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