...Bitcoin continuing its self destruction via ultra centralization [as predicted long ago]!---
Theymos:
Edit: To be absolutely clear: I am not proposing (and would never propose) a policy that would have the goal of depriving anyone of his bitcoins. Satoshi's bitcoins (which number far below 1M, I think) rightfully belong to him, and he can do whatever he wants with them. Even if I wanted to destroy Satoshi's bitcoins in particular, it's not possible to identify which bitcoins are Satoshi's. I am talking about destroying presumably-lost coins that are going to be stolen, ideally just moments before the theft would occur.
This issue has been discussed for several years. I think that the very-rough consensus is that old coins should be destroyed before they are stolen to prevent disastrous monetary inflation. People joined Bitcoin with the understanding that coins would be permanently lost at some low rate, leading to long-term monetary deflation. Allowing lost coins to be recovered violates this assumption, and is a systemic security issue.
So if we somehow learn that people will be able to start breaking ECDSA-protected addresses in 5 years (for example), two softforks should be rolled out now:
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One softfork, which would activate ASAP, would assign an OP_NOP to OP_LAMPORT (or whatever QC-resistant crypto will be used). Everyone would be urged to send all of their bitcoins to new OP_LAMPORT-protected addresses.
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One softfork set to trigger in 5 years would convert OP_CHECKSIG to OP_RETURN, destroying all coins protected by OP_CHECKSIG. People would have until then to move their BTC to secure addresses. Anyone who fails to do so would almost certainly have lost their money due to the ECDSA failure anyway -- the number of people who lose additional BTC would be very low. (There might be a whitelist of UTXOs protected by one-time-use addresses, which would remain secure for a long time.)
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So not only is Bitcoin ok to now become PayPal 2.0 but apparently they're gonna decide to delete people's coins unless they're moved to a "safe" wallet. Potentially including their creator's, Satoshi's, coins.
Now I don't wanna piss off the guy running this forum, Theymos [way too late for that
] but in the past he has been against centralization and XT/Classic so this signals to me an entire industry shift [to centralize Bitcoin for specific bank industry use] which has come as a [direct] result of consensus2016.
IXcoin is looking more and more like the optimal defacto crypto for the people.
~ Feel the Signal!