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That would require the government being able to coordinate controlling; 1. Internet access 2. Sales of computers 3. Imports 4. Citizens not revolting against
by AJRF 9y ago
That would require the government being able to coordinate controlling;
1. Internet access
2. Sales of computers
3. Imports
4. Citizens not revolting against that (including people using and accepting currency, so buy and sell side)
All of which are possible but not trivial. I actually think it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult to do this with a decentralised system like BitCoin than it is with fiat currency issued by a central bank.
- justboxing 9y ago> All of which are possible but not trivial Isn't China doing #1 - #4 to about 25% of the world's population already?
- cheez 9y agoYou missed step 0: disarm the population.
- zanny 9y agoChina is trying to do all that, but about 90% of bitcoins growth in the last 4 years has come out of Chinese investment in it for both speculation and mining. Even outright attempts to outlaw it has not slowed down participation practically at all. The fundamental problem is that it is incredibly hard to provide only some Internet access, be they a state actor, public school, parent, etc. The design of the protocols impairs censorship efforts. If you want to censor the Internet, you pretty much have to start with a whitelist approach of allowed IPs and domains, and then stringently audit those to insure they don't act as proxies.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ared38 9y agoAll you have to do is arrest people converting rebel cryptocurrencies into the one you can use at the grocery store. Since every transfer of legitimate money is now in the blockchain, they'll be able to identify them pretty quickly. Not sure if a government in turmoil could do it, but it's easy for a stable repressive regime. I agree the government doesn't get any benefit from decentralization and would just have a MySQL DB in real life to make corruption and whatnot easier, but cryptocurrencies only work if the government tolerates them.
- kown223 9y agohow would a government pay to secure their blockchain? how would they find those dealing everything in bitcoin? One of the reason of URSS going down was the huge administrative costs of spying / investigating, keeping up the oppression on its citizens.
- ared38 9y ago> how would a government pay to secure their blockchain? What do you mean? Aren't they inherently tamperproof? > how would they find those dealing everything in bitcoin? A few people might live that way, but unless the entire supply chain is bitcoin someone will have to buy the food/gas/land they need with govcoin and sell it in bitcoin, thus getting caught. > One of the reason of URSS going down was the huge administrative costs of spying / investigating, keeping up the oppression on its citizens. Since ever single transaction is tracked, you can automate 90% of the work. Just look for businesses making the same amount of purchases but less sales, or people sending money to or getting money from accounts that aren't registered as employers or stores. With modern anomaly detection techniques you'd hardly have to torture anyone. The USSR just didn't have modern technology. It would have taken a team of agents to tail a single person; the ARGUS-IS can track everyone in a 36 square mile area with a single drone.
- daptaq 9y ago>4. Citizens not revolting against that (including people using and accepting currency, so buy and sell side) I' extremely sceptical that people would do this. I most certainly wouldn't want to risk my life over one kind of (obscure) currency vs another.