Timo Y
Legendary
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Activity: 938
Merit: 1001
bitcoin - the aerogel of money
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March 03, 2014, 07:33:58 PM |
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bitcoin is not property.
who "owns" a bitcoin is decided by consensus and by consesus alone.
nobody who acquired bitcoins ever signed a contract that promises them "ownership" after losing the ability to sign a Transaction. Not even implicitly. Whether they lost that ability intentionally, by accident, or by force, doesn't matter. Ownership by protocol/consensus is the very essence of bitcoin. If ownership was determined by edict, then bitcoin would no longer be bitcoin. In fact, then you could scrap the blockchian altogether and use a public database of edicts instead.
Since people acquire bitcoins voluntarily, and since these rules are public knowledge, they cannot argue retroactively that bitcoins are property.
That would be like losing in a game of poker and then suing the winner to give you back the money because you think that the rules of poker are unfair.
edit: suing mtgox is a different matter because here users did enter a contract with mtgox. but that only creates obligations for mtgox, not for third party bitcoin users.
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