[nebula]

I am trying to understand impact of crypto currency. Sorry for my ignorance, and or impertinence. 1. Is it possible to run such large scale ransom demands without cryptocurrency? 2. Do we know if the attacker is using a single BTC wallet, or if ransoms are being collected in a distributed fashion. 3. Is it possible for BTC n/w to hijack BTCs going to the ransom wallet(s). That is to say collectively overwrite/override the transactions and may be reroute the coins to some non-profit wallet? I know it will be a very bad precedent, but I am trying to understand if it is technically possible.

[simcop2387]

> 3. Is it possible for BTC n/w to hijack BTCs going to the ransom wallet(s).

No, by design that's not allowed as part of the protocol for bitcoin. Every transaction must be signed by the private key for that address in order to be valid. You could in theory do it if you can get a majority of the miners to agree to the change in the protocol but it wouldn't happen since it'd require forking the whole blockchain to insert new transactions without the private key. And then you'd have to get everyone to agree on where those would go.

[nebula]

Thanks for the response. I should have been more explicit, but when I said BTC n/w I meant a consensus sort of thing from users/miners. Thanks for your explanation regarding the need of a fork to achieve this even with consensus.