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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

There's an interesting point in the bitcoin forums that someone basically had to mine the entire first year or two, just to ensure the network even existed. If someone downloaded a client to play around with it and there was no network to connect to, the project would never take off.

So it's possible Satoshi ran a client or two for that purpose, which had the side-effect of mining coins.

To me, this seems like a very likely scenario. Almost required, even.

Another interesting comment- if enough miners agreed, coins from the Satoshi blocks could just be blacklisted from the network. Some irony there, eh?

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> "if enough miners agreed, coins from the Satoshi blocks could just be blacklisted from the network. Some irony there, eh?"

Well, if enough miners agreed, anything can happen, but I doubt you'd get the required majority. It would undermine the entire system.

There's previously been talk supporting blacklists for stolen coins.

I suspect it's the sort of thing that will increase in pressure if bitcoin grows much further. It wouldn't surprise me if blacklisting eventually happens in some form or another.

i have a bad feeling about that.

I've made this comment here before, but the possibility of this happening concerns me. The 51% attack is a known potential issue of Bitcoin, but the more subtle problem is that Bitcoin is essentially a sort of democracy where voting power is proportional to computing power. The miners collectively have the power to change the way Bitcoin works, and it's up to them to not abuse that power (although Bitcoin would quickly drop in value if that power was abused).

This matters for decisions like blacklisting stolen Bitcoins, because it causes deflationary pressure, making all future Bitcoins mined more valuable. Note that about half of all Bitcoins are yet to be mined, and they will all start out in the wallets of miners.

But the same attack is available on other forms of currency.

Take gold, for instance. If a majority of the people who find gold to be valuable were to agree that they should value Palladium instead and stop using gold, then gold would drop in value and palladium would take over. The people who own palladium could even go around to the gold users and bribe them with some palladium to get them to go along.

Now, there is one important difference between my "gold" example and bitcoins. With bitcoin, there are two populations: the users of bitcoin and the subset of those who are miners. For a change to bitcoin, only miners need to agree -- but that's not as much of a limitation as it seems. For instance, if all the miners formed a secret cabal and agreed to blacklist all existing bitcoins and value only FUTURE mined bitcoins, then what would REALLY happen is that someone else would step in and start mining without that policy, forming a fork in the blockchain. The entire community would wind up deciding which fork to follow. So really, what you need is a strong enough majority of the miners (and those qualified to set up as miners if they wanted to) to ensure that there is no blockchain fork. This is not all that different from my "all users of gold" example.

Gold dropped 9.4% a few days ago. That had little to do with what the majority thought instead people wanted to sell slightly more gold than people wanted to buy and the price dropped.

Ass to messing with the block chain, the real problem is a 51% attack is one that people don't know for a while, start randomly seeding bad transactions and there is no obvious point as to which where good transactions and which where bad ones. People my suggest reversing all transactions but if you traded bit-coins for stuff your now out your bit-coins and your stuff. Net result Bitcoin's probably dies.

Absolutely true. "Introduction of double-spend and other corrupt transactions because you control a significant fraction (perhaps LESS than 51%) of the mining power" is a vulnerability for bitcoin that is NOT present in other forms of value.

But "a majority of the users could redefine what is considered valuable" is a vulnerability (mentioned in the post I was replying to) of EVERY representation of value, and not a particularly interesting or realistic one.

"Cornering a market" in a commodity is a lot like a bit coin 51% attack -- it gives a lot control over the price of the commodity.

The miners or the exchanges? If you have nowhere to sell your BTC, why bother mining?

What would then prevent a small number of players with a large (near majority?) number of coins going from miner to miner requesting a "buy-in" to prevent them from being blacklisted? It seems like this sort of behavior (unless totally abhorred by the community) could very quickly poison it.

If one party controls half of any currency, the system is already broken.

Sometimes listening to BitCoin proponants is hilarious. They point out all the disadvantage of current money transfer systems and how BitCoin will solve them ("No chargebacks! No transaction fees! No-one can take your money!"). Then when you quiz them, they'll admit people'll probably build systems like that on top of bitcoins ("Well people'll probably use escrow services on top of bitcoin to prevent dishonest merchants, and eventually there'll be transaction fees from the miners"). It looks like they are even talking about removing the "no-one can take your money" aspect!

This theme occurs often in software development. Someone sees a system that is very complex, old, difficult to understand, and has some known bugs. They implement a simpler, cleaner, new system with fewer known bugs and a handful of missing features. If it takes off, the missing features are added, often by people less intimately familiar and more likely to introduce a few bugs. The cycle repeats.

You're right, of course, but it's worth noting that the current system of national fiat currencies with floating exchange rates isn't very old at all. Commodity currencies (especially metallic standards), in which the money supply is bound to a good of fixed supply, are much older and more thoroughly debugged. Bitcoin, as a virtual fixed-supply commodity, is thus built on a firm theoretical foundation.

What? Commodity currencies are not fool proof. If you find more of the commodity, your currency suffers. This happened to Spain after they started colonizing the Americas. They found lots of silver, and their economy tanked.

You havent been listening to them closely enough then. There are transaction fees in bitcoin, and always have been. The point is that they should stay low because the system as a whole does not carry the burden of chargebacks and establishing trust.

Oh yes, bitcoin has always had the option of transaction fees, i think it's 0 now? But when promoting bitcoin, people often claim there will be none, or money can be tranfered for free.

There can and there are. When you start using bitcoin (with exchangers like Mt.Gox and with the satoshi client, and community in #bitcoin-otc) you learn quickly that paying a fee is a way to get more miners to pay attention to your block, but that your tx will likely go through without any fee.

Some day it's possible that you will have to mine a block to publish your own transactions! Not likely though, there will always be people willing to take less money to do it for you. And you're both right, if you start taking away the features then it undermines the advantages that generally bring users to bitcoin. Who knows what will happen. It's a software system with majority rules.

Default fees differ between clients, but most let you override. Note typically fees are per kb of data in the transaction.

http://bitcoin.speedstats.org/

This lets you predict how long your transaction will take based on the amount sent and the fee attached. It does not consider coin age, minimum transaction fees, or kb transaction size.

As a Bitcoin enthusiast, I am just as annoyed at those people. The lack of chargebacks has its ups and downs, and for cases when the ups outweigh the down, you'll want to layer protocols on top that allow for escrow-like services (including chargebacks), which bitcoin allows, and which people already do with other currencies.

> "Well people'll probably use escrow services on top of bitcoin to prevent dishonest merchants..."

Probably? There are already escrow services for Bitcoin that heavily used.

One would think that people on Hacker News, of all places, would appreciate the distinction between "opt-in" and "opt-out".

if they blacklist coins, eventually, there would be no coins left because there is a fixed numbers of allowed bitcoins to exist apparently

That simply isn't true, it is a mathematical fallacy people often fall into when dealing with infinity.

To take an extreme example, imagine that ALL bitcoins have already been mined, and there are no more bitcoins to be found. Then imagine that they start blacklisting bitcoins at an incredible rate: HALF of all bitcoins in existence are blacklisted each year. Remembering that it is possible to subdivide bitcoins (and arbitrarily far, given minor changes to the protocol), in what year will there be no coins left?

Zeno's paradox is very clearly not the way things work in the real world, or we wouldn't be able to physically move anywhere.

You falsely assume there'd be a fixed rate of coins lost to theft. When there's 100k coins left, though, it's entirely possible that someone goes and steals all of them.

The ability to steal all of them would imply they were all in one place or a small number of places to be stolen, modulo true protocol hacks. That seems unlikely. As they get subdivided, they spread finer and finer on a per-coin basis. It would be no different than trying to steal the entire set of BitCoins today. If you think that can be done, go for it.

Keep in mind that the coins can be distributed in very minute amounts. So with 100k coins remaining in circulation, that could be billions of people that all hold .00005 of a bitcoin.

The real world has Planck's constant. Exponents can be increased indefinitely, and eventually re numbered, like the New Israeli Skekel = 1000 old Israeli Shekel.

The interesting thing about it is that if he sells those coins on the exchange, the value will substantially drop, so it's not $100mln in the bank. However, he could buy 100mln worth of items from vendors that use btc, and the vendors will sell off the 1mln btc but won't be able to get the price of the purchases back. That's assuming that if there was a big order of items and paid in btc that the vendor would sell immediately.

"if enough miners agreed" so there will be a committee deciding on which coins are valid? That defeats the purpose of anonymous, peer-to-peer nature of things.

Yes, all BTC transactions are approved by majority vote of miners.

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