BurtW, you might want to consider the example of Vericoin. Vericoin had a market cap of around $6 million when Mintpal was hacked and 30% of all Vericoin was stolen. The devs orchestrated a rollback of the blockchain to cancel the theft. Despite this defeat of the thieves, the coin lost a tremendous percentage of its value in the ensuing uproar, and although it has recovered a bit since then it is nowhere near the $6M figure.
So your last bullet point, I think, is unlikely. After such a dramatic event the price would probably be permanently impaired, and be at a small fraction of its prior price for a good while. And that means there are a lot more losers than winners.
Thank you for bringing this up. This is the perfect example of exactly what I am talking about and the perfect example of why not to ever destroy coins or roll back transactions.
The reason Vericoin never recovered is that you can never trust a coin that rolls back transactions - it is the loss of trust that killed the long term acceptance of the coin, not the theft.
Theft of coins: the person who lost the coins lost, sure. The person who stole the coins gains, sure. The market reacts to the dump of coins. Then, the market rebounds back to its original value because faith in the coin itself it not lost. The exchange where the coins were stolen hopefully goes out of business since people lost all faith in its ability to keep their coins safe.
OR
Roll back transaction: the person who lost the coins gets them back, sure. The person who stole the coins gets nothing, sure. The market reacts to the loss of faith in the coin. The market never recovers and (almost) everyone has a loss.
I still think people are failing to address the topic Theymos raised, and are instead substituting their own vision for the example he was giving. People keep talking about "their" coins and not having them stolen. But in the actual example, the only coins affected are those that have been for all practical purposes abandoned - and WILL be stolen. If you care about your coins, as each of you has demonstrated, you wouldn't be falling into the category of those at risk. By all means, this whole subject should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. But it's pollyanish to think that if such a situation arose that having a huge fraction of coins fall into the hands of thieves eager to dispose of them would be a neutral or transient event.
Not true, sure there are the signature spammers who come in here and dump their shit. But ignoring them the rest of the people know exactly what this is about. They disagree with Theymos on philosophical or practical grounds.
The irony here is that, concerned about the value of your coins, many of you are staking out a position that would destroy the value of those coins if such an event came to pass.
Not true. Our concern for the long term viability of Bitcoin is exactly why we take our position.
