Hacker News Reader

Comment by popopobobobo | Hacker News Reader

Well, same thing goes to paper note forgery.

Except that, for the moment, paper note forgery is illegal but creating "extra" crypto coins doesn't seem to be.

And paper notes have the unfortunate characteristic of being.. paper.. the risk:reward logic is much different if you can pick your own jurisdiction to operate from and hide behind 7 proxies. It's also a very modern business model to avoid big capex expenses like printers and special paper.

You're never beyond the reach of a civil suit. If you identify yourself with the scheme and you're in the same country where there's adoption, you could be easily targeted.

Plus, the language in 18 U.S.C. § 1030(e)(2) (courtesy of CFAA) refers specifically to "any computer, when [it affects] use by or for [a] financial institution." And later it mentions "...affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication...". This statute is one that gives so much leeway to prosecutors that it's frequently abused.

I would really like to see this happen. Without an EULA, is it even possible?

Perhaps the next generation of cryptocurrencies can have a simple EULA that prohibits exploitation and can be used to firewall off stolen coins.

Uhhh, no. The whole point of cryptocurrencies is that they are permissionless.

Government censorship of coins or transactions is an attack vector, not a feature.

An EULA ("End-User License Agreeement") has to do primarily with copyright (17 USC [1]). As such it's pretty much orthogonal to the criminal statutes related to this act of "misusing" cryptocoins.

> next generation of cryptocurrencies can have a simple EULA

This is anathema to the nature of cryptocurrencies, all (?pretty sure all that matter anyways) of which have Open Source implementations.

Really, most cryptocoins which are worth anything have already had a big market cap "bounty" that has effectively proven their safety.

We don't need a EULA. Like I said, you could maaaybe sue for damages. Unfortunately there's no easy way to undo the impact to a coin's reputation once it's shown to have a weakness like this. Even once the bug's patched and the nodes all get back on board, exchange rates will suffer for a long time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_17_of_the_United_States_...

You are getting attacked for poor wording. It's reasonable (and there is precedent) for something like a blockchain fork that voids the value of bad coins. You'd need some implementation of majority vote, though (a jury of your peers, weighted by hashrate?)

TOR + Shapeshift

or in the case of Zcoin just come back into the clear chain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com