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by PeterisP
2767 days ago
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Ownership is a legal concept, and thus it's up to the legal system to decide if "the person who figures out the hash collision is the owner", or if in certain cases it's not. Yes, it may be hard to enforce a judgement, especially if the other party can't be identified or located. However, if the other party is reachable, then the courts can certainly force that person to, for example, reverse the transactions, or compensate the rightful owner (as determined by courts, not the algorithms), or have their stuff and liberty taken away by angry armed men. The process was designed so that the person who figures out the hash collision has full de-facto control, but the designers of a cryptocurrency have no say in what the rules for legal ownership are, that's up to the legislators - and just as for many existing (including physical things) having full control does not imply ownership, i.e. the right to freely act with that thing without it being forcibly taken away, and the right to have your property protected by the state if someone (including someone who has the key) takes your property. |
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This is the key distinction between actually using _Bitcoin_ (i.e. running a full node and creating transactions), and using custodial Bitcoin (outsourcing it all to a third party using legal constructs).
If you're saying that the users of the cryptocurrency can't opt-out of the legal system - sure, no-one can opt out against men with guns (in practice what ends up happening is everyone hiding under pseudonyms and introducing a whole bunch of friction in an attempt to do it anyway).
I suppose my comment is intended to illustrate that this is all a sort of shell game played by non-participants.
Essentially, lawyers trying to glue themselves onto and extract consulting fees or whatever from a system which does not require them.
Repeated again for the sake of clarity - if men with guns ultimately decide transactions on the blockchain, the entire system is pointless. We can just delete it. We don't need the horrendously expensive resolution mechanism of PoW in that case, because there's already a resolution mechanism, that of men with guns.