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> How does "their identity is known" translate into an attack? They can be coerced into actions based on threats to themselves or relatives.
by rogerbinns 11y ago
> How does "their identity is known" translate into an attack?
They can be coerced into actions based on threats to themselves or relatives.
- ewillbefull 11y agoVirtually everyone involved in Bitcoin's development is also well-known and presumably "coerceable." The company makes no difference as far as I can see.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThey don't need to target Bitcoin developers to track use of Bitcoin or conversions. So, they don't. End of story?
- DickingAround 11y agoWhen someone has a legitimate claim to be an owner, that person will have sway to do crazy things like make it closed-source or change the critical constants. Not saying it's a deal-breaker, but it's more risk than if no one can claim to own it (if bitcoiners are angry about the excessive power of the people with admin permissions to the github repo, just imagine how difficult it would be to wrench control from a company that invented the product and has copyright claims to it). I guess what I'm saying is you don't get much leverage if you convert a bitcoin dev but if you convert the owners of this company you'll get a lot of leverage.
- bduerst 11y agoThe miners could always revert from a hard fork that was put out under coercion, right?
- sarciszewski 11y agoGood luck pulling that off.
- themartorana 11y agoI presume this is sarcasm, since governments have been pulling this off since time immemorial?
- sarciszewski 11y agoPulling off a massive, international, targeted attack on several individuals of varying degrees of stubbornness to coerce them to do something unspecified and malicious to the code base of an open source software project and not get detected isn't exactly a practical goal for even intelligence agencies.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoHow about they just ask three payment networks (VISA/MC/Paypal) to cut off their payments then watch them wither and die? That's how Wikileaks was destroyed by Bank of America and Co when they threatened to leak on the big banks. All that OPSEC can't help without money to support it. Worked like a charm and not a single shot fired.
- kleer001 11y agoThe code base is not the only vulnerable part.
- toolz 11y agoCouldn't reply to your child comment, so I'll put it here. You don't seem to realize how easy it is to discredit someone that the general public doesn't recognize. The cryptographers are one false planting of child porn away from no influential majority of people believing a word they say. You won't defend them, because you'll question the authenticity of the child porn claims and you'll have no evidence to the contrary. Overnight these kinds of people can be taken down and made into nothing.
- sarciszewski 11y agoThe problem isn't "how to coerce", it's "how to coerce without being detected".