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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Given that the doge community has tended to be relatively "nice" rather than every-man-for-himself-libertarian, is there any chance of organizing a blacklist for these coins or some such?

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I'd love to see that experiment and I'm excited to see the how the process of blacklisting would work.

What would be next? A list of "unshibeful" businesses that are blacklisted? Guns? Drugs? Alcohol?

This is the perfect experiment to see how an un-libertarian, every-man-for-every-other-man interpretation of commerce works out.

If 51% of the mining capacity of the bitcoin network decides that your coins are invalid they cease to exist until the ban is lifted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a bit heavier than that if technically identical: the coins cease to exist until 51% of miners come together again to declare that they should exist again. At which time they also might agree to pay themselves any amount of Dogecoin or flood the market.

I bring this up purely because "ban is lifted" sounds like a much more achievable thing than I believed was possible. While 51% of people might agree to blacklist some obviously illegitimate coins that harm the value of the market... it doesn't implicitly mean that they would come together again even if irrefutable evidence proved their original belief wrong.

You cannot give yourself any x-coin with a 51% attack.

You can double-spend arbitrary, though, right? Your purchasing power would be arbitrary until you lost 51% control, I suppose...

The "community" cannot blacklist anything, it's the miners. And it is very unlikely that miners with >50% of the network hashrate would agree to this, since most heavy miners don't really belong to the "community" but are just in it to mine enough to be able to sell to cover their hardware and electricity costs.

If merchants and exchanges refused to accept block rewards from miners that don't follow a certain rule set, the miners couldn't sell their block rewards.

It's a complicated game.

Yes, the "community" can with modification to the code.

This wouldn't really work, as he can just make a large number of addresses and spread the coins out across a huge web. You could theoretically track the web and all the addresses, but you might then be blacklisting companies and individuals who unknowingly accepted his coins.

Unfortunately that's the "beauty" of anonymous decentralised currency.

That's not true-- if you built it into the protocol/client, then transactions from the blacklisted addresses would simply never be accepted into the blockchain; there would not be the possibility to spread them around.

But I doubt any of the main bitcoin (clones) would ever do that.

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