Topic: Theymos: “Bitcoins Belonging to Satoshi Should Be Destroyed” - page 5. (Read 18507 times)

Me.  I can totally be trusted; ask anyone that knows me.  Hmm, unless I am unduly coerced.  Hmm, what about a multi-sig?  Gosh, it would just be so much easier if Satoshi et al would secure their coins instead of burdening the community.

Agree 100%. Down the road if brute forcing private keys becomes possible with quantum computing or other means, then countermeasures would have to be put in place to secure the blockchain. But I have a feeling that before this can/will happen, there will be a means to secure it against such attacks. I am willing to bet that 'quantum-proof' cryptography will be available and used around the same time quantum computing becomes more feasible for the masses.

Ah, I see!;
vs.
The former is not hashed, the latter is.  The hashing makes it QC-resistant.  Leaving the unhashed coins laying around is just asking for trouble.  If the original owner(s) won't act to secure these then the community takes on the responsibility.  If the community doesn't act then I don't want to hear any complaints later.

Are my coins secured with hashes or not?  If they are not then I will act to move them.  How does one determine it?

I own 16V9UivwWtp6iGsaRnWycUjZJBcDDQRmV4 (amongst others).  Two transactions sent coins to it.  Both are secured with hashing.  So, I'm ok, right?  Or are only unspent coinbase coins at risk?  I don't happen to have any coinbase coins so I don't need to worry about my own, right?

So many "whens" and "ifs" and "what ifs"!

When and if such a time (or such tech) happens, we will have the ability to secure the blockchain against such vulnerabilities.  (The bad guys won't be the only ones with access to the new tech!!)  Then a mandatory fork in client software could be required to transact on it. 

The security of the individual wallet would remain in the individuals control and realm of responsibility.  If an individual wants to keep their paper wallets or wallet.dat files stored in a way they feel is secure without converting to the new "when and if" methods until such a time they deem proper to sweep those wallets into the re-born blockchain, then so be it. 

Exactly. The leveraging on the exchanges are what affects the bitcoin price most. There are only like 15 million bitcoins in existence right now. Satoshi's 1 million is only 1/15. While the monthly volume on the exchanges will be several times way more than that.

You're basically destroying the idea of freedom to private ownership. Also you are treating bitcoin as a gift card that can expire at a time. This is not good for a currency.

do you volunteer your own bitcoins as tribute to be destroyed first

I do agree with theymos that satoshi's stash should be burned in order for the value to retain. knowing there are issues to be solved, 1M btc can add up once stolen and may plummet its value if cashed out.
I think this is even the goal of those who are trying to find out who statoshi is. 

Satoshi's stash is definitely a cause for concern. I believe that the uncertainty regarding those coins will ultimately prevent Bitcoin from achieving a mainstream status.
However I don't think it would be a good idea to just destroy them, even if the whole of the Bitcoin community were to agree to it. That would be like resorting to vigilante justice and if Bitcoin is to represent freedom then we would've failed right there.
So far I like Theymos' OP_CHECKSIG idea the best because it will pretty much force a reaction from Satoshi in case he wants to keep his coins. The drawback of course is that a lot people risk losing coins if they don't move them in time. But at least we'll know where we stand in regards to those coins.

exchanges inflate Bitcoins by hundreds of millions

actual real Bitcoins r a drop in the ocean

I'm quoting these out-of-order, apologies in advance.


I thought OP_RETURN was sufficient for creating provably-unspendable coin? If an early adopter wanted to, they could choose that option to nullify their coin, right? Perhaps it hasn't happened because if it did, it would vastly affect the price of coin today. Perhaps Satoshi or other early adopters who are holding their coin without any intention of actually spending it would rather see adoption by those with faith in a more-decentralized asset before the reality sets in and the coins are destroyed outright, thus drastically affecting price? Or perhaps, it's another ironic-and-now-embedded reference to the bailouts of 2008 as the genesis block so alludes, with each passing day a big middle-finger to the existing financial system that just as the large fiat bankers hold the keys to destroying the modern global financial system, so too does one entity now hold the keys to "destroying" the system that will eventually replace it.

I don't think anyone would propose that recovered gold from shipwrecks in the 1800s be destroyed instead of being allowed to re-enter the market. Perhaps with abandoned coins as a prize, significant advances in quantum computing would provide their own just rewards. This could be the intent of NOT making early coin provably-unspendable, though I would echo your concerns about how drastic of an effect on price this could potentially-be and would hope that these owners react accordingly. Worse still, it has always been a sort of unspoken yet lingering concern for all of us that Bitcoin is the work of a nation-state bent on usurping another by devaluing Bitcoin at a predefined time, in which case the owner nation-state would almost certainly not approve of having this early coin programmatically-locked.

We knew these risks and got involved anyway. We've known with a far more accurate estimation since SDL's blog posts in early 2013, and yet the price rose anyway, though it had fallen for a bit after the revelation.

I'm not sure that the existence of *insecure, unmoved coin* is a sufficient precedent for disqualifying coin outright. There is likely some coin that hasn't moved since before the addition of encrypted wallet.dat files that could similarly be argued to be "insecure" at some point in the future (though from the perspective of the network itself it is just as secure). Should those owners from 2009-2011 pre-wallet-encryption also eventually be forced to move their coin or lose it entirely?

I think we should wait and see. Perhaps we will see a solution arise without intervention.


This is just a nitpick, but I think it is important to distinguish between China -- the country and its people -- and the Chinese government. The pools being focused there can be somewhat distressing, but the people of China may yet embrace the "spirit of resistance" that Thomas Jefferson once hoped all Americans would have towards their own government if it became tyrannical. So, too, may the Chinese possess a healthy distrust of their own government's adoption of tyranny for the sake of liberty. I do wish they understood that Bitcoin's fungibility is just as important as its role as a medium of exchange.

Turn on blockchain.info's advanced mode and see if you can find the difference...


Safekeeping by whom? There's too much moral hazard with that.


Destroying coins is a softfork. Everyone would automatically accept it.

In many cases, this is a huge problem. For example, China could right now freeze all the bitcoins of people who haven't been ID-verified by the Chinese authorities. (Since the vast majority of mining power is in China.) The defense against this is:

 1. Improve anonymity features so that specific coins can't be tied to specific people.
 2. Be prepared as a community to immediately hardfork to a different PoW if miners do anything like this. In fact, I think that a document should be written and signed by all of the major players which would specify exactly the lines that miners must not be allowed to cross, to avoid ambiguity/chaos if it actually happens.

But in the case of deleting insecure BTC, it seems possible to me, especially if quantum computers and coins being "un-lost" start looking more like a big looming threat and less like a theoretical discussion, that there could be sufficient support for the action that the risk of any substantial hardfork effort splitting Bitcoin would be low.

---

BTW, I recently wrote an article about quantum computing, for those unfamiliar: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Quantum_computing_and_Bitcoin

Doing this would destroy the core branch forever and the devs involved would find themselves quickly replaced

In the short term, the coins would still be worth whatever they are worth now. So, at the very least, a thief will get 50+ BTC, then sell it on an exchange, then withdraw. Or send it to a bunch of sites like casinos and blow it all. He could easily get $20k USD. By the time we all figure out what happened, if a million coins move, then maybe the price will drop, but that's maybe a week or two, or even a month after the fact.

A smart cracker will not target any coins from within the first year. They'll go look for coins that were mined, maybe in 2010 or 2011 or some time after the pizza transaction. Or close to it.

If he's figured out a way to quickly crack unspent outputs, then he might have figured out how to crack re-used addresses with balances on them, since the public keys are known, and at least one transaction has been signed. It happened with some bad RNGs that were signed by Android wallets or something like that.

Much easier to target those exchanges with re-used wallet addresses, and those have more coins too. People will generally assume it was an inside job.

This sounds terribly stupid to me.
I dont see any reason to destroy them.

Those coins belong to satoshi.

All those worries about coins getting stolen..this is all still pretty much science fiction, so all those people worrying about getting their coins stolen by some big evil quantum mechanism computer machine are simply out of their mind. No need to panic, specially if you don't go around making your keys public, so if you are that worried, make a new cold wallet that has never seen the internet and store all of your bitcoin there, I guess that would do it for the next 10000 years.


Such a change will require a lot of consensus.. so nothing worry about. If consensus is reached to not delete those bitcoins, the bitcoins will remain, if there is consensus, then they will get removed, but I don't think there will ever be consensus to do this, it's too controversial.

It's amazing.  The diversity of thought, opinion, and factual knowledge on this subject truly sheds light on the direction this project has taken.  It seems that with such a diversely rich pool of adopters some novel thoughts would present themselves.  However, what I am interpreting here just reinforces why representative models of governance replace those models based on majority consensus....Is that where we're going here also?

Do we sacrifice the few for the benefit of the group, or do we hold fast for individual rights?  It's very interesting, but from which perspective was the project conceived? 

If a thieve is capable of getting those coins then a thieve should be capable to get any coin, yet if they could then they wouldnt need to do it since bitcoin would be worth nothing.

Maybe I was talking about the lost coins and they should be destroyed so thieves don't get hold of them later ?

OK, I started it and I apologize.

So, can you explain what you meant by this?


That is true for all Bitcoins.

No, the only person who can claim them is the person with the private key.  Nobody else can claim them.

I was about to answer Burt's question, but KenR already answered it. Something like that. I'm pretty sure I can find a Legendary member who has no clue too (excluding sold forum accounts.)