13 ms·

OK, I bid $50 to recover Satoshi's original account. Presumably he/she/they won't respond and I'll get a million bitcoin. More generally, you'd want to make sm

• magnamerc 7y ago
  In their implementation, it appears you'd need to create an account by calling the contract https://github.com/pickhardt/escrovery/blob/master/contracts/Escrovery.sol https://github.com/pickhardt/escrovery/blob/master/contracts... So it wouldn't work with existing accounts/addresses.
  • rtkwe 7y ago
    That just moves the problem away from existing accounts/wallets like Satoshi's without really affecting the logic for future large inactive accounts.
• semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  The big problem AFAICT is, how does the account holder get notified? If you have a deterministic link between the account holder and e.g. an email address, you can just do normal recovery. If the recovery attempt gets posted to a public place, then HFT-style actors can arb the system by bidding 99.99% of the holdings in the account, for all accounts everywhere.
  • jrpt 7y ago
    Q - What about front-running the challenge? ("HFT-style actors") A - It uses a two-phase commit and reveal procedure to prevent front-running, like was used with name registration on Namecoin.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
    1. Bid 20% of the value for your account, pretending that you lost the key. 2. HFT-style actor bids 21% (or 99%, or whatever). 3. Resolve all challenges because the key wasn't actually lost, get your original bid back, and get the actor's bid.
    • sterlind 7y ago
      Seems like this is the only solution that works, since it makes it a zero-sum game. I like it, good braining. The resulting cat-and-mouse game would double as a replacement for SatoshiDice. Also, it'd let the network clean up dust and recover money sent to invalid addresses.
    • semi-extrinsic 7y ago
      It's a good strategy. But then you need there to be a stable equilibrium state that doesn't cost people too much money, not sure if the present system has that?
  • thinkloop 7y ago
    If you enabled this feature you could have a process check for you at an interval.
  • fastball 7y ago
    It's posted to a public place, and you just have a notification service that you can sign up to. "When this public address gets bid on, send an alert to this email and phone number".
• gumby 7y ago
  Large amounts of "hoarded" money causes a deflation, already a structural issue with a system like bitcoin, and can compound itself by reducing liquidity. In fact that was the bigger, more dangerous consequence of the 2008 financial crisis. So when I saw opposition to the bailouts I was annoyed: not because those opponents' arguments were necessarily wrong (some were, some weren't) but because mostly even the people whose theory was correct were working about the wrong problem.
  • tuesdayrain 7y ago
    > Large amounts of "hoarded" money causes a deflation, already a structural issue with a system like bitcoin It feels wrong to call deflation an issue with bitcoin when that is arguably the main reason anyone buys it.
    • Retric 7y ago
      The problem is people buy but rarely actually use bitcoin. This means the price collapses whenever a major holder tries to cash in. The basic math is you only get a net ROI across all users when someone derives some value from the act of using bitcoin. As a currency that’s either from efficient transactions or as a stable store of value. Otherwise it’s an inefficient pyramid scheme where case inflows = cash outflows - mining costs. PS: By contrast bonds can retain a high percentage of their value after a massive sale because they become more appealing as the price drops as they have some underlying value.
    • Nasrudith 7y ago
      Well frankly that in itself should be be a huge red flag to the buyers as it doesn't add up. Everybody who does the math gives stock investors shit for doing worse than random strategy but then you see what the amateurs do when they play at "investing" (really speculation but it is considered rude to call it what it really is) like beanie babies or baseball cards. And even they are geniuses compared to those who try lotto tickets, race tracks, and slot machines.
  • thinkloop 7y ago
    Why is it a structural issue? Decimal places can be added if it's a question of having tradeable units, and over time avg losses will be predictable and not affect price much.
• mehrdadn 7y ago
  Regarding adverse possession, do you know what the justification is for such a heavy-handed approach? The theory I see mentioned there is: > Because of the doctrine of adverse possession, a landowner can be secure in title to his land. Otherwise, long-lost heirs of any former owner, possessor or lien holder of centuries past could come forward with a legal claim on the property. But I don't see why they wouldn't exclude the actual owner from this and limit it to just former owners/heirs/etc... and frankly it seems even those should only have to go through this process once before they're recognized as the current owners and not have to put up with this possibility again.
  • crooked-v 7y ago
    You mistakenly assume that the actual owner can always be identified. Part of the point of adverse possession law is to moot cases of "the McCoys and the Hatfields both claim they owned this land 100 years ago and nobody can offer substantive proof as to which is right (and in the meantime the Johnsons have been living there for six generations)".
    • mehrdadn 7y ago
      Well then why not limit it to cases where there's no proof? I seriously don't see why someone with proof of ownership losing their property is necessary to solve any other problem.
      • afiori 7y ago
        Because you can have many concurrent proofs of ownership. For example someone sells a land twice, the first buyer leaves for 20 years and them come back with a better proof of ownership than the farmer that worked there 19 years.
        • mehrdadn 7y ago
          But in your case the second buyer has proof too. The law says they still own it even if they don't have proof and even if the first one does. Why is that necessary?
• mrb 7y ago
  «Presumably he/she/they won't respond and I'll get a million bitcoin» Well, presumably Satoshi intended to abandon his keys, therefore they wouldn't have used the scheme in the first place. In general I think the scheme would be more useful with a long claim period, eg. the original owner could be given a month, or more to claim back his account.
• darawk 7y ago
  It seems like you could solve the 'small bids' problem by having a minimum bid size. That bid size could be proportional to the value of the account. E.g. the minimum recovery bid for an account is 5% of it's value. EDIT: In fact, why not make it a huge percentage of the account value. Even 100%. If you had to bid 100% of the account value to recover it, almost nobody who wasn't the real account owner would take that risk. And the real account holder, being that they knew for sure they would get it back, could presumably find a way to raise money from friends/family/loans to acquire enough capital to make the bid. EDIT2: In second fact...why not make the lockup period adjustable based on the size of the bid relative to the account value (within limits)? If you bid 50% of the account value, you wait 2x the lockup period. If you bid 200%, you wait 1/2 of the lockup period. You'd need to have a hard minimum lockup of say, 1 month. But in this way, if you were the true account owner, you could bid way more than your account value to get it back pretty quickly, while also ensuring that people that couldn't raise as much capital could get their money back eventually.
  • muzani 7y ago
    It still doesn't solve the problem that you could presume Satoshi is dead, and bid a million dollars. Odds are better than the startup lottery. I guess there has to be a service that monitors if someone is brute forcing the system.
    • fastball 7y ago
      If someone is dead and no one else is going to get the coins otherwise, what exactly is the harm in that scenario?
      • jon_richards 7y ago
        You are putting a huge incentive on DOXing people. If you know when an account holder dies or goes on vacation and others don't, you can take all their money.
      • Rebelgecko 7y ago
        I would hate to be in a situation where anyone could profit billions of dollars if I die or can't access a computer. People have certainly been murdered for less money than that.
• kazinator 7y ago
  Satoshi didn't participate in a system featuring an implementation of "escrovery". See 4.3.
• blue_devil 7y ago
  Off topic, but thanks for the reference to adverse possession. Watched a video about a restored stone house in a ghost village in the Italian Alps, and the buyers had to hunt down the owners who had abandoned their houses/land more than a century ago to emigrate to the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB3e8xwu_Do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB3e8xwu_Do