Different kind of attack.
Think of the analogous situation as printed currency that absolutely cannot be forged.
A thief can still steal the physical notes. Ditto bitcoins.
Little intrinsically to do with bitcoins. Though some of the philosophy behind it means there’s no deposit insurance and little regulation of the banks themselves.
But there’s nothing physical in the exchange. And aren’t all transactions logged?
In fact, if BCs are serialized, can’t they blacklist the stolen coins, like they do with banknotes? Seems crypto currency has lots of features they’re not using.
This is why I keep all of my coins inside various blocks of brick and concrete down in the sewer.
It’s more like gold. By design, there’s a finite number of bitcoins. Taking any out of circulation would be bad. Banknotes eventually make their way to a central bank where they can be removed from circulation and replaced. There’s no central bitcoin government bank, nor can they be replaced.
Also, you’d have to have everybody agree to blacklist them. There’s no central bank or government regulation. This is by design. There’s no enforcement ability.
Do bitcoins really exist though? I was under the impression that whatever bitcoins you could be said to own are a sum of the transactions you’ve in- and output. An address or transaction id could be blacklisted but the bitcoins themselves are just a quantity.
But when a bunch of gold is taken out of circulation, doesn’t the price go up usually?
The way I understand BCs work, you’d only need to get half the processing power to agree to blacklist the coins. Thieves could also amass enough processing power and take over all transactions.
Having a limited number of coins is a problem. Can’t they reverse the transactions?
Well, if national governments can squash BitCoin like a bug, then it won’t work very well as an alternative to national currencies, will it?
This is like libertarians complaining that governments have taken over the whole planet, so there’s no place on Earth you can go to live as a free man. Yes, governments have taken over the planet, that’s the whole point! Libertarians systems have to be able to work around fascists and statists and militarists, if they can’t deal with actually existing government cops and prisons and judges and soldiers and bureaucrats then they’re useless.
This is like blaming the failure of our moon base on the unfairness of gravity. Yes, it’s unfair that we can’t just jump really hard and land on the moon. Yes, it’s unfair that there are a lot of organized gangsters who call themselves governments. Sure is. So now what?
Only if the people who have received the bitcoins agree to send them back.
That implies a natural fiat currency, say dollars.
But say we’re on the gold standard. Taking gold entirely out of a gold backed currency and destroying the gold is usually a bad idea.
If you’re on the dollar, that’s not a problem. You adjust the price of bitcoins relative to the dollar. But if your currency is the bitcoin itself (or backed by bitcoins), you’ve got problems if the limited supply of bitcoins is further limited any time there’s a theft.
While I doubt we’re all switching to bitcoins over dollars anytime soon, it does pose a problem to be overcome for anybody who wants to switch away from a fiat currency to one backed by bitcoin.
I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility.
When the Tea Party embraces bitcoins…then you’ll see some orchestrating !