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The Future of Cloud Mining Bitcoin Contracts in the Light of the Contract Clause of the US Constitut

  • lacamabiltywalt
  • Aug 12, 2023
  • 2 min read


One can only make electronic cash transactions if one has obtained the underlying cryptocurrency of that blockchain (bitcoins if using Bitcoin with additional software to augment privacy, or some other cryptocurrency such as Zcash or Monero if using a new, privacy-focused blockchain). There are only two ways to obtain these cryptocurrencies: (1) participate in the blockchain consensus mechanism and receive rewards for your contributions in the form of newly minted cryptocurrency (i.e. mining),48 or (2) receive cryptocurrency from someone who already has it, either as a gift, payment as wages, or in exchange for other valuables (i.e. exchange).




Cloud Mining Bitcoin Contracts Clause Of The Us Constitution




As we have just described, electronic cash and decentralized exchange work without the need to trust an intermediary like a bank or other financial institution and may leave little or no information about user transactions public on the blockchain for use by law enforcement.68 If regulators wish to impose Bank Secrecy Act obligations upon entities in the electronic cash or decentralized exchange space, the only possible targets would be the software developers of electronic cash protocols and decentralized exchange smart contracts or the persons running that software on the internet. Would the imposition of such obligations upon these parties be constitutional under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence?


The ledger is referred to as the blockchain, and all bitcoin transactions are checked against the blockchain to ensure that there is no double spending. This authentication process on the network allows people to make direct digital currency transactions with each other without relying on a third-party intermediary, such as a bank or PayPal. The authentication process is referred to as mining, and it also creates new bitcoins at a pre-determined rate.[2] People who make their computer resources available for authenticating the blockchain, referred to as bitcoin miners, are rewarded with some combination of new bitcoins and transaction fees.[3] Transactions are verified by miners working to solve a computer resource-intensive computational problem built into the underlying Bitcoin protocol.[4]


The code in a program are evaluated in a virtual machine/interpretor inside the miner, any miner. The code evaluation could theoretically infect the mining computer. However, the code is fully open, relatively small, and miners run different implementations of the language interpretor. Also, the language lacks most hooks into hardware or the world. Ethereum contracts do not need to access memory, printers, keyboards, wifi or TCP/IP stacks. As blockchain data is immutable, it is not possible to infect other parts of the blockchain.


So far I have not heard about any case of, or possibility to infect mining computers by this route. But I am willing to to be surprised. I would love to hear about such actions from Ethereum contracts. 2ff7e9595c


 
 
 

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