4 ms·

If they wanted to make P2P protocols illegal, they will have to ban E2E encryption, I could be running the bitcoin protocol over Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp/HTTP.

• littlestymaar 5y ago
  They can make it illegal and call it a day. The successful crackdown of BitTorrent usage is a good illustration of that. The protocol is still here and you can use it, but the general public doesn't anymore. In the case of torrent, it causes seeding issues and severely limit the availability of non-mainstream stuff (finding non-Hollywood movies is hard for instance). In the case of bitcoin should the public don't use it anymore, the price would collapse, making the current mining unsustainable, and as the mining difficulty declines the robustness of the protocol reduces sharply, especially if state actors start buying the unused mining devices… BTW, the sneakernet is unsuited for most uses of bitcoin transactions: you don't just want to be able to transfer the token from one address to another. Most of the time a transaction is an interactive process: you send the money and I give you something in return after I've checked that I actually received the funds. This usage simply doesn't work well on the sneakernet, because of the very high latency.