On Tuesday, 20 January 2015, at 12:40 pm, Peter Todd wrote: > On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 12:23:14PM -0500, Matt Whitlock wrote: > > If you have the private keys for your users' bitcoins, then you are every > > bit as much the owner of those bitcoins as your users are. There is no > > custodial relationship, as you have both the ability and the right to spend > > those bitcoins. Possession of a private key is equivalent to ownership of > > the bitcoins controlled by that private key. > > Posessing a private key certainly does not give you an automatic legal > right to anything. As an example I could sign an agreement with you that > promised I would manage some BTC on your behalf. That agreement without > any doubt takes away any legal right I had to your BTC, enough though I > may have have the technical ability to spend them. This is the very > reason why the law has the notion of a custodial relationship in the > first place.
I never signed any kind of agreement with Andreas Schildbach. I keep my bitcoins in his wallet with the full knowledge that an auto-update could clean me out. (I only hold "walking around" amounts of money in my mobile wallet for exactly this reason.) I would love it if Andreas offered me an agreement not to spend my bitcoins without my consent, but I doubt he'd legally be allowed to offer such an agreement, as that would indeed set up a custodial relationship, which would put him into all sorts of regulatory headache. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
