would it be possible to create a fork that excludes just one bitcoin adress from

[moses]

if all miners agreed to abandon all transactions to and from one particular adress would it be possible to keep the system going and ingnore this adress?
how long would it take the community to do this approximately?

[1714771988]

1714771988

[1714771988]

1714771988

[1714771988]

1714771988

[TierNolan]

if all miners agreed to abandon all transactions to and from one particular adress would it be possible to keep the system going and ingnore this adress?
how long would it take the community to do this approximately?

You would need 51% of the miners to agree.  If more than half of the miners refused to mine against blocks containing that address, then it would be effectively dead.

Mining pools would have to convince their miners that it is a good idea.

However, it is a dangerous policy.  What happens to merchants who accept payments from that address?  There could be 1-2 block confirms that get overridden by the majority miner bloc.

It makes the entire system more complex, some bitcoins are "more equal than others".

[moses]

i am talking about a case where 99% of the miners agreed on it. the goal of this would be to make all coins at that adress useless. this came up when we talked about the question if "the world" could be blackmailed to accumulate a certain amount of BTC at some address and if not... i don´t know. it´s a theoretical question.

[DannyHamilton]

You are unlikely to get 99% of the miners to agree to such a change, but imagining for a moment that you could, it would seem that you would then be able to get 99% of the users to agree as well.  If you could do that, then you could change all the clients/wallets to refuse to even relay any transaction to or from that address.  This would reduce the concern about a merchant accidentally accepting a payment from the address.

[moses]

thanks

[pc]

It's important to keep in mind that bitcoin only has value in the sense that people give value to it. If merchants/users/etc. all decided that particular bitcoins with whatever characteristics (sending address, has a particular pattern of digits in it, whatever) were no longer valuable, and set their wallets, websites, brains, and whatnot to not treat those payments as having any value, then they wouldn't have value anymore.

I find such a scenario pretty unlikely, though.