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by echelon 3393 days ago
I would really like to see this happen. Without an EULA, is it even possible?

Perhaps the next generation of cryptocurrencies can have a simple EULA that prohibits exploitation and can be used to firewall off stolen coins.

3 comments

Uhhh, no. The whole point of cryptocurrencies is that they are permissionless.

Government censorship of coins or transactions is an attack vector, not a feature.

An EULA ("End-User License Agreeement") has to do primarily with copyright (17 USC [1]). As such it's pretty much orthogonal to the criminal statutes related to this act of "misusing" cryptocoins.

> next generation of cryptocurrencies can have a simple EULA

This is anathema to the nature of cryptocurrencies, all (?pretty sure all that matter anyways) of which have Open Source implementations.

Really, most cryptocoins which are worth anything have already had a big market cap "bounty" that has effectively proven their safety.

We don't need a EULA. Like I said, you could maaaybe sue for damages. Unfortunately there's no easy way to undo the impact to a coin's reputation once it's shown to have a weakness like this. Even once the bug's patched and the nodes all get back on board, exchange rates will suffer for a long time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_17_of_the_United_States_...

You are getting attacked for poor wording. It's reasonable (and there is precedent) for something like a blockchain fork that voids the value of bad coins. You'd need some implementation of majority vote, though (a jury of your peers, weighted by hashrate?)