Their fix was to put a piece of paper over the passwords.
What a time.
Bitcoin, and really fintech as a whole, are beyond reckless.
With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts like what happened with the beyond reckless banks in 2008.
It is not beyond imagination that the most popular Bitcoin blockchain (and thus, the label of being the "real" Bitcoin) could change at some point in the future.
"Bitcoin" is not immune from the implications of political fuckery.
Governments around the world are 100% attempting different plans to destabilize or destroy Bitcoin because it harms their interests and ability to print money from thin air. But at the end of the day it's a distributed ledger, so even if they do find a way to manipulate or damage or takeover the network the Bitcoin users can just fork it from before they did their damage and continue from there. That is the ultimate power of a decentralized blockchain, nobody has ultimate power and everyone votes with their resources.
I don't know what the specific mechanism would be, but I would bet that it relates to the billions of dollars backing the current ecosystem, and the interests of the people behind them. If the right event or crisis comes along, then people could be compelled to switch over to something else.
I'm sure there's someone out there still mining blocks on that chain with the exploit from 2010, but that's not where the mining power is. If the right series of events occurs, the miners will switch.
But if, say, a mere 99% of miners switch, it’s far from a given that people would follow. Having more mining capacity makes the chain more secure, but it’s not that big of a deal.
Hahahaha
It's that everything you do on the blockchain is there forever, so if a government needs you in jail for using it, they can show you were involved in a financial crime and the blockchain proves it... And if you are unwilling to give up your public wallet they can keep you in jail indefinitely until you do.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Every activity on the network is encoded into a perpetual auditable dataset, by design.
The government in the US has far bigger guns than the citizenry these days.
The only thing that will ever prevent a government from abusing its populace is the willingness of actors of the state - police and soldiers - to say no to abusive orders. Independent thinking coupled with believing in the people more than the executive is the only thing that will ever keep us safe. Guns are not defensive tools. The state can shoot you before you shoot them if they decide they don't like what you're doing.
Put guns in the hands of the people you're policing and you just make it that much easier for the police/soldiers/govt sympathizers to make it us-against-them and side with the totalitarians.
The miners do not control the network. The people transacting on the network control the network and decides who is rich and who is not; and whether the miners get paid or not.
I guess arresting ten thousand people a year for grevious hurting of the feefees with assault tweets is a recently prevented overstep that the citizens of some other countries have not been able to prevent.
If miners suddenly fled en masse, it’s possible for the chain to be left stranded where the small number of miners remaining couldn’t realistically get to the next 2016-block interval to adjust the difficulty down to match the drastically decreased mining capacity. If mining capacity dropped by a factor of 1000 and it happened right after an adjustment, then bitcoin would be producing about one block every week, and it would take about 40 years (if mining capacity stayed constant) to reach the next adjustment.