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> That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously. No, it cannot. No government can issue an order to seize 47.5%
by mopsi 7y ago
> That still doesn’t address the fact that BTC can be confiscated, as I pointed out previously.
No, it cannot. No government can issue an order to seize 47.5% of everything over 10 BTC (ca 100k EUR) from a list of accounts. Third parties cannot freeze cryptocurrency accounts or rewrite their balances. That's the major innovation of distributed ledgers (blockchain).
This is a fundamental difference compared to traditional banking where account balances are just fields in a writable database.
At best, they can seize private keys that control accounts, but to achieve that, they must confiscate personal devices (phones, tablets, computers) and examine each of them with forensic tools. This is not viable on a large scale, especially when considering that private keys are easy to hide with plausible deniability (using encryption, steganography, memorization, etc).
News stories about "confiscated" cryptocurrency are nothing more than private keys found on seized computers. No-one can take control over any account by any other means.
- pmiller2 7y ago> No-one can take control over any account by any other means. I see. I suppose if the US government orders, say, Coinbase, to turn over control of someone’s account, they won’t do it? You have an example of that happening, right?
- mopsi 7y agoCoinbase has no control over any cryptocurrency accounts besides their own. Each cryptocurrency user generates a private key that becomes a wallet and is used to sign transactions. These signed transactions are then broadcast to the internet for balance keeping nodes to keep track of. They do it in a globally distributed manner (no central entity) and earn rewards for their work (like collecting a tiny fraction of the transaction as a fee). The private key is never disclosed to anyone.