6 ms·

It's simple, you can't ban it. You can ban the on-ramps and off-ramps, you can't ban p2p transactions.

by rawtxapp 6y ago

baby 6y ago
Yes you can, you could shut down access to seed peers IPs, to miner pool IPs, at the exchange level, etc.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  What do you mean by pool IPs? edit: after your clarification, you can easily use tor, IP addresses can be easily changed, miner's don't have to use the same IP address, they can solve the block wherever they want and broadcast it from wherever they want. There is even satellite blockchain connections now. At exchange level, that's what I mean by on-ramp and off-ramp, that would only push exchanges to decentralized platforms and to black markets.
  - sodality2 6y ago
    For sure, but that would effectively kill BTC.. So much of it is due to institutional investment it would probably halve overnight.
    - rawtxapp 6y ago
      > So much of it is due to institutional investment it would probably halve overnight. Which is why I really doubt the gov would ban it. Especially now that many gov members understand it somewhat (Gary Gensler, head of SEC, used to teach blockchain course at MIT, many senators are publicly holding, etc). But regardless, BTC was very much alive when it was trading at 1$, so I wouldn't really equate dead/alive with price, it would just hinder adoption.
      - baby 6y ago
        Adoption of what?
      - morpheos137 6y ago
        Outside of speculation, money laundering, black markets, and grey market remittances what real world use cases does Bitcoin have today? Gary Gensler taught a course on blockchain at MIT? So what. What does he understand? How to make a decentralised cyclical Ponzi scheme? That is the "store of value" use case that is now being touted since medium of exchange and unit of account are basically non-competitive with traditional (read: real) currencies. Issac Newton bought into the South Sea bubble. Did that mean the bubble was credible? Did that mean Newton "understood" it or was he merely suckered in by the hype? Anybody who is trained in economics who thinks Bitcoin is a serious useful, thing as opposed to an Ponzi is probably somebody who has a financial, professional, or social interest in Bitcoin "succeeding." See regulatory capture. For the past 20 years regulators have been basically asleep in a lot of areas in America. They woke a bit after the financial crisis 10 years ago but "too big to fail" and bailing out the banks (moral hazard) showed they were not serious about doing anything unpopular but salutary. Likewise now regulators are tolerant or supportive of blockchain bullshit simply because it is popular. Similar thing has gone on with driverless cars. The technology is obviously not economically viable (much less technically) and yet at every step in the way has been enabled by regulators. State DMVs should never have issued autonomous car permits, because the technology is bullshit. Yeah I am sure after billions of dollars of sunk costs Waymo can navigate some geofenced area of Phoenix / Chandler. So what? Were is the "innovation" if the "AI" driver is more expensive and less universal than a human driver? If autonomous navigation is a tractable problem why not ships, planes, trains before cars? Planes have more degrees of freedom so are less likely to hit something in seconds if they make a mistake. Same for ships. Trains are bound to rails. Cars have to stay on the road but the road is not systemically cleared (as rails are) and there is nothing mechanically binding the car to the road. Driverless cars are the hardest vehicle class to automate, and yet they were taken seriously. When people will drive a cab for under $10 a hour I don't see how AI that costs 10s of thousands of dollars to do a worse job can compete. When money is cheap, bullshit proliferates.
- jMyles 6y ago
  OK, so it's perhaps possible to ban it by completely changing the nature of the internet (and hoping that each block isn't beamed down from satellites). If that's the yardstick, then I think it's not unreasonable to simply say it can't plausibly be banned.
  - baby 6y ago
    I guess you can’t ban anything then.
    - jMyles 6y ago
      Sure you can. We're not talking about ivory here, which has an incredibly elaborate and difficult-to-hide supply chain (and even at that, is still sometimes smuggled). We're talking about permissionless network traffic. Blocks can be broadcast via shortwave if necessary (of course this will be slow, but not too slow for the 'store of value' use case). Have we lost all sense of the difficulty of censoring the internet?
marcinzm 6y ago
Technically governments can't ban anything but they can discourage anyone from doing something by levying massive penalties if they are caught. Which in practice means those without power go to jail for it while those with power can do whatever they want with it.
- 14 6y ago
  Exactly. I recently saw a near by forest tourist area closed off with threat of $143 fine. I thought damn I have that cash I could literally go for a private picnic in the woods worst case is $143. I can afford that. Then I realized that mentality must exist to a greater extent with the rich. Park where they want and just pay the ticket. Ignore rules and for anything and perhaps just pay a fine.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    I've often though, instead of speeding tickets we could just have speeding fees. Monitor cars, and charge a measured rate per-mile by speed. Pay for everything, for get road taxes!
jayd16 6y ago
Sure you can. Banning doesn't mean eradicating. Making it illegal or taxed heavily would push it underground and tank adoptions. People will still be able to break the law and use it, but no businesses will invest. In fact its extremely easy to go after users seeing as its a public ledger and all that. You can claim some laundering schemes will protect users but any significant movement of money will be trackable unless your opsec is perfect.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  > Making it illegal or taxed heavily would push it underground and tank adoptions. I agree with you! It wouldn't stop it though, just like prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption. If anything, it would make the system more resilient over time. Besides, the governments would want to retain some control through exchanges, rather than lose all control and possible tax benefits, etc.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Banning doesn't mean eradicating Eradicating Bitcoin wouldn’t be that hard. Publicly committing to repeatedly launching 51% attacks is well within the budget of many governments. It would singularly destroy the currency without even requiring criminal statute. Hell, I think the President could do it without permission from Congress. But why? Why do that? Bitcoin threatens nobody. It underwrites a lot of wealth. And voters don’t care about it.
contravariant 6y ago
Sure, but if you ban the on-ramps and off-ramps you've mostly blocked the ways people can obtain and use bitcoins. You could also ban mining if you wanted to, though that's slightly more difficult to enforce.
acdha 6y ago
A nation state has a number of effective measures to block it: require ISPs to block its port and major sites, put punitive taxes on any exchange points into the local currency, require people to certify under oath the origin of funds they’re using for transactions, etc. Since Bitcoin helpfully provides the government with a full transaction log, it’s extremely risky to try to bypass these controls since your history is revealed if you or anyone you have ever dealt with leaks your identity. They also have enough capacity to either do a 51% attack directly or to compromise enough miners to get there – does anyone think those groups are NSA-proof? The better question is why they’d want to. For example, the U.S. government doesn’t have an ideological crusade – pay your taxes, follow anti-money laundering laws, etc. and they don’t care.

It's simple, you can't ban it. You can ban the on-ramps and off-ramps, you can't ban p2p transactions.

baby 6y ago

Yes you can, you could shut down access to seed peers IPs, to miner pool IPs, at the exchange level, etc.

rawtxapp 6y ago
What do you mean by pool IPs? edit: after your clarification, you can easily use tor, IP addresses can be easily changed, miner's don't have to use the same IP address, they can solve the block wherever they want and broadcast it from wherever they want. There is even satellite blockchain connections now. At exchange level, that's what I mean by on-ramp and off-ramp, that would only push exchanges to decentralized platforms and to black markets.
- sodality2 6y ago
  For sure, but that would effectively kill BTC.. So much of it is due to institutional investment it would probably halve overnight.
  - rawtxapp 6y ago
    > So much of it is due to institutional investment it would probably halve overnight. Which is why I really doubt the gov would ban it. Especially now that many gov members understand it somewhat (Gary Gensler, head of SEC, used to teach blockchain course at MIT, many senators are publicly holding, etc). But regardless, BTC was very much alive when it was trading at 1$, so I wouldn't really equate dead/alive with price, it would just hinder adoption.
    - baby 6y ago
      Adoption of what?
    - morpheos137 6y ago
      Outside of speculation, money laundering, black markets, and grey market remittances what real world use cases does Bitcoin have today? Gary Gensler taught a course on blockchain at MIT? So what. What does he understand? How to make a decentralised cyclical Ponzi scheme? That is the "store of value" use case that is now being touted since medium of exchange and unit of account are basically non-competitive with traditional (read: real) currencies. Issac Newton bought into the South Sea bubble. Did that mean the bubble was credible? Did that mean Newton "understood" it or was he merely suckered in by the hype? Anybody who is trained in economics who thinks Bitcoin is a serious useful, thing as opposed to an Ponzi is probably somebody who has a financial, professional, or social interest in Bitcoin "succeeding." See regulatory capture. For the past 20 years regulators have been basically asleep in a lot of areas in America. They woke a bit after the financial crisis 10 years ago but "too big to fail" and bailing out the banks (moral hazard) showed they were not serious about doing anything unpopular but salutary. Likewise now regulators are tolerant or supportive of blockchain bullshit simply because it is popular. Similar thing has gone on with driverless cars. The technology is obviously not economically viable (much less technically) and yet at every step in the way has been enabled by regulators. State DMVs should never have issued autonomous car permits, because the technology is bullshit. Yeah I am sure after billions of dollars of sunk costs Waymo can navigate some geofenced area of Phoenix / Chandler. So what? Were is the "innovation" if the "AI" driver is more expensive and less universal than a human driver? If autonomous navigation is a tractable problem why not ships, planes, trains before cars? Planes have more degrees of freedom so are less likely to hit something in seconds if they make a mistake. Same for ships. Trains are bound to rails. Cars have to stay on the road but the road is not systemically cleared (as rails are) and there is nothing mechanically binding the car to the road. Driverless cars are the hardest vehicle class to automate, and yet they were taken seriously. When people will drive a cab for under $10 a hour I don't see how AI that costs 10s of thousands of dollars to do a worse job can compete. When money is cheap, bullshit proliferates.
jMyles 6y ago
OK, so it's perhaps possible to ban it by completely changing the nature of the internet (and hoping that each block isn't beamed down from satellites). If that's the yardstick, then I think it's not unreasonable to simply say it can't plausibly be banned.
- baby 6y ago
  I guess you can’t ban anything then.
  - jMyles 6y ago
    Sure you can. We're not talking about ivory here, which has an incredibly elaborate and difficult-to-hide supply chain (and even at that, is still sometimes smuggled). We're talking about permissionless network traffic. Blocks can be broadcast via shortwave if necessary (of course this will be slow, but not too slow for the 'store of value' use case). Have we lost all sense of the difficulty of censoring the internet?

marcinzm 6y ago

Technically governments can't ban anything but they can discourage anyone from doing something by levying massive penalties if they are caught. Which in practice means those without power go to jail for it while those with power can do whatever they want with it.

14 6y ago
Exactly. I recently saw a near by forest tourist area closed off with threat of $143 fine. I thought damn I have that cash I could literally go for a private picnic in the woods worst case is $143. I can afford that. Then I realized that mentality must exist to a greater extent with the rich. Park where they want and just pay the ticket. Ignore rules and for anything and perhaps just pay a fine.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  I've often though, instead of speeding tickets we could just have speeding fees. Monitor cars, and charge a measured rate per-mile by speed. Pay for everything, for get road taxes!

jayd16 6y ago

Sure you can. Banning doesn't mean eradicating. Making it illegal or taxed heavily would push it underground and tank adoptions. People will still be able to break the law and use it, but no businesses will invest. In fact its extremely easy to go after users seeing as its a public ledger and all that. You can claim some laundering schemes will protect users but any significant movement of money will be trackable unless your opsec is perfect.

rawtxapp 6y ago
> Making it illegal or taxed heavily would push it underground and tank adoptions. I agree with you! It wouldn't stop it though, just like prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption. If anything, it would make the system more resilient over time. Besides, the governments would want to retain some control through exchanges, rather than lose all control and possible tax benefits, etc.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Banning doesn't mean eradicating Eradicating Bitcoin wouldn’t be that hard. Publicly committing to repeatedly launching 51% attacks is well within the budget of many governments. It would singularly destroy the currency without even requiring criminal statute. Hell, I think the President could do it without permission from Congress. But why? Why do that? Bitcoin threatens nobody. It underwrites a lot of wealth. And voters don’t care about it.

contravariant 6y ago

Sure, but if you ban the on-ramps and off-ramps you've mostly blocked the ways people can obtain and use bitcoins. You could also ban mining if you wanted to, though that's slightly more difficult to enforce.

acdha 6y ago

A nation state has a number of effective measures to block it: require ISPs to block its port and major sites, put punitive taxes on any exchange points into the local currency, require people to certify under oath the origin of funds they’re using for transactions, etc. Since Bitcoin helpfully provides the government with a full transaction log, it’s extremely risky to try to bypass these controls since your history is revealed if you or anyone you have ever dealt with leaks your identity. They also have enough capacity to either do a 51% attack directly or to compromise enough miners to get there – does anyone think those groups are NSA-proof? The better question is why they’d want to. For example, the U.S. government doesn’t have an ideological crusade – pay your taxes, follow anti-money laundering laws, etc. and they don’t care.