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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Under the hood, I think that bitcoins, etc., are just blobs of text that can be saved in regular files. Probably ascii-armored, like a PGP key, correct ?

So I think that an "unhosted wallet" just refers to a blob of text in a regular file ... which is exactly how I would store bitcoins if I had any.

In the United States, this is a clear-cut free speech / First Amendment issue. In the United States I can write, or say, any number I choose to.

There's a lot of hand waving reference to magic technology when discussing things like key escrow or "encryption" or "unhosted wallets". In the end, they are protected speech and cannot be limited under any interpretation of the First Amendment.

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> First Amendment issue. In the United States I can write, or say, any number I choose to.

That is complete and utter nonsense. A child pornography video is just a blob of text, essentially a big number. And you certainly can be prosecuted both for distribution and for storing child pornography. just because you have the imagination to boil everything down through bits to a number does not mean the First amendment becomes a shield for anything. A tweet stating you want to assassinate the president is equally "just a number" and also not protected by the first Amendment.

Porn is covered under an exception. A tweet saying you merely want to assassinate the president is fine, what's illegal is inciting others to commit crimes.

Bitcoins are entries on a ledger, which you can transfer by signing a message with a key. The keys are typically a master key encoded as a 12 or 24 word seed phrase, from which the actual keys are then derived.

What this regulation is targeting isn't the holding or sharing of the keys itself, but the use of exchanges to convert between cryptocurrency and fiat (regular) money. They want to restrict/regulate (mostly monitor for now, but more regulation is likely to follow)

a) the ability to send Bitcoin that you bought on an exchange to your own wallet, i.e. your ability to get Bitcoin that you actually control yourself with said text file

b) the ability to send Bitcoin from such a wallet to an exchange to turn them into "regular money".

Not text, but stored in a binary format in a Berkeley DB (Generally only version 4.8.30). There is documentation on the formats here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet

Where it gets interesting is the so called Seed Phrase, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase in which an unlimited number of private keys can be derived. A seed phrase can 'recreate' every key in a wallet, it could be considered a form of wallet backup. In the BIP39 standard, 12 words are used from a dictionary of 2048.

Genuinely curious - can you export them to a pgp-like ascii-armored text blob for easy cut and paste, etc. ?

I have never interacted with a bitcoin or other crypto-currency ...

Yes. You can even turn them turn them a 12 or 24 word mnemonic, designed for pen and paper writing.

The words come from a standardised wordlist, providing a rudimentary way of error checking and checksumming.

At its core, a wallet is just a collection of private keys. So yes, these are easy to extract and, in the original client, there is a simple command to do just that. Or, as mentioned, you can access the BerkleyDB wallet.dat file directly. The "bitcoin" itself is never really stored anywhere in terms of state-- the chain simply stores the series of transactions between public keys up to right now and you calculate the btc state from that. The wallet.dat also typically stores cached transaction data, but it's only a local cache and not authoritative.

A bitcoin private key is an elliptic curve private key on the secp256k1 curve. OpenSSL will let you encode a valid bitcoin private key as a PEM if you wish for easy copy paste -- you would have to convert them into another format for direct usage however. eg:

openssl genpkey -algorithm EC -outform PEM -pkeyopt ec_paramgen_curve:secp256k1 -pkeyopt ec_param_enc:named_curve

There is a native format known as WIF (wallet import format) that uses ascii encoding for private keys, allowing easy migration/copy paste: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_import_format

Sure, here's a bitcoin address that's prefixed with your name.

    $ ./vanitygen -i 1rsync
    Pattern: 1rsync
    Address: 1rSYNCeAXmXY64GabjpGN3rcihFwZmcP3
    Privkey: 5JPbRtnXStQgeGAFb49JQ7f4bx1f9fJRHnV9pawxevFG58zDjGY

This should be obvious, but just in case: do not store your bitcoin at this address.

What would happen, eventually clobbered?

The Privkey field I posted is the 'private key' credential needed to manage any funds sent to the account.

By your argument, piracy of digital media and software should be 100% legal because it's just exercising first amendment rights to share text in a file (which is ultimately what any software boils down to)?

Come. On.

I don’t think that’s analogous, with cryptocurrency you generate the text file from a random number generator or rolling dice, there is no issue with copyright for private keys. The courts have already ruled that copying DVD decryption keys is allowed under free speech.

This is a deeply philosophical issue. Ideas can be encoded in text there are laws that protect ideas, but then there is rights such as free speech which are meant to protect what we say and how we express ourselves. From a socialism perspective ideas should belong to everyone, capitalism would say an individual has the right to own an idea from the set of all ideas if they discovered it, or own some text (code) from the set of all possible text.

> capitalism would say an individual has the right to own an idea

"Capitalism" says no such thing. Property under capitalism is a consequence of scarcity; property rights exist specifically because a particular good cannot be expended for two different purposes at the same time. As such, someone must decide how the property will be used, and the entity with the right to make that decision is designated the owner. Ideas lack scarcity—the same idea can be used for any number of purposes simultaneously without being used up—and consequently are outside the capitalist definition of property.

Assigning fake "ownership" privileges to ideas infringes on the exercise of actual property rights, effectively seizing private property (including capital) for public use to to implement a policy of subsidizing the creation of new copyrightable works or patentable inventions, which is an inherently socialist exercise of government power.

I never really understood this things. Thank you for clearing this up.

>By your argument, piracy of digital media and software should be 100% legal because it's just exercising first amendment rights to share text in a file (which is ultimately what any software boils down to)

Why, thank you, I didn't even have to spell it out for you. That's reasonable even if the extension to CSAM isn't.

Binary streams should not come with impllicit legal chains. It's all math.

Don't want it copied? Don't make it digital. The rest of the world shouldn't be held at gunpoint over your inability to cope with trivial reproduction of information.

>Come on. You can have this back. Use it for a post that needs it.

They aren't gonna crack down on them in the sense of speech, they are gonna tell exchanges not to give people dollars in exchange for bitcoin associated with them.

>In the United States I can write, or say, any number I choose to.

Nope, you can't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

Edit: About an unhosted wallet being a clear case of freedom of speech because it can be encoded as text; even if it was, what are you expressing? The intent to evade cryptotaxes?

I am well aware of these, of course, and they have not been tested at the supreme court where they would fail.

You'll note that one of the numbers in question[1] is published, in full, on the wikipedia page that you link to.

[1] 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

That one was everywhere at the time, it's still a trade secret, but utterly unenforceable. As you say, it's one number, Wikipedia is not publishing all of them for a reason.

I think you are making a pretty big assumption that it would fail in the supreme court. It's not like the supreme court has abolished asset forfeiture either.

Bitcoins are stored in the blockchain. The wallet stores the private key to use (spend) the bitcoin at an address.

'intellectual property' is mostly post-modern nonsense. Yet, here we are. If these numbers are property, then, the government will duely regulate it as such.

property rights are man made constructs.

intellectual property is a subset of property rights.

they both exist only because society deems their existence necessary.

Society reifies and adjudicates the specific rules surrounding "property rights", but they also derive from our cultural norms and biological instincts: everything from "Finders Keepers" to "Your Home Is Your Castle". And predictably, these root nodes of moral claims to property frequently conflict.

I strongly recommend Heller & Salzman's "Mine!" [0] as a non-ideological and layperson-accessible exploration of the history and nature of property.

[0] https://www.minethebook.com/

regulating intellectual "property" will only become increasingly difficult to protect and regulate as the technology for recording, copying, and disseminating information improves. In order to regulate intellectual "property", you need to gimp information technology with DRM.

I don't deem the existence of intellectual "property" necessary, in fact I predict its existance will become infeasable to uphold.

That's about how I feel. I think it's worth noting that humans seem to go through cycles of securitization, that makes 'all the sense in the world' in their time. But, which becomes abhorrent, or nonsensical as the fashions change over time.

I generally agree but it's more accurate to classify "intellectual property" as a completely different concept than "property rights".

>'intellectual property' is mostly post-modern nonsense.

Quite the opposite. You're either confused on the meaning of 'intellectual property' or 'post-modernism'.

>In the United States I can write, or say, any number I choose to.

Images of sexually exploited toddlers are "just numbers" too, but it doesn't seem like the DOJ buys the free speech argument.

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