Topic: Should core bitcoin developers freeze stolen Mt.Gox bitcoins? - page 3. (Read 6164 times)

They can make a list of addresses to blacklist.

Really sad to hear this. No one will use Bitcoins if they are frequently stolen and resold. Just look at the past 3 months or so. More than 1 million coins (including those in Mt Gox) have been stolen and their real owners have been left with little or no support. Some people will claim that this happens with the fiat as well. But in fiat, does this much amount (8% of the total money in circulation) gets stolen in just 3 months?

In addition to "NO!" I would like to add:

Massive thefts are an inevitable and necessary part of Bitcoin's evolution. Too many people are overlooking the primary goals of Bitcoin, namely being a decentralised, trustless, digital currency. The majority of Bitcoin users are trusting centralised authorities. This requires a mental shift which will be facilitated by pain.

We need decentralised exchanges as a priority.

thank math.

Just thought I would re-visit this thread to say:

NO

...in response to the OPs question.

I'm against about forking bitcoin and freezing the stolen funds what is the difference between governments freezing bank accounts?

More people would lost trust to bitcoin if this happen. Price would crumble and I'm seeing a new coin will replace bitcoin.

OP, what you're suggesting isn't possible in Bitcoin by design. The blockchain can't just be altered by the dev team in the manner that this scenario would require.

The block which contains the MtGox transfers also contain numerous other legitimate transactions that occurred around the same time period before that block was solved.

The hash of a block is a long string of characters representing the entire hash of the previous block, a time stamp of when the current block was created, and all of the transaction data contained within the current block. If a single transaction is changed, the resulting block hash will be completely different. When a block is solved, a new block is instantly created and the cycle is repeated.

All of the blocks solved from then up until now rely on the hash of the block containing those MtGox transactions. Every block is dependent on the data contained within the previous block remaining concurrent. Changing something in a past block would cause a cascading failure event. The change would be rejected.

Each and every block uses the hash of the previous block in its algorithm. If you change the content of a block, the hash changes with it. If the hash of the next block does not check-out against the hash of the previous block it will be discarded. The blockchain from that moment forward and every transaction that occurred from that block onward would need to be reverted as if it never happened for such a change to be accepted...

The protocol will not allow the coins to be "frozen" since the act of freezing them would destroy the concurrency of a known good chain where the inputs and outputs are proven. The alteration would be discarded the same as a "double-spend" attempt.

Bitcoin can't do what you're asking it to do regardless of what the core devs think about the Gox situation... Bitcoin has no conventional "core" in that unilateral "source-code" alterations are not possible. If the community wishes to implement an improvement they must do it by consent. Community consent has limits in that it still doesn't mean they can change the content of a previous block. Improvements can only be implemented from an unsolved block onward. The only way to go back would be to discard all transactions that took place in the chain between the block in question and the current unsolved block.

Bitcoin isn't about Anarchy, it's governed by the most absolutely infallible system of law on the planet; math... The problem with math is that it cares nothing for emotion. If you have unspent outputs and the private keys to control them; nobody can stop you from spending them. That's not Anarchy, that's equality and neutrality...

I think even if it were easily possible without horrible code changes that it would set an extremely bad precedent and put developers in the firing line (as others have pointed out). Gox had some kind of weird authority about it despite being next to useless for the best part of 2013 and having warning flags written all over it. Many other services that have lost coins due to hackers have been, or at least seemingly been, far more professional and secure. Just because it is a large amount of coins I don't see that the case is any different to that of a tiny little exchange/site.

Hopefully this is the last of the infancy hacks, dark net hacks will continue but I hope that the rest of us on the clear net are kept safe from it all and that everyone starts to think more carefully about their coins (who on earth would have had more than a couple of months salary on Gox!).

Keep your long trades on paper, not an exchange.

None of the pools responded.  Four of the seven developers responded.  One half-heartedly gave permission to share his response.  Three others did not give their permission.

Some responded that they couldn't freeze the coins, others that they would if the rest of the community decided to freeze the coins.

Developers, if I have shared too much of what you shared with me, please PM me and I will delete this post.  (I figure if I didn't include your name then I'm adhering to what we agreed, but if that's not how you read it let me know.)

The Bitcoin core Devs don't need to get into the middle of a fight between people and the exchanges. Such interference would look bad to as many people as it would look good. Then there would be people who would attempt to sue the core Devs for the interference.

While I never used MtGox, I also was taken in by what seemed to be their stability. Their crash is a good reminder to me that Bitcoin is FREE to use, and that means free from standard security as well as free from the banking industry's supposed security. Since Bitcoin is free for me to use without interference, if I use my freedom, I need to learn to take responsibility for my actions.

If we all had done the secure thing, if we all had transacted in small amounts so that we wouldn't lose much when failure came, Bitcoin would not have had the wild fluctuations that it has had. It would be far more stable as a medium of trade. Its foundations would be stronger, and we would have more people moving into it for buying and selling, rather than for speculating.

Keep the core Devs out of the battles. They have enough to do simply considering the technical side of things.

I think that BTC developers should feed the poor, cure all diseases and of course freeze stolen mtgox btc....

If there was a like button I would use it here.

This seems to be seriously lacking in the BTC community which is hurting it.  The "if you were so stupid as to keep your BTC in MtGox, you deserve to loose your shirt" mentality stacked on top of the silence when it comes to any attempt at justice is read by the general public as a protocol that could never be trusted.

Regulation is not the same as centralization.

Thank you!

If you do receive any responses from any mining pool I actually think it may justify starting a new topic along the lines of "I asked mining pools about freezing stolen coins and this is what they said" because I don't recall any other similar thread getting that far recently, and a lot of people are probably writing this topic off as being the same as those.

Thanks for doing that zylstra.

I have not heard back from Eligius, http://eligius.st/~gateway/contact .
I have not heard back from BTC Guild, [email protected] .
My questions to GHash, https://support.cex.io/hc/en-us , have been forwarded to the CEX.IO supervisor.  I have not heard back from the supervisor yet.

I have emailed each lead developer listed here, https://bitcoin.org/en/development .

If you have a closer connection to any of these people please ask them their opinion on the stolen coins.  Of course I would be interested to hear it.  My letter is posted below in case you would like to use it.

I will update you on any responses I receive that I have permission to share.  


When I hear/read something to that effect that is spoken/written by them.

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?

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:


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.

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

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


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:


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.

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

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

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