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That may be impossible - it depends how far back the problem goes: If someone stole some money three weeks ago and spent it, then any transaction descending fro
by ealloc 13y ago
That may be impossible - it depends how far back the problem goes: If someone stole some money three weeks ago and spent it, then any transaction descending from that original bad transaction would have to be invalidated too. This could conceivably be a large fraction of all bitcoin transactions since then because of the way bitcoins get 'mixed'.
In other words, most likely we would have to reset everything to the way it was before any of the bad transactions, and they might have started years ago (my impression is it was a small but long-term drain). This would be insupportable to anyone who has sold any goods since then.
Also, you don't need to persuade the miners, so much as the sellers (of goods): The miners will mine whichever blockchain on which bitcoins have value, and bitcoins have value only because people accept payment using them. In other words, your main challenge is to convince anyone selling goods in bitoin to update to the new client - the very people who would likely get screwed by reversing transactions.
- danmaz74 13y agoThis is exactly what I was thinking about, and I'm really surprised nobody else talks about it. Are we missing something?
- Mtinie 13y agoIt all really depends on whether or not the funds were siphoned out of Mt.Gox, or if they are still there in a (currently) inaccessible cold-storage wallet. If they were siphoned out -- especially over a long timeline -- I agree with you completely. The cascade effect of a rollback would be fatal (not to mention the precedent set would be...interesting, even if the Bitcoin ecosystem survived). On the other hand, if the coins never were spent, and are just sitting there because the private keys have been lost, it's more straight-forward to fix for the protocol. It certainly won't be easy, and would require a major rethinking on how to attack the problem. Also, while people affected who have coins tied up in a "lost" wallet are interested in having those coins released, I'm sure that there are more than a few people who want the opposite. Having a known condition where ~6% of the existing coins have been removed, most likely permanently, from the monetary supply means that their proportion of current holdings would go up (and, in turn, would see a corresponding rise in market value).
- makomk 13y agoYeah, there'd almost certainly be opposition. A few years ago I wrote a data recovery tool for Bitcoin private keys, and even that was enough for some Bitcoin users to start complaining to me about how people who couldn't look after their wallets deserved to lose their coins.