“Transfer your bitcoin to me or I’m going to hit you with this board with a nail in it.”
Eh, forget it.
Of course, there ARE cases of con artists effectively stealing land by manipulating the system. It’s one of the reasons you are supposed to buy title insurance.
The thing is, you can manipulate blockchain records by scamming people into giving you keys. Some guy on Twitter was complaining that someone stole one of those expensive monkey pictures from him through some underhanded online means. Now the other guy has the monkey NFT and buddy can’t get it back. You can steal things that are “in the blockchain” through any number of methods.
At its most fundamental level, land ownership is a government fiction. You own land because some government bureau or judge says you own the land. If the bureau or judge said that someone else owned the land, you wouldn’t own it any more. Simple as that.
There is some sort of plausible crypto-anarchist future where some crypto network has an enforcement arm. Most versions of that seem like a dystopian hellscape to me, and I don’t think it’s super likely, but eroding and replacing the power of governments is an actual stated goal of at least some crypto visionaries.
I can sorta see a system of mob justice working on a small scale. If the blockchain says I own a house at 123 Fake St but squatters have moved in and are also claiming to own it, then volunteers who follow the blockchain could come enforce it. But aside from the obvious downsides of vigilante justice, you could get into situations where competing blockchains with their own armed mobs behind them disagree on who owns a certain parcel of land.
Once a group of people band together and agree to use a blockchain to track ownership, there’s really no difference between that scenario and a group of people using PKI to do the same thing. Have them elect someone to be the keeper of the root cert(s), distribute public and private keys to all citizens, and require deed transfers to be digitally signed.
How is that different from ownership of anything else?
True, although land is subject to far more record-keeping than just about any other piece of property. With other stuff, the general assumption is that whoever is holding it, owns it, but with lands, records are everything. You could live halfway across the world and never seen the real estate in your entire life, but if some government office somewhere says you own it, it’s yours.
Which is why in most places where there is private land ownership, the society has devolved the bearing witness on who holds the land to one entity, and what better than the body politic, which already has the power of enforcement.
Land and unmovable edifications are even an entire different legal category of property than movable chattels.
Personally, my hypothesis is that Bitcoin was actually invented by the FBI, NSA, or some similar government agency, as a way to make it easier to track transactions among ne’er-do-wells. The amount of effort needed to make Bitcoin truly anonymous is staggeringly impractical, and the actual use case makes it much more traceable than gold, gems, stolen artwork, or other traditional underworld currencies.
It’s been a while since I looked at it and I don’t remember the specifics, but I was reasonably convinced by some forensic text analysis a few years ago that suggested that the original Satoshi papers and code commits were likely written by 2-3 people, one of whom was in the Americas and one in Europe.
I tend to believe that one of them was Hal Finney.
I think it’s very unlikely that this was the brainchild of some government agency.
Some methods are downright hilarious. Imagine trying to report this to the authorities.
Correct, but up until a few years ago, the FBI informed us of that same fact- 80% Bitcoin was blackmarket and criminals. Now the buying and selling is mostly, as you say- a gamble/investment.
Still, when something actually changes hands via BC, it is almost always illegal.
Hm, I was not aware that that sort of analysis had been done.
The first bitcoins would have been very easy to mine, and it’s presumed that the first n of them would have been mined by the inventor(s). What’s the transaction history look like for those early coins? That is to say, the wallets they were transferred to, and any wallets those wallets transferred to, and so on. Presumably some of those wallets belong to known individuals (besides Finney).
The original coins were presumed to have been mined by Satoshi and have not moved in over a decade. It would be major news if any of the original coins ever moved.
Some are known (but not by me personally). I’m sure there’s an annotated early blockchain explorer somewhere.
Finney received the first bitcoin transfer from Satoshi. So it seems likely he knew who Satoshi was (or who the other people in control of the Satoshi persona/wallets/private keys were), but Hal Finney is no longer with us.
I must have fallen into a wormhole, how is this reality?
Beats me but people are paying $250,000 and up for the monkey pictures.
If you want one, of course, you can just right click on it and save it on your computer for free.
OK but when I buy a stock or mutual fund, I can evaluate the investment based on the NAV, earnings per share and other well-understood metrics. On what basis are people “investing” in bitcoin? I get the impression that people just think it will be worth more tomorrow.