[uxp8u61q]

How would this help that hypothetical person in any way? If the coins are stolen, then the victim will want the money back. They won't care if the "same" coins are given back or not. Money is fungible. If someone steals a $10 bill from you and burns it, are you going to forsake your claim to $10? I bet you'd even be happy to get two $5 bills back rather than nothing.

[janmo]

It proves that you destroyed X coins. Example, with the Bitfinex hack, about 120k Bitcoins were stolen, but they were blacklisted and unspendable even on the darknet. So the hypothetical hacker could try to negotiate returning x percent of the coins if he is let go with the rest. Burning coins could prove that he means business, and that he could just burn the entire 120k Bitcoins.

There must be something going on behind the scenes.

[akoboldfrying]

I'm trying to see a way for burning the coins to be useful in some way, but I'm not yet seeing it in your scenario. If it were the case that there had been a theft, and the thief wanted to be able to spend a fraction of what they stole (instead of get it all blacklisted), wouldn't the deal involve sending the remaining fraction back to the original owners? If you steal something from me, I'm interested in getting (at least some fraction of) that thing back, not in you provably destroying some fraction of it.

[janmo]

It is pretty much a prisoners dilemma. If the coins are blacklisted, then both the Hacker and the victim are in a lose situation and it is a stalemate.

Now let's imagine the victim tells the hacker they are not willing to negotiate and hope that law enforcement will catch the hackers like they did in the Bitfinex case. The hacker could destroy some coins every X days to make it clear to the victim that this is not a good idea.

This is just a wild scenario. But had I been the Bitfinex hacker I would have done crazy things such as sending blacklisted coins in small amounts to many random addresses, those of exchanges, developers, non-profits, Satoshi Nakamoto etc.. Just to create chaos as it would have caused those people a lot of trouble and would have forced some kind of resolution.

[nullc]

FWIW, bitfinex was willing to buy the coins back on what they claimed was a no-fault basis and even put a significant amount of coins into third party escrow for that purpose.

Back in the early days of Bitcoin... Zhou-tong, after robbing his own business (Bitcoinica) blind, did something kind of like what you were suggesting -- raining down coins on random people and creating general chaos. I think it was more mania and panic rather than a well considered strategy.

I think in general you don't see stuff like that through a mix of (1) it's less easy than you think, and (2) thoughtful people don't become serious thieves in the first place, it's not worth it.

[jcpham2]

I miss the Zhou tong memes.

[uxp8u61q]

You watch too many action movies.

[themoonisachees]

I think in this scenario they would be burning coins as bank robbers would execute a hostage.

Not sure how the binance source address plays into this theory though.

[akoboldfrying]

For this analogy to fit, the bank robbers would have to destroy (some of) the notes/coins/gold bars (that is, the stuff both parties care about), not execute people (whom the robbers don't care about but the other side do). Which would convince the other side not that the robbers are serious, but that they're idiots.

[pcthrowaway]

Well, if you don't have hostages, demonstrating that you're capable of destroying the entire bank vault if they don't let you walk out with half makes sense

[vintermann]

For regular money, "the same coins" isn't usually meaningful. For bitcoin, it is perfectly possible to say yes, this is the same money, and those other coins in the same wallet are not the same.

Since we can track bitcoin perfectly, it's hard to argue people who have the exact stolen item shouldn't be required to return it.

Fungibility is just a social convention. Anything we can tell apart we can decide to treat non-fungibly, and we can tell bitcoin apart.

[uxp8u61q]

I specifically took the example of a (physical) $10 bill. You can definitely tell apart two different $10 bills. They have serial numbers, for example. They're different physical objects.

[vintermann]

Sure. I said we can decide to treat things we can tell apart as non-fungible. I didn't say we had to.

If it's things we can't tell apart (say, liters of oil in the same tank), we are pretty much forced to treat them fungibly. I say pretty much, because there are such things as LIFO and FIFO accounting conventions - sometimes we do our damndest to tell apart things that can't really be told apart.

But if we can tell them apart, it's up to us. We have decided to treat money (incl. physical bills) as fungible in most contexts. With laws.

Even with laws there are limits: If someone wants to pay a debt to me, and offer to settle with a 200 NOK bill, it would be illegal for me to refuse, even if I knew this bill had been stolen from me earlier that night.

But if it was a $10 bill, or a bitcoin, it would be perfectly legal for me to refuse. With crypto tokens in general, there's to my knowledge no government on earth stopping me from declaring that I will take payment in bitcoin minted only on Thursdays.

[oska]

> Fungibility is just a social convention

No, the fungibility of money is law, established by legal precedent. Specifically the case of Crawfurd v The Royal Bank (1749).

> On 30 July 1748, an Edinburgh lawyer named Hew Crawfurd mailed two £20 notes to the merchant William Lang in Glasgow, but the letter was lost. Prior to sending them, Crawfurd had meticulously signed his name on the banknotes and recorded their serial numbers, so he notified the Bank of Scotland and advertised his predicament in several newspapers. One of the notes was never found, but the other note turned up at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Crawfurd requested the Royal Bank to open a multiplepoinding action with respect to the note, but the Bank refused. Thus he brought suit in the Court of Sessions against the Royal Bank.

> Both banks were alarmed by his action, as an adverse finding would subject banknotes to infirmities of title like any other property, which would threaten the idea of paper money as a common circulating currency. Despite their generally poor relations with each other at the time, they agreed to cooperate and jointly defend the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfurd_v_The_Royal_Bank

[vintermann]

> No, the fungibility of money is law, established by legal precedent.

Laws ARE a kind of social convention. And to the degree that the fungibility of "money" is law, law also decides what counts as "money", and there's no reason why they (yes, they, not it - law is actually people) should let your crypto-token of choice count as money for legal fungibility purposes.