Should core bitcoin developers freeze stolen Mt.Gox bitcoins?

[Joshuar]

+1

[BurtW]

Agreed, the link you provided in the other thread explains it very well.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=352734.0

zylstra: Keyser actually read the thread I gave you.  It appears that you did not.  What is the matter?  Did the facts of how Bitcoin works, as detailed in that thread, not jive with your fantasies of how you think it works?

[zylstra]

Who, me?  Posturing?  

I think posing is a more accurate description than posturing.

I couldn't find a posturing happy face.  : )

[jonald_fyookball]

No because then we are placing our trust in "the core developers",. Trust in anyone is slippery slope.  Bitcoin is supposed to be trustless system

[tvbcof]

Well... 51% of the hash rate could attempt the following.

The could stop including a certain set of transactions and stop building on top of blocks which include any of those transactions.

In this case, we would probably have a nice fork.

I would imagine most rational people would sell their coins on the miners-decide-to-freeze-coins fork pushing the price of that alt-coin down. I doubt the two forks would survive, and I'm willing to take the chance that Bitcoin will come out on top (I don't think 51% of miners would want to cut off their nose to spite their face in the first place).

I mean, we hear these threads over and over again from a vocal minority who has no idea why this will never work, yet they never do anything about it. It's been four years now that I've been seeing these threads. Everyone but the OP and one or two posters are completely against the idea, yet they just keep on talking and talking about it.

So OP, please stop talking about this 4 year old topic and go do something about it. No one is going to throw Bitcoin under the bus to save some people who ignored the benefit of Bitcoin in the first place by trading actual bitcoins for Bitcoin IOUs.

If you aren't the sole controller of your private keys, you don't have any bitcoins. This is how Bitcoin functions. This is a feature, not a bug. You can be your own bank. Why do we want to throw that away to save some people who refused to take advantage of that. Not only did they refuse to use Bitcoin safely, they ignored many years of signs that something was terribly wrong with their Bitcoin IOU provider (aka Gox).

In poker I always prefer to be dealt an "economic majority" over a "51% attack".

In order to make any meaningful inferences about what might happen in the face of an attack on miners, we really need a characterization of what the actual hashing landscape looks like.  e.g., how much hashing happens on USB sticks and how much occurs in liquid coolant submerged datacenter facilities.

The reason that this is important is that people with a large and static investment are not likely to do anything but comply with a directive to honor a tainting authority's output.  At best their option would be to shut down, but that would lose more money (in the short-to-mid term at least) than to simply comply.  I suspect that a lot of operators who have a large capital investment would simply comply.

Perhaps there have been surveys of the different varieties of hashing power.  Dunno.  I don't follow it as much as I probably should.

In any event, I believe that it would/will be unnecessary to bother the miners at all.  If taint directives are aimed exclusively toward retailers I believe that economic principles will lead to taint being widely observed (and the economy damaged accordingly.)  If Bitcoin did not tie it's fortunes to success as a widely used exchange currency it would not have this particular Achilles's heal and an attack at the mining level would be more likely.

[tkbx]

Absolutely not. This is the kind of bullshit Bitcoin was designed to prevent. I've personally lost thousands of dollars due to stupid mistakes, just like Mt. Gox users, but I would be mortified if someone suggested that we override history to get those coins back.

[teukon]

That's one of the big misconceptions I hear over and over again on this board, that bitcoin means no regulation.  Regulation and decentralization are two different concepts.  Bitcoin's strength is its decentralization, not its lawlessness.

...

Law is one of the foundations of civilization.  If bitcoin is anarchy then I'll pass.  If bitcoin is anarchy then another more lawful coin will overtake it because the anarchists are in the minority.  (Not that minorities are wrong and that they can't have their own coin; I just didn't know that bitcoin was that coin.)

Lawlessness and Anarchy are two very different concepts.

Bitcoin is anarchy (for want of a better word), more specifically crypto-anarchy.  I, for one, still welcome you to use Bitcoin, but I can totally respect you abstaining on principle.

[CryptoPanda]

Nope, that's a bad idea.
They develop the protocol, they are not police.

[luv2drnkbr]

OP meet Protocol, Protocol meet OP.

**Later that night**

Protocol:  Why did you introduce me to OP!?  He's stupid and doesn't understand anything about me.

[smoothie]

Short answer: They can't. Even if they release an update the network has to accept it.

I for one would not accept it. You snooze you lose your bitcoins. That's that.

[Bit_Happy]

Before I write a full argument for why the core developers should consider asking the mining community to freeze Mt. Gox’s stolen BTC (the coins mentioned here, for example, http://www.coindesk.com/gox-money-moving-through-block-chain/ ), I would like to ask your opinion.  What is it?  Yes, you.

No one has EVER asked this question before.

[wumpus]

If 51% of the miners refuse my "dirty" transaction that still leaves 49% that will accept it.  So my confirmation time goes from an average of 10 minutes to an average of 20 minutes and you have done nothing.

Repeating over and over that getting 51% of the miners to refuse the coins you don't like will stop them from moving does not make it true.

That's not how it works.

If 51% or more of miners decide that they will not accept the transactions and not build on blocks that have the transactions, they will outrun the miners that do accept them.

The 49% miners could have a longer chain temporarily in bursts, but statistically over time the 51% miners will win.

The experience for users would be ugly if the numbers are so close together (transactions may seem confirmed for a while, then unconfirmed again), but by denying that transaction censorship is possible you're just as well deceiving yourself (personally I don't like it either). Wording your message angrily doesn't change that.

Learn how something actually works before you try to fix it.

Frustrated much?

[zylstra]

How do you propose miners keep track of the stolen coins?  Perhaps the miners will place the coins in a temporarily locked wallet.
How can coins be unfrozen?  The coins are returned to the rightful owners after a democratic court determines who they are.
Who pays for this system?  A percentage of the stolen coins may be used to pay for any management of the system.  Similar to the taxes we pay to support our justice system.

Three glaring example of how you have no clue as to how the thing you are trying to "fix" operates at a fundamental level.  None of this is even possible.

NOT.  POSSIBLE.

Miners cannot "place the coins in a temporarily locked wallet" because they can only send them where the owner wants to send them (or not, but then another miner will).

NO ONE can return "coins .. to the 'rightful' owners" except the current owner.

It is not possible to take "a percentage of the stolen coins" unless the current owner gives them to you - and they may not want to do that.

Look, I'm glad you know more about the protocol than I do, but I'm not here to debate the protocol with you.  I know if the devs and miners decided to freeze the coins they could.  If they can't technically do it, everyone else (with a wallet) would do what they say because they carry too much weight.  I'm simply stating an option that may be better for bitcoin and bitcoin society as a whole in the long run.

Just as a technical point, are you stating that the representation of the stolen bitcoins could not be re-encoded (sent, outputted, or however you want to call it) with a new key pair in a new block?  It appears that someone else who appears knowledgeable says its possible:

Well... 51% of the hash rate could attempt the following.

The could stop including a certain set of transactions and stop building on top of blocks which include any of those transactions.

In this case, we would probably have a nice fork.

So OP, please stop talking about this 4 year old topic and go do something about it. No one is going to throw Bitcoin under the bus to save some people who ignored the benefit of Bitcoin in the first place by trading actual bitcoins for Bitcoin IOUs.

I am doing something about it by talking about it.  Bitcoin does not have to be thrown under the bus to be more just.  The devs and miners simiply have to lead the way.

Are you stating that you never purchased coins at an exchange?  Or that exchanges haven't played the most important part (by far! other than the code itself of course) in bitcoin's short successful history to date?

No because then we are placing our trust in "the core developers",. Trust in anyone is slippery slope.  Bitcoin is supposed to be trustless system

If you don't believe your trust is already with the core developers you're sorely mistaken.

OP meet Protocol, Protocol meet OP.

**Later that night**

Protocol:  Why did you introduce me to OP!?  He's stupid and doesn't understand anything about me.

Is this on topic?  Do I need to understand the protocol to suggest a better way?  One can code anything one desires.

Short answer: They can't. Even if they release an update the network has to accept it.

I for one would not accept it. You snooze you lose your bitcoins. That's that.

I'm going to call bullshit on you here.

Finally to all those who keep saying something to the effect of "please stop talking and go do something about it":
For one I am; I am discussing it with you.  Secondly, I am not forking the chain because I do not have the technical capability at this point nor do I have the leadership role in the bitcoin community that would make it a success.

[Ytterbium]

Individual exchanges could theoretically 'taint' coins, but if the developers tried to implement this it should be rejected.  If the developers can block transactions they don't like, then the government can force them to block any transactions they don't like as well.

[corebob]

Regardless of how and if they could do that, it would ruin bitcoin. Period.

This is a really scary thought. It better be impossible.

[spooderman]

no. stupid idea is stupid. someone with more patience than me explain why please. I'm sure someone already has.

[BurtW]

First let's get on the same page here.  When I said:

If 51% of the miners refuse my "dirty" transaction that still leaves 49% that will accept it.  So my confirmation time goes from an average of 10 minutes to an average of 20 minutes and you have done nothing.

Repeating over and over that getting 51% of the miners to refuse the coins you don't like will stop them from moving does not make it true.

My assumption was that the majority miners were not including the "dirty" transaction but still accepting all valid blocks per protocol - including blocks with "dirty" transactions produced by other miners.  Given these assumptions I stand by my statement.

When you said:

If 51% or more of miners decide that they will not accept the transactions and not build on blocks that have the transactions, they will outrun the miners that do accept them.

The 49% miners could have a longer chain temporarily in bursts, but statistically over time the 51% miners will win.

The experience for users would be ugly if the numbers are so close together (transactions may seem confirmed for a while, then unconfirmed again), but by denying that transaction censorship is possible you're just as well deceiving yourself (personally I don't like it either). Wording your message angrily doesn't change that.

You correctly desribed the situation based on the assumption of a malicious majority hashing attack in which the majority of miners refuse otherwise perfectly valid block per protocol that happen to contain transactions they consider "bad".  This is a different scenario.

[lindeanin]

If 51% or more of miners decide that they will not accept the transactions and not build on blocks that have the transactions, they will outrun the miners that do accept them.

This is true, but miners would destroy Bitcoin value if doing this, so not in miners interest at all. Any blacklisting of Bitcoins is terrible idea, unless you want destroy Bitcoin

[BurtW]

Next, I would like to appologize.  This noob and his thread about the same damn subject, again, set me off more than most.  Instead of:

Hey everyone I have a great idea!  Let's try to destroy Bitcoin and everything it stands for by using a majority hashing attack as a way to implement a coin blacklisting fungibily attack!  Who is on board with me?

He glibly said "it is not an attack it is just a vote"!  Yes is is "just a vote" in exactly the same way voting for the Nazi party in pre WWII Germany was "just a vote".

I did get worked up a bit and due to that I made a few technical errors in my posts.  Not in this thread but in the other one.  I have re-read all my posts in this thread and stand by all of them, including this one.  I will now correct my errors in the posts in the other thread.

[grifferz]

Finally to all those who keep saying something to the effect of "please stop talking and go do something about it":
For one I am; I am discussing it with you.  Secondly, I am not forking the chain because I do not have the technical capability at this point nor do I have the leadership role in the bitcoin community that would make it a success.

So have you contacted any mining pools about your proposal yet? If so, what did they say?

Or are you waiting to see if you can find someone with a leadership role who agrees with you?

You don't appear to have found one yet. At what point will you concede that no one with a leadership role considers this a good or workable idea?