141
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
141 points (100.0% liked)
United Kingdom
4041 readers
131 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Bitcoin are associated against addresses which are held in wallets. To transfer coins away from an address (i.e. to spend them or to sell them) you need to create a transaction on the blockchain - as part of doing this you need to “sign” the transaction with a private key associated with the address which holds the bitcoins.
In this case the guy doesn’t have an extra copy of his private key so cannot transfer the coins - he still “owns” them but cannot transact them. It’s like having gold bars locked in a safe but you can’t remember the combination - except the combination is so huge that the chances of guessing it are effectively zero.
Most people who hold more than a trivial amount of bitcoin will have backups of their private key or use mnemonics to remember it but in the early days when 8,000 bitcoins were worth pennies there was no real incentive or knowledge that it was a good idea to keep backups of the key.