Topic: [PROPOSAL] - lock the apparent Mt. Gox coins for now - page 4. (Read 4954 times)

Seconded.  I move that the blacklist should contain no addresses and be forever closed to new addresses.   Situation resolved.

Why do you keep insisting on calling this theft? Nothing is being stolen. The miners would simply be refusing to aid what they believe to be a theft or fraud.

I agree, it is a change of the protocol, however, none is stealing the private keys of anyone else.

Consensus.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

I nominate myself, DeathAndTaxes, QuestionAuthority, LaudaM, and justusranvier.

Hopefully, that group will agree to block no addresses.

 

Theft for the greater good?  Decentralized is too scary, bad people might do bad stuff so we should instead facilitate absolute control by a cartel who is almost certainly to end up doing bad stuff.  


Consensus obviously doesn't mean what you think it means.  51% is not a consensus, it is a majority.  Deciding who has the money based on majority rule is a terrible idea.  The point is you have no possibility of a consensus so instead you would force your will upon the minority (potentially a very large minority) by extorting their valid mining reward to compel them to act against their own better judgement.

To avoid miners wasting effort on blocks, this could be phased in at a certain block number. There would be no need for miners who are following the consensus to surrender any earned rewards. It is just a matter of whether the majority of miners would choose to support what is just, that is all, and choosing not to have their own effort mining used to support a massive fraud or theft.

So a group of unelected persons appoint themselves as a central authority to police a decentralized system.  Can't possibly see what could go wrong with that?  Maybe you should just use PayPal, they already are the sole judge without recourse for transactions on their network.

They may decide that they don't wish to have their mining power used to support a massive fraud or theft. Deciding to drop valid blocks for that reason has a far greater ethical imperative than doing so to enhance one's own profits.

So your solution is for a group of miners to "solve" a potential theft by stealing bitcoins from other miners?

Sorry, no thanks.  Good luck getting a consensus on this.  Almost certainly it would result in those miners whose blocks are being dropped deciding to drop the blocks from the group you approve of.  This would split the bitcoin blockchain.  There would be 2 bitcoins.  Those that embrace fungibilty of currency, and those that want a cartel that can independently decide whose transactions are "good enough" for their system.

I can tell you which "bitcoin" I'd choose.  I wish you luck with yours.

As I suggested at the beginning of the thread, I would suggest a group of people, reasonably respected in the community, be set up to judge the evidence. To proceed fairly they would have to weigh the evidence for particular addresses. These addresses can always be unlocked if an owner can submit proof of proper ownership by other than Mt. Gox.

There are quite a few discussions on the web where the evidence looks reasonably compelling that there are large blocks of bitcoin which previously belonged to Mt. Gox and haven't been spent since. I don't believe it is accurate to qualify this evidence as "no idea".

There is another alternative to viewing this as arresting the wealth of anyone. It could be viewed as the miners simply refusing to take part in what they judge to be an unethical transaction. I don't think there is anything wrong with miners deciding they don't want to support what may be a massive fraud or theft.

That is a dangerous road to go down.  The 51% of miners they could just drop ALL other blocks and keep 100% of the block rewards for themselves too.  Honest miners build upon the longest chain.  A block containing a tx involving a "MtGox address" (which you have identified to any degree of accuracy) is a valid block.  So your solution is a cartel of miners decide to start dropping valid blocks?  Why not drop all valid blocks and double their profits?  They are already breaking the spirit of Bitcoin why half ass it.

Also you do realize this cartel would be blocking txs based solely on their (likely flawed) guess as to what is a MtGox address.   Why not boost profits and start dropping transactions (and block containing them if they haven't already excluded all other miners) of users who refuse to pay an extortion tax?  Pay 1 BTC and we whitelist your addresses, if you don't then you never get to spend your coins again.

While these types of cartel behavior may be something Bitcoin needs to face in the future, it is another thing to actively recruit and coordinate miners to form the first cartel.

I don't believe it would require 100% of all miners. A simple majority, a bit over 50% of the hashing power, should suffice, right?


I would suggest they drop it. That way it wouldn't pay to waste a mined block including such a transaction. Since miners choose which transactions are included in the block, they needed include them in the first place.

According to statements by MtGox, they have 127,000 creditors.  You might have noticed that people who are owed money by MtGox cannot come to a consensus about how the situation should be best approached, and those people have the possibility of invoking varying levels of actual authority.

Do you really believe that "the Bitcoin community" - a diverse group with widely varying agendas - would reach a consensus on this?  Even if they did, they have no authority over miners.  How would you even know that a consensus had been reached?  "The Bitcoin community" includes far more people than those who post here and on reddit.  Are miners supposed to just listen to the loudest voices?

You talk about "supporting law enforcement", but you're really talking about taking an action without even consulting them.  Do you think they're not capable of asking the devs whether or not it's possible for Bitcoin addresses to be "frozen" if they believe that's a desirable option?  It takes legal authority to freeze bank accounts, but what your proposing is freezing funds with no legal authority whatsoever based on no evidence whatsoever - the kind of thing this community would be outraged by if it was done by a conventional financial service.

Seriously, many of the proposals to "help law enforcement" I've seen over the last few days seem far more likely to hinder any investigation than anything else.  Y'all need to step back and let investigators do their thing working within the law because if one of you idiots fucks up the legal cases against MtGox in your quest to play Ellery Queen, nobody is going to give a shit that you had "good intentions".

What "appropriate group"?  The central bank of Bitcoin?  The Central Bitcoin Intelligence Agency?

You have no idea which addresses belong to MtGox.  It doesn't strike you as utter contemptible to just start blocking addresses because you think they belong to MtGox? Forget laws, on what ethical or moral authority do you have the right to arrest the wealth on another person? 


Except by the responses of this very thread you already don't have a consensus and that is with only a tiny number of people knowing about it.  What you want is a central all powerful authority to control the wealth of others based on the flimsiest of evidence.  Evidence which BTW wouldn't be sufficient in a court of law to freeze assets "Your honor we think these assets might belong to the defandant so we want you to freeze them for an indefinite amount of time just in case.  This was thoroughly researched by some people on the internet and stuff.".

How sure are you that 100% of all miners and all mining pools in the entire world will honor the agreement not to put such transactions into the chain in the first place?

If even one miner somewhere in the world puts such a transaction into the blockchain, how would you suggest the remaining miners handle the situation?  Do they ignore that block, or do they accept it and build on top of it?

Hopefully we would all learn that the community can pull together for the sake of justice?

In any case, I imagine this would depend almost entirely on what the miners are willing to do, and if a majority of the hashing power would support it.

Like I said, it would be a good learning experience.

I don't believe this requires an immediate change in the client software, does it? Simply the software used by the miners would need to be changed to not incorporate transactions spending from the locked addresses. Eventually I suppose it should be incorporated into the main client software, but that is not the main priority.

Anyone who feels their coins have been unfairly locked, because they weren't part of the Mt. Gox wallets, can just provide proof of ownership to the appropriate group to have the addresses removed from the locked list. Clearly this would require good evidence, but that can be arranged and weighed appropriately.

This shouldn't inconvenience many people at all, at least not the honest ones, and would prevent either insiders at Mt. Gox or the alleged thieves from being able to move these coins until the facts are resolved.

When the bankruptcy is cleared up, which I understand will likely be a year or more, then the coins can be unlocked. Obviously, not something we would want to be doing for every theft and problem, but perhaps something to consider when major problems affecting substantial sums are involved. In fact, the ability to perform such a lock under extreme circumstances can be considered a strength of Bitcoin.

There is nothing wrong with the Bitcoin community, as a consensus, saying they want to be just and support law enforcement in such cases. In fact, I would argue it is using available information and the capabilities of new crypto-currencies in a freedom supporting way.

It would be a good learning experience for everybody involved if the core dev team did indeed release a new version of the client that did this.

This will never happen, no way.