Topic: Should miners collude to steal funds from wallet confiscated by US government? - page 9. (Read 12919 times)

By the way, the feds did set up their own bitcoin address and moved the SR funds into there. They were apparently able to do that because they imaged the server and the coins were in hot wallet. They don't seem to have DPR's probably-gigantic cold wallet, and if he hid it well enough they never will.

Actually, more like everyone's Bitcoins become worthless at the whim of an oligarchy.  As soon as the Gang of Four or whoever decide they don't like you, *poof* your Bitcoins are gone.

Never mind that the whole "stealing from the FBI" idea is just insanely stupid for practical reasons so obvious they need not be outlined.

I doubt most people who voted Yes meant the mining pool ops should steal the coins into their own pockets. Obviously few people would get behind that. The idea would of course be to make the funds immovable, effectively the exact same as stealing the funds and distributing them to every bitcoin holder in proportion to how many they now hold. The money goes permanently out of circulation and everyone's bitcoins become that much more valuable since they are that much more scarce.

Hence it is possible and it IS necessary to explain why it's a horrible idea.

It only takes one "traitor" to accept the transaction and with a big enough fee someone with a block mining capability will do it.

SInce the fund is >25kBTC a fee of 25 (one block reward) would probably be sufficient.

Blacklisting will not work that well obviously. Not only the feds will have to play by Satoshi's rules, we have too...

In the mean time, enjoy the new twitter for small donations service they have arranged for us, we all have to chip in in these times of hardships and defaults.

https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX?offset=50&filter=0

Bitcoin should remain what it is now:
a decentralized, neutral and fair currency.
The network shouldn't try to play the judge in the world. People, organizations and governments are playing their own games.
The Bitcoin network should just keep his own rules. Who owns the private key, owns the coins. Simple.

Excuse me if I disagree with you, but I don't think they simply gained access to the wallet where the 26,000 (or 27,000) bitcoins used to seat. That wallet was created on October 2nd, the same day SR was shut down. And it wouldn't be very smart to hold on the bitcoins in that wallet since they don't know who else got the private key for that. Most likely they created a wallet on their own (probably offline) and then moved all the bitcoins from the wallets they could grab from DPR (as shown by the big transactions pointing to that particular address right after its creation). Looking forward to knowing how did they manage to have access to those wallets in the first place and obtaining the private keys.. DPR himself provided them? The Agents found them somewhere, maybe in the form of paper wallets? Keylogger in his laptop?

How would miners obtain the ECDSA private key to this address then?

Please explain.

Still in their what? 

The day this happens is the day I quit bitcoin.

Glad to hear it's not really possible anyways.

Possible or not, would you like to give back money to a person whose actions are considered a crime basically in all jurisdictions around the world? I would not..

If your reply is yes, what about future seizures that we will likely see (for different crimes)? Who will judge what must be returned? YOU? Will you tell us on the base of YOUR judgement what is a crime and what is not?

Don't worry, FBI will order a mass from BFL and set up their own mining pools to transact funds, the government is close to shutdown and they need some extra income

.gov might have 0.25% of all bitcoins at the moment. If they get control of the rest of the purported DPR bitcoins they might control 5% of all bitcoins. But so what?

- If they never do anything with those coins then that's equivalent to someone forgetting their password to their encrypted private key = lost bitcoins. The remaining bitcoins are worth more.

- If they wholesale liquidate their bitcoin holdings to fiat, well good riddance. Bitcoins out of control of .gov and back in general holdings/circulation.

- If they try to use their bitcoin holdings to "manipulate the market" to produce instability and promote reduced confidence, well sure they could do that. Might cause a lot of chaos for some time, but the very action of doing so gradually whittles away their holdings by way of miner transaction fees and/or exchange fees. Eventually, the coins go back into general holdings/circulation and out of their hands.

I can't see any scenario where this situation makes any difference in the long run.

I also don't see any evidence that .gov actually has exclusive control of the private key(s) that controls the 27,000 bitcoins. Think about it. Every report about this is consistent with them simply knowing the public address of the 27k coins, nothing more. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary either in the news or in blockchain activity.

Do they actually have control of the private key(s)? Dunno. Does it make any difference in the long run? As per the above, I don't see how.

Remember that the structure and therefore dynamics of bitcoin is fundamentally different than unbacked, centrally controlled fiat currency. If a chunk of bitcoins is never ever circulated/transacted/exchanged, it is by definition economically irrelevant (save for the boost in value it gives other bitcoins). If it is circulated/transacted/exchanged, then it must eventually be diffused into general circulation simply by virtue of the fact that it can't be forged/debased, and there is a 21M bitcoin hard limit.

You are changing the topic.

The IT that is being discussed is miners "colluding to steal funds from wallet confiscated by US government".

That is NOT possible.

The IT you have put forth:


Does not involve stealing from the wallet, it simply forces the wallet to continue to hold on to the funds indefinitely.

The SR news is going to be an afterthought in the next few weeks. No point.

No, not steal it.

It would be funny to see all the major pools refuse to include any transactions to/from that address though... make them wait days/weeks for a confirmation

Where's the I'm a potato choice?

No. The US government seizing a wallet is just fine. The guy who ran SR was stupid and his stupidity cost him those bitcoins. Thats life. Thats money.

It IS possible. If 51% of the miners decided to reject blocks that spends coins from that address, then coins from that address won't confirm

FBI can steal, seize, buy, use all the coins they want for whatever purpose they see fit!!!


Bitcoin is a currency, if miners start to politicize their hashing power, Bitcoin is no longer money, it becomes a coupon or a wager for hacktivism, political correctness. Not a bad idea, but you can no longer call it a currency.

It's the same as the way banks work now: We do not have any costumer confidentiality, and you funds can be seized without any notice or legal means to fight such a ruling.

So it could be nice if "we" could seize funds based on majority, but that would defy the purpose of Bitcoin.  

 

Wait so they will sell them at a very low price?!?