Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Lost coins vulnerable to theft in the future?
by
kaggie
on 14/06/2022, 15:55:51 UTC
If you can burn or lock coins for arbitrary reasons, then you have proven that you can manipulate the ledger, after which it will never be long until censorship rears its regular head.
Irrelevant arguments here because we are not talking about some "arbitrary reasons" we are talking about a serious one that would make the very thing that made bitcoin secure becoming obsolete.
It's not all about price either, in fact not preventing old UTXOs from being spent would be against the fundamentals of bitcoin where your coins are only yours to spend not everyone's.

I actually didn't understand what you were saying because I thought that such censorship, deleting, and blocking of addresses would make bitcoin obsolete.
If the arguments about censoring old coin ever succeed, then bitcoin would have already failed because it would show that bitcoin is not a long term store of value, in which case, the idealogues should move on.

It's not that any reasons for censorship are arbitrary reasons, but they are ones that I don't think will ever result in anything because the results are much more unpredictable than the scenarios in this thread. The product of old addresses being hacked is no different than them being re-engaged in by the original owners (or their inheritors), which could happen at any time. The very top thread assumes two scenarios which I think would happen in exactly the opposite fashion -- someone who has been holding onto coin for ages has little reason to sell them immediately or quickly because they have 'enough'. Their sale pressure is pretty low, so the scenario given above is unlikely. Even if such old coin are sold by hackers or original owners, then it results in a more distributed coin, which adds long term value to the network and is a necessary part for sustainability and growth.