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I actually think in this case it basically is. The court can say those bitcoin are his, but if he doesn't have the wallet he doesn't have the wallet. The only w

I actually think in this case it basically is. The court can say those bitcoin are his, but if he doesn't have the wallet he doesn't have the wallet. The only way to get the coins would be to introduce a hard fork that moves those bitcoins, but good luck trying to get a court to mandate every bitcoin miner across the entire world move to a specific peice of software, and then good luck enforcing it. Especially since unlocking those coins would represent about 5% of all the bitcoins ever made.

ansible 5y ago
If whoever "owns" the BTC gets the fork as desired, and then tries to sell the BTC, that will massively decrease the conversion rate to fiat money (like USD). So for everyone in the current network, it is in their best interests for those BTC to remain unspendable in a lost wallet. The only way a fork would work if the "owner" were to promise most of it to at least 51% of the current miners. Is all that correct?
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  I think any fork of this nature would erode the trust in bitcoin and destroy the value immediately regardless of what happens to the coins themselves.
  - nullc 5y ago
    I suspect it would just go unnoticed, other than to whatever extent he managed to disrupt the Bitcoin Core software project. Wright already has a fork "Bitcoin SV" that most people have just ignored.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  It is correct, but I'd add that the adversarial environment means that if 51% of miners were to collude to take some portion of the money, they'd rather collude to take all the money, which takes away the incentive for anyone to arrange a fork to do this, and if that were going to happen it would be happening all the time. What would probably actually happen is that such a fork would be obviously illegitimate to users, exchanges, etc and people would use the unforked chain deliberately, and after some hash rate adjustment and delayed block times, the forked chain, even with 51% of the hash rate, would be close to valueless. Miners don't like mining valueless chuck e cheese tokens, so their hash power would return to the broadly accepted network. This BTW demonstrates a security property of PoW that you don't get with PoS: you can't mine two networks with the same hash power, you have to pick one or the other. If bitcoin were a PoS system, validators could just stake both chains and make a riskless bet on the winning one, and even benefit from both.
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  Even if you were to bribe 51% of miners it doesn't necessarily "work". You could do this today, let's call this new fork Bitcoin CraigVision. The trouble is convincing people to value Bitcoin CV or consider it "the real" Bitcoin. But it's not obvious to me why I should value Bitcoin CV above Bitcoin just because it has more electricity being burned to mine it (after all, just because someone works harder doesn't make the product of their labor more valuable). And this altcoin would only temporarily have a higher hash rate, until those miners realize people aren't interested in buying their coins, major exchanges aren't listing it, etc. and they go back to wanting to make money by mining Bitcoin.

ansible 5y ago

If whoever "owns" the BTC gets the fork as desired, and then tries to sell the BTC, that will massively decrease the conversion rate to fiat money (like USD). So for everyone in the current network, it is in their best interests for those BTC to remain unspendable in a lost wallet. The only way a fork would work if the "owner" were to promise most of it to at least 51% of the current miners. Is all that correct?

squeaky-clean 5y ago
I think any fork of this nature would erode the trust in bitcoin and destroy the value immediately regardless of what happens to the coins themselves.
- nullc 5y ago
  I suspect it would just go unnoticed, other than to whatever extent he managed to disrupt the Bitcoin Core software project. Wright already has a fork "Bitcoin SV" that most people have just ignored.
betwixthewires 5y ago
It is correct, but I'd add that the adversarial environment means that if 51% of miners were to collude to take some portion of the money, they'd rather collude to take all the money, which takes away the incentive for anyone to arrange a fork to do this, and if that were going to happen it would be happening all the time. What would probably actually happen is that such a fork would be obviously illegitimate to users, exchanges, etc and people would use the unforked chain deliberately, and after some hash rate adjustment and delayed block times, the forked chain, even with 51% of the hash rate, would be close to valueless. Miners don't like mining valueless chuck e cheese tokens, so their hash power would return to the broadly accepted network. This BTW demonstrates a security property of PoW that you don't get with PoS: you can't mine two networks with the same hash power, you have to pick one or the other. If bitcoin were a PoS system, validators could just stake both chains and make a riskless bet on the winning one, and even benefit from both.
jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
Even if you were to bribe 51% of miners it doesn't necessarily "work". You could do this today, let's call this new fork Bitcoin CraigVision. The trouble is convincing people to value Bitcoin CV or consider it "the real" Bitcoin. But it's not obvious to me why I should value Bitcoin CV above Bitcoin just because it has more electricity being burned to mine it (after all, just because someone works harder doesn't make the product of their labor more valuable). And this altcoin would only temporarily have a higher hash rate, until those miners realize people aren't interested in buying their coins, major exchanges aren't listing it, etc. and they go back to wanting to make money by mining Bitcoin.