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Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

My point is even if someone has your password there are legal routes where you can go recover your money. The bank will then do that. The blockchain is distributed. Who do you go complain to?

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That's the whole point of the blockchain. Your money is sovereign. There is nobody to call when it gets stolen, but this also means that no government or bank or agency can take your money or prevent you from being paid (see Visa/Mastercard vs Wikileaks etc)

Not true, an entity with control of >50% of the pool can. I thought such a pool exists

Even with 100% of hashpower you can't steal anyone's money

You can just threaten to reverse any transaction they ever make.

I think double spend coins as well, but don't quote me.

You can't double spend -- you would need to generate 2 conflicting tx's with the private key. Only the person that holds the money can attempt a double spend, the miners only process and include (or exclude) transactions.

You can stop them from ever spending it. You can't take it from someone, but you can stop them from using it - I doubt most people would consider that much of a difference (they still suffer the loss).

This is true if you consistently have control at every relevant point in the future, but if a malicious entity gets control for a month and then loses it to the crowd again you can spend your old funds. That's one difference. Another is that the transaction log can theoretically be moved to a new chain if some part of the crowd desires (and has been), so if a proprietary ASIC manufacturer takes control the community, or some part of it, could move to a different hashing algorithm that isn't yet targeted by ASICs, and you could spend the funds on that chain. In either scenario you've probably lost value, but not all value as originally suggested.

Can you at least explain why you think with 51% pool control you can’t double spend ? It seems while not trivial you can approve and reject transactions/ mining as you see fit

There are governments that can knock you over the head and take your wallet right after you unlock it.

They can only do that if they know who you are.

So make sure that they don't!

Oh they already know who you are. Too late to fight that fight

Of course they know my meatspace identity.

And maybe someone knows that Mirimir is meatspace me.

But Mirimir is only a semi-anonymous persona. And I don't count on being anonymous as Mirimir.

However, I've had thousands of other personas, over the years. Mostly all using some mix of nested VPN chains and Tor. Some using Mixmaster remailers as well. Many I only used for a few days, or maybe for a month.

I doubt that anyone knows all of the connections. Or even enough to trouble me substantially.

You complain to the insurance company that the exchange uses.

This is how banks deal with the potential for loosing money too, except they have a mixture of private insurance, SROs insurance and state insurance. These things added confidence to their market, centralized crypto services do this too. QuadrigaCX did not.

The bank/exchange/etc that was entrusted to protect your dollars/bitcoin/etc. FDIC insurance is indexed to dollars but insures the value of your deposits. If someone robs a bank there is no way to reverse the robbery by invalidating the physical assets they stole be it cash, gold, bitcoin keys etc. This is not a problem most cryprocurrenties propose to solve.

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