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Ask HN: Is it possible to create counter-terrorist consensus on blockchain?

6 points by marius_k ↗ HN
So let's say we have a set of wallets which are used to support terrorist organizations. Can we write a patched BTC/ETH clients/miners to freeze those wallets? This way we can perform >50% counter attack on terrorists?

I am not blockchain expert, sorry if this sounds stupid.

I am asking this because I can't stay rest seeing Ukrainian civilians being killed by bombarding residential areas.

9 comments

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sinyug
> This way we can perform >50% counter attack on terrorists?

Who is a terrorist?

In the Israel vs Palestine violence, which wallets will you block?

What about the Balochistan Liberation Army vs Pakistan?

Houthis in Yemen vs Saudi Arabia?

Tigray People's Liberation Front vs Ethiopia?

Are the Taliban terrorists or the de facto government in Afghanistan?

These things are not that simple. Every side has justifications for why it believes it is right and the other side wrong.

marius_k
> Who is a terrorist?

We can decide by consensus. Now I see Putin and his orgs being terrorist committing unjustified war crimes.

> In the Israel vs Palestine violence, which wallets will you block?

Those who commit war crimes. Israel mostly, could be Palestinians too.

> Every side has justifications for why it believes it is right and the other side wrong.

How does one justify Putins actions?

sinyug
> We can decide by consensus.

I have to really appreciate how the US and China are getting every thing they want in this conflict without firing a single bullet:

* destroy crypto

* make Europeans dependent on American fuel supplies - cannot buy from Iran and Russia

* push Russia into China's arms

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bitxbitxbitcoin
Do you mean consensus as in the will of the majority forced on the minority?
marius_k
Yes. I see this is a problem. In 1930's Germany these kind of referendums(fraudulent?) made the world-wide catastrophe.

Anyway it is fundamentally(?) always the majority who agrees on the rules. And the majority chooses how to advocate for minorities (one of which could be a terrorist organization).

So in case there are bloody coins on the blockchain - the majority has two options:

- collaborate with terrorists (do nothing)

- freeze the coins

bitxbitxbitcoin
No it isn’t. If it were, I wouldn’t call the resultant database a blockchain anymore.
chasebro
No one is actually answering your question, the answer to which is absolutely yes, it’s technically possible to do what you’re describing. Actually getting 51% hash power will be likely infeasible.
leifg
In theory yes. If you have a list of addresses you want to “block” and you convince the biggest mining pools to play along you can “block” transactions to and from all these addresses. Whoever mines a new block gets to choose which transactions are going to be in it. If you just never include flagged transactions, no one is able to transfer terrorist money in and out.

There is still a possibility that one of the smaller miners gets a block once in a while but you’d already be able to significantly disrupt the terrorist organization. In addition to that you could also decide to fork off the chain before a block with any transaction and long term convince 100% of the miners to not touch any of the addresses.

Here is where reality kicks in: how do you get an agreement which addresses to block. There is more than one terrorist organization and certain miners might find the “censorship free money” argument more important than the existence of some of them. And judging by how often I hear the argument that BTC is “non-political” I don’t see that happening at all.

And even if you had consensus of what is good and what is evil, the counter attack of terrorists is fairly simple. Generate a new public key for every donation. This makes is a lot harder to track and would start an arms race between miners and terrorists.