BJW

They use up so much electricity! And they enable piracy. Some of them are even gasp water-cooled! 😱

You, too! Everyone should enjoy all the slop, of every kind, with no discrimination.

I winced when I read your comment. I like the responses though.

Perhaps I am. I’m referring to your malicious actor you believe will rob you of your holdings. What does that look like? Some nebulous entity undertakes the task of acquiring greater than half of the processing power of the Bitcoin Blockchain, expending enormous resources to do so, for the purpose of reverting the $500 they paid you? And they’re not at all worried about devaluing the network they’ve invested significant resources into controlling, they just want their $500 back? The attacks are theoretical because they’re not practical and require illogical actors working against their own interests by undermining the network they’re supporting. It would be like a bank who takes deposits, but doesn’t allow withdrawals - who would trust them? They’d go bankrupt for their efforts.

Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That’s because it’s not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It’s actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it’s final. There’s no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It’s just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.

It’s not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it’s not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it’s never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.

Only the last few blocks are “rewritable,” which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not "rewritable.’

Fire: bad!

Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.

What of the agency of the players? Who will be sitting in the room and impacted, if this optional feature is enabled in the privacy of one’s home? Will the artist, halfway around the world suddenly wail and fall over in pain because of personal preference?

I guess it’s the same as when people put steak sauce on a steak, and all the chefs who love the taste of bloody meat cry that the meal has been ruined… Except they’re not the ones eating it. They can enjoy their own creations however they like without getting all nitpicky about how others have their own preferences.

Only artist intent matters. Personal preference be damned!