People are going to say what they say. They might also reasonably say that cause Mark Karpeles was proposing a fork to reclaim the mtgox funds. But as much as you try to argue these are similar situations, they’re just really not?
Fundamentally, in a world where a CRQC exists and more will later, your fundamentally cannot have a concept of property rights for coins secured by ECC. “If you have the key” is nonsense when everyone has the key!
More generally, I posted this yesterday:
I think its actually an interesting question as to whether allowing a BIP 32+seedphrase-based recovery scheme that also necessarily freezes some coins as a result is more or less property-rights violating than doing nothing.
My view of Bitcoin's property rights has always been that someone who bought bitcoin, took self custody and wrote down the seedphrase 10 years ago then promptly forgot about bitcoin and went and lived their life should be able to retain access to their coins no matter what.
For that user specifically, a recovery path actually *retains* more property rights than it loses. But for patoshi its a different question. Obviously you can do a commit-before-Q-day-reveal-later scheme for patoshi to retain ownership without revealing whether they still have the private keys, but they do have to do something.
Its tricky but ultimately I don't think the "freezing coins is violating property rights so its bad" view is fully thought out - freezing some coins actually allows owners of other coins to retain the coins! Its far from black-and-white.
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IOW, personally, I came to the conclusion ECC should be disabled (in conjunction with a commit-reveal scheme to allow pre-BIP-32 wallets to retain ownership without revealing they still have the keys) precisely because it is *less property-rights-violating than the alternative*.
Yes, it’s “us” violating some property rights instead of “them” violating all property rights, but I think the distinction is really weird? Like, it feels like shoving our heads in the sand to pretend reality doesn’t exist (once a CRQC is undeniable) instead of facing a tough decision.
Your position is 100% mine, too.
How could we coin it in a way can easily rally behind it without writing walls of text every time?
The CRQC risk is real, but ECC-breaking scenarios would身亡 traditional finance too—this isn’t a Bitcoin-unique problem. The MTGox fork debate feels different because it’s about governance, not cryptography. On property rights, I’ve been thinking about how ETF flows could reshape market dynamics in ways that complicate “ownership” narratives.


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Critical thinking and nuance FTW 💥
Your identifying the ZK exit proposals is useful. I'd point it back to our earlier discussion, somewhere, where I was saying something along the lines of "there is a catastrophic faliure mode that is unavoidable". In the scenario where a CRQC is developed, quickly, before escape routes are created, secretly and creates the ability to spend any key immediately, bitcoin is fucked - full stop, no argument. In the most likely scenario where all that is reversed - escape routes are created in advance, the development is at least semi-public and very slow, that analysis doesn't apply. The point of discussion is (imo) only the intermediate case - we have a slowly developing escape route, and we have a semi-public, slowly developing concrete CRQC threat. there might be some intermediate point of time where the argument "some coins can be protected by an ECC freeze" I think is defensible, but I'd still say it's very close to a complete failure vector. Because once the precedent is established, it will definitely be used to push other similar cases - the mining security requires inflation argument, before long the North Korea threat, and the will someone think of the children threat leading to a complete loss of the permissionlessness principle. So I'd say that that's a "75-90% loss of bitcoin being bitcoin" scenario that I think could only be defended if there was a 75-90%++ chance that the whole project is, right now, failing in any case. It would be a near-catastrophic failure, in itself, if we ever had to enact it. But it gets hard to argue details precisely because it's specifically the messy case, where we can't know the details, where the argument holds merit.
You don't own a right for the network to process your transaction just because you own a UTXO, as far as I can tell. Physical removal of certain people from certain forks of bitcoin is legal, it just might not be in the best interests of the people doing so. Freezing coins is licit but is fucking stupid under most cases. That is why I can justify freezing spam UTXOs.
Could you explain to me how this redemption path would work and how it is not something that an attacker would have equal access to?