?  Do you really think ideology will beat greed in that scenario?  Don't get me wrong, I understand that if the greedy side won, they would likely actually be shooting the collective in the foot and we'd technically all lose, but how much say does Theymos really have in Core development?  How true to the founding values of bitcoin is the current core development team?  This all makes me very nervous and reaffirms my belief that we need multiple implementations (even if XT and Classic had their flaws, at least they could theoretically keep development decentralized).  I actually ran XT even though I had a problem with many of Hearn's ideas long before it was created, but I understood that I could switch away after big blocks happened so that I wouldn't support the other more evil aspects of that particular implementation.    I've been running Unlimited since XT died, but more recently I've been considering switching back to Core even though I only support segwit as a hard fork with other fixes to prevent drastic soft forks.  Right now I'm thinking I shouldn't switch back after all...

ETA:  To be clear, I'm really looking for input here.  I've re-read that post many times.  My comments above are based on it sounding like:
"You can't stop the destruction of those coins, because we can force it with a soft fork and you can't get enough support to undo that with a risky hard fork"
However, other times, even though I would be against the potentially supportable hard fork, it sounds like a much more even keeled:
"We should prevent soft forks that would allow destroying coins, but even then there will probably be sufficient support for a risky hard fork to destroy them"

[andulolika]

there are gold coins sat in museums.. no one is sure when someone wil steal them and melt them down into bars. no one is sure who actually owns them.

Hmm i think that if a coin is in a museum is because its worth more that way than in a goldbar. Eitherway i completly agree with you.

[franky1]

there are gold coins sat in museums.. no one is sure when someone wil steal them and melt them down into bars. no one is sure who actually owns them.

Hmm i think that if a coin is in a museum is because its worth more that way than in a goldbar. Eitherway i completly agree with you.

but a theif wont care about the real value.. even at pennies to the dollar.. its still more pennies then they had before..

again value is meaningless if you think about the big long term picture

[David Rabahy]

there are gold coins sat in museums ...

Gold has some intrinsic value, gold coins have historic value well beyond that, and also, much of it in museums is made into art; it would be wasteful and very costly to send them into the sun.  Bitcoins have no intrinsic value; nothing is wasted and it would cost very little to render them useless.  Museums are spread out with a variety of security measures in place; non-hashed coinbase coins are all sitting in one place.

Color me naïve then as I believe it is in the best long term interest of Bitcoin to just let the coins be stolen and placed back into circulation.  Everyone will know they were vulnerable, being stolen just proves that, having them stolen will wake eveyone up and get them to move the rest of the vulneralbe coins.  Short term buying opportunity on the dip.  Recovery, etc.

Hmm, this position literally encourages folks to strive to steal them.  Do we actually need to have them stolen to gain the benefits of waking everyone up?  You, I, and some others are already awake before they are stolen.  Can't we gain the benefits any other way?  If not (and I do respect your opinion/thoughts) then I do see your point.  Suppose we compromise and allow some to be stolen (eventually) and render the rest useless.