Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 25957. (Read 26608261 times)

Jorge just described cash.
And Alex Jones is just soooo retarded I can't watch.

Excellent summary, agreed on the main points.

But it's also at the core of why I am so happy to have seen Bitcoin emerged - it's at the center of a huge social experiment, the question: how much central guidance do we need or want vs. how much can we replace the authority with decisions based on personal responsibility.

The most hard core libertarians here are (at least in words) violently anti-government. They are also the ones who see Bitcoin absorbing basically the entire money supply. They do away with legal 'property' then, in your terms.

I don't follow their logic.

However, I also don't follow yours. In your view, only 'property' matters. 'Possession', which would be extensionally indistinguishable from 'property' if you would truly be the master of your own affairs, doesn't seem to play a role in your world. I know you're not a naive supporter of an all-powerful, purely well meaning government, so I'm sure you understand that there is value to raw possession of your capital (if for no other reason so you can send a donation to Wikileaks and not have it blocked by Paypal or Visa).

Which is why I'm interested in, and a supporter of Bitcoin: Not because I necessarily believe it will succeed, but because I want to find out if - and to what degree - it succeeds.

Note that the verdict there was based on the fact that the current owner of that physical note acquired it by legitimate means in good faith, so the court had a good argument to decide that that physical note was no longer the victim's property.   The victim of course still retained the right to get the amount of 20£ (not that physical note) back from the thief, if he would ever be identified; in which case the government would take that amount from the thief's possessions, in whatever form they would find it, and return it to the victim. 

Ideally the same should happen in bitcoinland: if a hacker steals one bitcoin from you, and buys a megapizza with it, you should be able to ask the government to hunt down the hacker, and take one bitcoin (not THAT bitcoin), or equivalent dollars, from HIS possessions (not from the pizza parlor's possessions)  and return it to you.

But, in reality, you will not even be able to prove to the police that a theft took place.

Explanation

Our favorite crazy crypto anarchist girl on alex jones's InfoWars

Do you know of any case?

Precisely!

One fundamental flaw of  cryptocoins (that supportes consider a feature) is that they are intended to eliminate the notion of "property" for money, and leave only "possession" instead.

You have "possession" of something if you physically can use it or dispose of it as you like.

The thing is your "property" if, and only if, the  government thinks you should have possession of it, and you can get his cops and courts to get it.

If a thief steals your car, it becomes his possession; but it is still your property, because the government thinks so, and is expected to take the car from him and give it back to you, by force if needed, once he is found.  If your tenant stops paying the rent and refuses to leave, the house is still your property because the government thinks so, and will help you get the guy out.    If a hacker empties you bank account, he may get possession of the money, but that money is still your property -- only because the government thinks so.  If you fail to pay taxes by the due date, you retain possession of that money, but it will be property of the government -- just because they think it is.

There is no way to define propeprty without reference to some government.  If there is no government, there is no property, only possession; and when something gets stolen from you, it becomes the thief's possession, and that is it.  YOU (and your friends) may think that it is still your property, but the thief (and his friends) will disagree; what then?  

By design, cryptocoins (as the libertarians see them) are meant to be impossible for any government (or any other entity) to take away from their possessors.  But then, by design, no government (or any other authority) can enforce any property rights on cryptocoins.  (Indeed, early adopters had hoped that the government would be unable even to discover who has possession of the coins; and now that bitcoin has been found to be inadequate in this aspect, they  are turning to more sophisticated "truly anonymous" altcoins.)  

Therefore, there is no concept of "property" in the realm of cryptocoins.  Only "possession".

The notion of "property" as distinct from "possession" is very old; it may have been invented when humans adopted agriculture and settled down, abandoning the "share the catch" economy of nomadic hunter-gatherers.  It has become such a basic feature of society that people seem to forget what makes it work.  

Do we really want to eliminate the concept of "property" with regards to money?
  
(PS. And then there is the misleading use of "possession" instead of "knowledge" when talking about keys; but that is another issue.)

Careful mentioning the chinese, you might wake the megatroll.

Did someone turn on a mini willy bot?

Jorge, here is a study of an important case involving the theft of bank notes and the Royal Bank of Scotland.  This case illustrates pretty clearly why fungibility of a currency takes precedence over being able to recover stolen currency.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2260952

There is no dilemma here - it is design.

Explanation

So just do the same in case your bitcoin is stolen.

You go to the police and hope that they can catch the thief and get your coins back.
 

i say this and i feel victime to scam myself, i lost 5BTC back in the day on what should have been an oboives scam, 100$ nuts.com gift card for 50$.

but also i bought a graphic card it didnt work i sent it back and the seller sent me back my coins...

the FBI stole all of SR users funds and sold it back to the market at 500% higher then they were worth when originally stolen.

it is not for bitcoin to say what is fair and what is not, bitcoin is completely neutral, and the fact that these events happened and it didn't destroy bitcoin itself is a testament to bitcoins unshakeable core values / indifference to silly human "morality".

for the first time in history, history cannot be rewritten at a whim, this is epic, this is bitcoin!!!

I wager we bounce back to ~550 before resuming downtrend.

if people could reverse TX for wtv reason, bitcoin wouldn't be as cool, and i probably wouldn't be a buyer.

This is unsolvable. Please ponder about the definition of 'stolen' in a system where property is defined by 'knowledge of a key'.
There is no way to mathematically demonstrate that a transaction, for example, was fraudulent. Or that if two people know the same key then one is a rightful owner (whatever that means) and the other is not.

I have some sliver coins got stolen. Please teach me how I could recover them.

Maybe... But the cryptocurrency principle of offline generation of key/address pairs so distinct from the traditional models that it  is hard to compare the risks.  It removes some weakeness but adds others.

For example, consider the risk that a malicious version of a popular wallet software will choose the keys from a small set known to the thief (with, say, only 2^30 possibilities).  There is no test that can reveal the weakness of those keys, and the probability of a collision would still be very small. The malicious code can erase itself after some time, leaving no trace of its action.  Such a malware may run undetected for months, providing thousands of users with weak keys; until the thief strikes and empties all the compromised addresses at once.  This attack will work even on computers that are isolated from the internet, and could hit cold wallets as easily as hot ones; so the damage could be quite substantial.

(The wallet software itself could be tested after each release by generating a few billion keys and looking for collisions; but the malware could be programmed to detect intensive use, or to generate weak keys only in special situations -- such as in machines with a specific range of IP addresses, or in a certain range of dates -- that the test setup may not satisfy.)

4f

Indeed, there seems to be a fundamental dilemma there.  Satoshi solved the problem of secure trustless e-payments, but there is still no solution for the problem of recovering stolen coins without spoiling that primary goal.