Could Time Travel Kill Bitcoin?

[R2D221]

Guess that time traveling is impossible so in my opinion answer is no.

Obviously, but this is a “What if” question. It's just for fun.

[criptix]

Sure, time travel could kill. Imagine I could go back to the time when your mom was a teenager, and drive over her with a truck. You'd be no more.

time travel paradox

solution: multiverse

answer: in a multiverse basically everything would be possible, the different timeline you went back too could/would develop completely differently then your original timeline. so might be possible you went back in time and btc will be worthless after you bought alot 

[MakingMoneyHoney]

I was thinking, that if someone could go back in time, tell themselves to purchase at pennies (mining too) and sell at 1,000, they'd probably end up being greedy and buy more. If you get into a situation like that, you're buying every Bitcoin that's being sold, the price would go up faster, and probably would go up higher, because more people would be interested in something that someone out there is paying THAT much for.

You'd want to make your payday when it hits 1,000, and dumping that many coins, might make Bitcoin's price fall, fast. HOWEVER, I don't think Bitcoin would die. I think Bitcoin's price would plummet, lower at one time, than we've seen. But, I think enough people would be into Bitcoin, because all the demand would make MORE people notice than they have so far. That somewhere out there someone would be ready to do their own buying frenzy.

So no, I don't think Bitcoin would be killed. But I do think the price would drop with that many being sold at one time.

And to answer my last question, if it would kill Bitcoin, I wouldn't do it.

You're talking about price manipulation, but my hypothetical Bitcoin attack involves actually disrupting the mining process:

You have the wrong perspective about this.

The person with the time machine can simulate a 51% attack (or even a 100% attack, in fact).

There's this miner, working hard to find a block. After say, two hours, she finds a block. Then she travels back in time to seconds after the previous block was found, and then she broadcasts her new block. No matter what happens, even if the difficulty is the highest possible, she will be able to wait for the new block and then broadcast it seconds after the previous.

This would also mean, after two weeks, the difficulty would increase unimaginably high, because what's supposed to happen every 10 minutes is happening every 10 seconds.

Ah, yes. Interesting.  But I think if that happened, people would complain that it was too difficult. If it's not worthwhile to mine (as it would be increasingly difficult for other miners to get a block reward) they would stop mining. If she kept it up:

1. Bitcoin would die
2. A New Altcoin might popup, and if she tried it there she'd kill it too.
or
3. She'd stop it because people were complaining that it's dying and she would realize you can't make any money on Bitcoin if the no one wants it. And people won't want it if they feel it's not worth it to put their work into mining it and/or they think it has a problem (it can't account for time travel).

[CanaryInTheMine]

So I just woke up from a dream about time travel and it had me thinking all sorts of questions...

If you could time travel and leave yourself a note "Mine and buy Bitcoin at cents each, then sell for 1,000 dollars each," and sign it so you know it's you from the future, what would happen?

1) Would you do it?

2) If you did, knowing it could be sold for 1,000 dollars, would you keep buying and buying as the price rose, and how much do you think you could make if it you sold it all or most of it for 1,000 dollars each?

3) What would that kind of heavy demand from the beginning do for Bitcoin, would it have rose much faster, and higher quicker?

4) What would that kind of amount of dumping, at 1,000 dollars each, do to the price?

5) Do you think you could kill Bitcoin, trying to dump that much?

6) If you could kill Bitcoin, would you still do it just to profit?

The reality you leave to time travel from would go on as if nothing happened.  The changes you make, would effect one of the parallel universes you enter.  So the answer to your question is both yes and no.  Or to be more precise, it doesn't make any difference for where and when you're from.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

The threads in this forum are becoming more retarded every single day.

What if nuking the Eath's core kills Bitcoin?
What if an Asteroid kills Bitcoin?

[R2D221]

The threads in this forum are becoming more retarded every single day.

What if nuking the Eath's core kills Bitcoin?
What if an Asteroid kills Bitcoin?

Relax, it's just for entertainment.

[jonald_fyookball]

I think a more interesting scenario is , imagine bitcoin was never invented (satoshi never existed) but you have the knowledge you have bout it.   would you try to invent bitcoin?  write a white paper?  would you do it anonymously?  what would you do?

[MakingMoneyHoney]

The threads in this forum are becoming more retarded every single day.

What if nuking the Eath's core kills Bitcoin?
What if an Asteroid kills Bitcoin?

The question was for entertainment, and I hardly expected as many responses. But I did kinda think someone might do the math, and figure out how many Bitcoins someone, in the know, could have hoarded from the beginning and how much that would be worth at the high... but I wasn't around then. I know someone tried to sell 10,000 Bitcoins for 50 dollars, that would have been scooped up. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92.0 But I don't know how many of those deals could have been taken up on.

These kind of responses make me think a few people didn't read beyond the title "Could Time Travel Kill Bitcoin?" to actually read the longer poll question and first post at all before posting here.

[R2D221]

I think a more interesting scenario is , imagine bitcoin was never invented (satoshi never existed) but you have the knowledge you have bout it.   would you try to invent bitcoin?  write a white paper?  would you do it anonymously?  what would you do?

You publish the white paper and the source code, becoming Satoshi and fulfilling the bootstrap paradox.

[Beymond]

f time travel can happen then killing of Bitcoin ain't a big deal 

[jonald_fyookball]

I think a more interesting scenario is , imagine bitcoin was never invented (satoshi never existed) but you have the knowledge you have bout it.   would you try to invent bitcoin?  write a white paper?  would you do it anonymously?  what would you do?

You publish the white paper and the source code, becoming Satoshi and fulfilling the bootstrap paradox.

but I don't think I have the skills to write the code from scratch...despite my knowledge of programming, I don't know many of the things required such as networking, cryptography, etc...  and probably I don't know enough of the details of Bitcoin implementation to get it right.  I know most of the basic concepts and could certainly rewrite a white paper of sorts...I wonder how it would it turn out? I'm guessing only publishing a paper would require waiting a year or two until some does code it.

[Lauda]

Sure, time travel could kill. Imagine I could go back to the time when your mom was a teenager, and drive over her with a truck. You'd be no more.

time travel paradox

solution: multiverse

answer: in a multiverse basically everything would be possible, the different timeline you went back too could/would develop completely differently then your original timeline. so might be possible you went back in time and btc will be worthless after you bought alot 

If you add parallel universes into the equation, there is no reason for time travel to be impossible. Since space can be bent, time could possibly too (maybe only going forward i.e. the future).

Who's to say that Satoshi did not go through time to make Bitcoin? 

[tss]

I could time travel into the future, get the private key for a 100 BTC wallet in a flash drive, and come back to the current time.
Boom, 21 million and 100 coins now in existence.

uhmm no.. your key would have no coin in it until the future when someone deposits to that address so still only 21m coin

[tss]

Guess that time traveling is impossible so in my opinion answer is no.

Obviously, but this is a “What if” question. It's just for fun.

time travel is possible.  only at relative to current time and speed so basically forward only.

higher rate of speed will speed up your time passage, slower rate will make your time pass slower.  an example is someone who spends a year in orbit ages slower than someone currently on earth.

[R2D221]

But this thread is about traveling backwards in time, which is impossible.

[funkenstein]

The word "travelling" implies increasing t parameter. 

That being said, it is possible for a block to have a timestamp before the previous block's timestamp.  If you can keep this up for a few hundred blocks get back to me. 

[johnyj]

Sure, time travel could kill. Imagine I could go back to the time when your mom was a teenager, and drive over her with a truck. You'd be no more.

time travel paradox

solution: multiverse

answer: in a multiverse basically everything would be possible, the different timeline you went back too could/would develop completely differently then your original timeline. so might be possible you went back in time and btc will be worthless after you bought alot  

This

If you travel back in time, you will change the randomness of the network and cause the blockchain to be totally different than the blockchain that we know today

The world will just fork into another reality that is unrelated to the reality you know today

Actually I don't believe the multiverse theory since it creates energy out of nothing when the world splits into two reality, and we all know that energy will just go down and entropy is getting higher and higher over time. So time travel is impossible at least in our universe

[Febo]

if you had a time machine, bitcoin is nothing.  i'd bring some automatic weapons back to genghis khan times and take over the world.

But Time machine is fueled with Bitcoins. So ofcourse Bitcoin is something.

[kolloh]

If you could time travel, wouldn't it just be easier to buy a winning lotto ticket instead?

[NeuroticFish]

If time travel would kill Bitcoin, then Bitcoin would be already dead. Meaning that somebody would already have come from the future with the better alternative to bitcoin.

My conclusion is that either time travel is not possible (neither now, neither in the future), either it will/didn't kill bitcoin.