Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Fork The Blockchain And Block The Seized FBI Coins.
by
augustocroppo
on 12/01/2014, 19:50:12 UTC
What if you just destroyed the hard drive or the wallet or whatever the bitcoins are stored on?

In first place, BTC are not stored anywhere. What is stored in a wallet (file) and thus in a hard drive is the private-keys which allows someone sign and validate the transference of BTC from one public-key to another public-key. In other words, the only thing stored in a hard drive is a pre-defined password which allows any user to send BTC to whatever Bitcoin address they want. With that in mind, I stated that there is not a system embed in the Bitcoin protocol which allows an user to delete the BTC already supplied. Anyone can just delete a private key in their possession, but no one can command the protocol to delete the BTC supplied.