stacksatsio on Nostr: Thank you for engaging in this thought exercise! It’s really useful to play through ...

Thank you for engaging in this thought exercise! It’s really useful to play through such hypotheticals and challenge one’s own thinking and biases, appreciate that you’re willing to do that in good faith 😊

We agree a hardfork/rollback ain’t happening in the case of “theft” then. The entity whose coins were “stolen” can try but the fork will not gain any traction. I’m using quotation marks as this scenario could be done via legislation/Executive Order or as a straight up heist, either way, once the coins move is when the game theory kicks in.

If we take your presumption that they do this overtly to known addresses, leaving motives aside, let’s play that out.

We can blacklist or not.

If we softfork to blacklist and burn those coins (ie make them unspendable / not fungible with BTC) we reduce the supply cap by that amount. Existing HODLers benefit as their share of BTC goes from X/21M to X/21M-Burn making their coins more scarce and therefore more valuable. The thief, be it USGov or anyone else, is defunded and goes to zero.

BTC has now demonstrated that the network is not neutral. It can and will boot participants it does not want to hold it. That’s a BIG change.

This could possibly be overcome with the right propaganda but could just as easily be used as a narrative against it. We’re in a different world with adoption/knowledge/state strength etc if this is playing out so it’s difficult to judge how this might go - we’re looking too far ahead with too many variables.

Alternatively there is no softfork.

The world knows the addresses, no hardfork/rollback is happening, no softfork gains any traction.

We now have the biggest honeypot in history.

If it’s the USGov who 6102ed the coins, whoever is in charge is now effectively dictator and can’t be removed (think on the nature of holding the keys in multisig and who would be trusted). No more elections, how can you trust a new guy to come in and not steal that much wealth for himself or his cronies? (Bukele ain’t going anywhere BTW!) They gonna setup a Supreme Court of key holders? 😂

If it’s some private entity who takes the coins before a 6102, I guess it would come down to their motives. Do they want to airdrop it to millions of plebs? Do they want to fund global socialism? Does some bloke want to be a modern day Mansa Musa? Too many scenarios to nail down.

Either way, there is now a massive honeypot of coins which was just proved to be stealable.

Why would they be forked off? To discourage more theft I guess.

What if the network likes what they’re doing? Then maybe it won’t be restricted. And if it’s for something the network doesn’t like (ie the WEF agenda), maybe then it is.

Maybe we’re willing to see them be restolen. Maybe it brings too much heat to Bitcoiners getting wrench attacked in this new dynamic.

Again we’re into too many variables..

I can see paths where your softfork might happen but I think it’s extremely unlikely. Bitcoiners would be super reluctant to change consensus on 21M even if it favoured them short term, they’d probably be so well funded at this point that they could launch their own offence against such an actor and flip things into a different direction, depending on who has the coins and what they try to do with them I suppose.