It is absolutely evil. It proposes that the collective has a greater claim on one's bitcoin than the owner himself.

If there is a risk of early hashless-address bitcoin being stolen by advances in cryptanalysis, the only party that has a legitimate right to manage that risk is the owner of those bitcoins.

Fucking period.

I can hardly believe all y'all covetous crass craven cretins are even entertaining the notion. Or publicly admitting to such an offense.

The problem is you are responding to the bogus OP, while the rest of us are, more or less, dealing more accurately with theymos' position:


Maybe if I repost this a dozen more times people will stop reacting to the OP?

In context, people would have plenty of opportunity and warning - as much as can be arranged - to take action to update their coins. Destroying the non-updated coins would be a last-ditch effort before they became vulnerable to theft, only affecting coins that no one cared enough, or knew about, to update them. The choice here is between destroying coins or letting thieves have them, not a choice between letting an owner keep them or lose them. The original owner would be losing them one way or another at this point anyway.

People are being really dumb about this, because of the OP. I had a similar reaction at the outset, but I hope once people grasp the context they'll stop attacking a caricature. There are lots of things to be concerned about in the bitcoin ecosystem. Losing your coins because theymos or anyone else is plotting to destroy them is not one of them.

You are asserting a false equivalency. We can indeed move those willing onto a new cryptographic underpinning without stealing the funds from those who would prefer not to move their coins.

Yes. I forget the specifics, but I seem to recall it being somewhere in the 3-5 year range.

I understand jbreher's philosophical position and agree.

I would also like to reiterate my pragmatic position.  The worst case scenario is that about 1M (yes I pulled that number out of my ass) coins get stolen by an entity who has access to and pays for a QC to break all the addresses.  Then this party dumps them all on the market hoping to sell them all before the price of BTC tanks due to everyone noticing the theft.  Of course the theft and dump would be noticed.  The price would crash.  Since they are trying to dump all those coins at once they will most likely get caught.

Those of us who do not panic will buy up coins at the bottom and ride them as they price recovers.

All the remaining QC vulnerable coins are moved to new QC hardened addresses by those that either sell them in the panic or move them for safety.

End result:

Culprits probably caught.
A bunch of people panic and lose a lot of money.
Another bunch of people take advantage of the buying opportunity and make a lot of profit.
The price recovers once the dust clears and all/most the coins are on QC resistant addresses.

And that is the worst case scenario if we simply implement the new QC resistant addresses when needed and drop this whole idea of destroying coins.

Another historical example that comes to mind is the Great Depression. A large fraction of banks failed in the U.S., with depositors losing all their money. In the aftermath of that disaster safeguards such as the FDIC were instituted, insuring the funds of individuals in bankrupt banks so that people no longer lost their savings when a bank went under.

Despite this extremely successful safeguard, for the rest of their lives huge numbers of people flat out refused to entrust banks with their savings. I was a financial planner for a bit back in the early 90's and heard many accounts of how older people who remembered that era were still, right up to the 90's, refusing to trust the banks or deal with them.

So the notion that a QC breach and subsequent theft of a million or millions of bitcoins would be a transient event strikes me as completely contrary to historical example on two counts. On the contrary I think it would deeply scar people's psyches, even if they rationally "knew" that the issue had been fixed with new algorithms, etc.

Well in this case, theft of the contents of that wallet will probably lead to in the worst case, the death of btc. I'm not talking about releasing millions of BTCBTCBTC in the market I meant the trust over bitcoin's security. IMO that wallet's private key is long lost and in the case a theft would occur it would mean there's a loophole in the network.

Yes...It probably would effect the exchange rate.  However, if the controlling premises of the project were violated, then that would damage it more.  The vast majority of users moved to bitcoin because of the belief that no governing organization had the power to manipulate the ledger.  If it came to pass one day that ledger entries could be removed at any given time, then committing any type of resources to the security of the ledger would be meaningless.  The ledger should be locked down and only those that control the private key should have the power to manipulate the funds on the ledger....period.  If a hacker got my private keys, then they have the power to move my coin according to the rules.  If my private keys were somehow compromised, that's my problem....They're my keys, it's my coin, so it's my responsibility....not anybody else's.

To say it bluntly, the system would be broken and meaningless if any group (government <=> community<=> third party) had the power to erase entries on the ledger.  It was intended to be immutable and that is evidenced in the very first block with Satoshi's citation: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." That was placed there to signify the date of the first entry in a chain of immutable entries. Think about what that means. Nobody (even if it's EVERYBODY) should have the ability to prune the ledger for any reason at any time....forever. That would be an attack on the system!

Consequently, if the chain could be pruned at will, then that removes the huge potential of using the block chain to secure patents, record contracts, time lock funds, test reputation, validate identification....etc  It's not just a question of how many dollars one can exchange for their bitcoin on the market at any given time....it's much larger!  Contrary to popular belief, the block chain is far more valuable then it's measure in fiat!