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> Once you discover that you are in possession of cryptocurrency, you can simply send it directly to a government-controlled blackhole address Previously you s
by greyface- 5y ago
> Once you discover that you are in possession of cryptocurrency, you can simply send it directly to a government-controlled blackhole address
Previously you said I had to destroy the key. When is key destruction necessary and when is transfer to government necessary?
What if the transaction to my address is timelocked to 5 years in the future? Does that create any custody responsibilities on my end between now and 5 years from now when it becomes spendable and I can surrender it to the government?
What if I'm sent $50,000 worth of "dust" outputs that are only spendable by paying a $49,500 miner fee? Do I really need to pay miners to incur $49,500 worth of carbon emissions in order to cleanse my secp256k1 private key of $500 worth of bitcoin-ness so that I may continue using it in peace?
> Child pornography is the classic example. Any arbitrary sequence of bits could in principle be child porn expressed in some highly unusual binary format, and yet somehow the legal system has successfully avoided criminalizing the possession of arbitrary random numbers
This is true only because the "child pornography-ness" of the data is a property of the data itself, even if it's in an obscure format. Any arbitrary cryptographic key can be imbued with "cryptocurrency-ness" by anyone else, which means that revealing your non-cryptocurrency public keys now exposes you to risk, as long as some cryptocurrency out there uses the same type of public key.
If we're dead-set on banning it, why ban "possession" instead of use? If it's illegal to send cryptocurrency, but still legal to "possess" it, a lot of these problems go away. Making it illegal to sign a bitcoin transaction is a lot simpler than creating a new class of illegal number, and seems like it would be just as effective at ending the behavior it's trying to end. Maybe even better at it, since it would not incentivize additional "surrendering coins to government" transactions.