Let's say that, hypothetically speaking, someone had the mining power to mine all unmined bitcoin(I believe around 6 million bitcoin, correct me if I'm incorrect). Would they confiscate it off of them? Would there be some kind of software barrier? which would mean that even if you had such great mining power, you wouldn't be able to mine so many bitcoins.
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2 Answers
Then all those bitcoins would belong to that person. There's nothing in the current Bitcoin protocol that prevents this.
I don't know what you mean by "would 'they' confiscate it". From the point of view of the Bitcoin protocol, nobody has the authority to confiscate bitcoins.
Of course, if this happened, it would mean that miner would be able to unilaterally decide which transactions would be confirmed, and they could also reverse past transactions by re-mining part of the chain. They would be able to allow people to double-spend. This might well cause other people to lose interest in using Bitcoin, since its security would be undermined, and this could cause the currency's value to fall, perhaps to zero.
answered Mar 6, 2017 at 20:13
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by re-mining the blockchain do you mean that that one person could keep on making money?– 97980Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 21:12
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@97980: No, I'm referring to the fact that they could create multiple forks of the block chain which diverge after a certain point. This wouldn't gain them any extra money (because shorter forks would be invalidated), but it would let them undo previous transactions by including a conflicting transaction in the new fork. Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 23:24
The problem with all of these "what if X amazing ability is discovered by someone" (SHA-2 breaking algorithm, near infinite computational power, etc.) is that a person/government with such an ability would be better off keeping the ability a secret to sell or use than using it to publicly destroy bitcoin (which is what this would do)
answered Mar 17, 2017 at 22:57
