Dark Wallet Will Make Bitcoin Accessible For All — Except the Feds 206
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The group, called UnSystem, are self-proclaimed crypto-anarchists led by Cody Wilson—who you may remember as the creator of the controversial 3D-printed gun. After getting himself in hot water with the government for making the digital files to print an unregulated weapon freely available on the internet, Wilson's now endeavoring to bring Bitcoin back to its anarchist roots. Like other Bitcoin wallets, you'll be able to store, send, and receive coins, and interact with block chain, the Bitcoin public ledger. But Dark Wallet will include extra protections to make sure transactions are secure, anonymous, and hard to trace—including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger."
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
No, the just remain in the blockchain as unspent outputs.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:4, Informative)
Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors?
Until someone can work out what the password / key is, the bitcoins will be unable to be used by anyone else -- the value of the remaining bitcoins will probably increase. If someone *is* able to work out what that password / key is, then the value of all bitcoins will drop.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
That would be deflation, since it's the money supply being reduced.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks
Actually, that ordinarily would be a problem. However, you're not understanding that bitcoin isn't encrypting anything. It's hashing it. The bitcoin system doesn't protect against seizure and use of bitcoins; it protects against ledger fraud.
Think of it this way: It will always be hard (hopefully too hard) to undo, invalidate, or duplicate a transaction; The older it is, the more secure it becomes. But let's remove the idea of a bitcoin for the moment and instead say that everyone has a user account in this 'BT' system, and after supplying their login and password, can trade any coins they have with anyone else. Any transaction made is secure; until and unless you lose your password or someone else gets it. Then whatever bitcoins you have are now theirs, the end. But they cannot unspend your coins; they cannot change the transactions. They can only spend what's in your wallet now.
So these "grave" robbers can't reclaim old blocks... they can only decrypt the wallets the coins are stored in. Assuming they were ever encrypted to begin with.
The bit coin system is not secured against theft of coins. That's your job (either to steal or to protect)... all it guarantees is that transactions are permanent (and public).
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
Factor in eight decimal places worth of divisibility to that 20 million limit. I hope you understand why that's significant.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:2, Informative)
In other words, you don't understand SHA256.
I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.