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I would really like to see a full-frontal assault by a first-world government on Bitcoin, just to test how resilient it is to such an attack, and also so that t

I would really like to see a full-frontal assault by a first-world government on Bitcoin, just to test how resilient it is to such an attack, and also so that the lessons learned from it can be applied in improving both the technology and its utilization. I wonder to what extent the very prospect of failure discourages that. Same goes with Tor. Both of these technologies are things that most governments would very much like to see rubbed out before they gain widespread adoption (and, you know, fuck them for that). It's a shame, because even the Internet could probably do with a little bit of regulation, and the monetary system certainly needs it, and yet both of these technologies are in part a reaction to the complete failure of most governments to have any sort of competence with either. In fact in many cases it's just outright malicious. Now in Japan they will begin jailing people for something as harmless as viewing a copyrighted work on fucking Youtube. Time to get a Tor router.

urlwolf 14y ago
I'd like to have a dead easy way to implement bitcoin payments, stripe like. This would help it spread to mainstream population. Right now, using bitcoin is a bit of a pain, you have to do a bank transfer, etc. Fix that, and make it as fast as paypal. Money ensues.
- PeterisP 14y ago
  That's exactly what governments can (and will) prevent. Offering money transfer services or accepting money deposits from the public are regulated activities. And part of such regulation are anti-money laundering rules that essentially mandate that you're not allowed to execute a) anonymous transfers; and b) 'on behalf' transfers if you don't know the 'ultimate payer' and the 'ultimate beneficiary'. IIRC, skirting such rules just last week led to a fine of some two hundred million for banks that anonymised payer data for some transfers that turned out to be for iranian oil.
evoxed 14y ago
>Now in Japan they will begin jailing people for something as harmless as viewing a copyrighted work on fucking Youtube. Well... we'll see how that pans out. I've never had any problems myself, though the new rules only just kicked in. When you consider the conviction rate it can be worrisome, but then again I don't believe they really have the competency or care to really keep track of any of it. Just a slight push and a shove, and anyone who tries to shove back becomes a person of interest.
- mahyarm 14y ago
  Any conviction rate needs to be accompanied with a total potential case rate. In japan, unless there is a high probability of a successful prosecution, will chose not to prosecute so the DA doesn't have an embarrassing 'non-guilty' verdict.
- bluedanieru 14y ago
  Just to add to that, the laws already on the books for quite some time can get you potentially ten years for sharing copyrighted works over Bittorrent and the like (the new law is for downloading, but a similar law for uploading is already there). Never heard of anyone getting pinched by it though. It's still fucking lunacy.
nullc 14y ago
It's not resilient to such a thing. If you think _anything_ widely used can be, you are woefully underestimating the power of a modern major state. This isn't a question about technology; as much as the geeks love to obsess over it. Technology is just one part. Non-technology attacks are simply much more powerful. E.g. "Anyone caught using Bitcoin will be executed on the spot by large caliber fire from attack helicopters flying far enough away that you can't see or hear them targeting you", and suddenly Bitcoin is only some obscure and irrelevant thing— even outlaws have no use for outlaw 'money'. There is no question of _ability_ to suppress it, only a question of sufficient motivation. And motivation is where it comes up short. Bitcoin is just another thing people can barter. Not different from beanie babies or lumps of coal, and it shouldn't be legally or politically different. This whole weird concept of something being unlawful until proven otherwise must be some kind of crazy fallout from the drug and copyright wars, and I fear that thinking will greatly harm society in the long run. If Bitcoin turns out to be an efficient 'money' then sane and efficient governments should support it: because a more efficient money will make everyone more prosperous. Some people love to feel all counter-culture and subversive with their hobbies, but as disruptive a technology Bitcoin is it's just not politically disruptive. Most of the few establishment risks that go along with Bitcoin apply doubly to cash, the others apply to other valuable commodities that goverments can't just create out of thin air. The motivation to attack just isn't there.
- kmm 14y ago
  > Non-technology attacks are simply much more powerful. E.g. "Anyone caught using Bitcoin will be executed on the spot by large caliber fire from attack helicopters flying far enough away that you can't see or hear them targeting you", and suddenly Bitcoin is only some obscure and irrelevant thing That's still a technology problem. Make the use of it undetectable. A sufficiently technology savvy Bitcoiner would just wrap his stuff with some encryption and with minimal hassle, you would need to be much faster and harsher to stop them. Besides, if we're assuming civilian execution without trial, then we're not talking about the modern major states. Not a single of the major states could even remotely do such a thing without consequences. The harshest punishments for comparable offences would be for the distribution and possession of child pornography and that is not stopping the offenders, on the contrary.
api 14y ago
I completely agree with your first speculation. I don't think they want to go after these and fail. I think they'd rather have them exist in their present possibly less hardened form and try to monitor and reverse engineer them passively. Attacking them would just harden them.
sausagefeet 14y ago
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/29/1743201/attacking-and-defending-the-tor-network http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/29/1743201/attacking-and...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
lambda 14y ago
Bitcoin could be attacked pretty easily right now. It really isn't big enough to stand a substantial assault from a major government. In part it's due to being too small of a network; while there is a lot of CPU power mining, it would have to grow a couple orders of magnitude before I seriously considered it resilient (an in order for that to happen, the value of Bitcoins will have to grow the same amount, to make mining worthwhile). A DDOS against the top miners and pools, plus a few million dollars in CPU cycles, could probably allow you to successfully fork the block chain. Furthermore, there isn't much of a pure-Bitcoin economy. There are a few things you can buy in Bitcoins, but you cannot make your living in Bitcoins and pay for all of the goods and services you need in Bitcoins. As such, Bitcoin relies on the exchanges to keep the economy going. And there aren't that many of them, and they aren't that resilient. Taking down the top couple of exchanges could devastate the Bitcoin economy. Heck, just taking down Mt.Gox would probably do it. And there are some weaknesses in the current implementation as well. Most discovery of peers is still done through a single centralized IRC channel. There are a few hard-coded peers to bootstrap the network even if the IRC channel is unreachable, but again, for a sufficiently motivated government, that probably wouldn't be too hard to deal with. But you also have to wonder if a government would want to attack Bitcoin. After all, there are a lot of people who think that it's an anonymous method of transferring money, but it really isn't. It's pseudonymous, but the entire history of transactions is publicly available to everyone. With a little bit of knowledge of who own certain keys (by buying or selling from people, using compromised vendors, or the like), you could start to generate some pretty good data on where money is flowing. Given that you also publish your IP publicly, and someone listening into the network could start to watch for which IP addresses initiate certain transactions, a party with sufficient resources could probably de-anonymize a large amount of the transactions that go over Bitcoin. Yes, there are ways to protect yourself; connect to the network via Tor or a proxy, launder the money through online exchanges or wallet services, be careful about breaking up transactions randomly across addresses and time to hide any laundering. But there are many people who are not going to be sufficiently technically savvy or motivated to do all of that. Bitcoin probably provides a lot of interesting data to snoops; why try to shut that down? There are similar arguments for Tor. For one thing, running a Tor exit node and snooping the traffic can get you a lot of interesting data. Given the technical and legal risks of a private citizen running a Tor exit node, I wonder how many of them are run by governments looking for interesting data? Anonymity is pretty hard; there are lots of ways to leak information allowing yourself to be uniquely identified, like browser fingerprinting, forgetting to turn off cookies when using Tor, and the like. There are also reasons why the government might want to encourage the use of Tor and Bitcoin. Remember, Tor was originally funded by the US Naval Research Laboratory. Any type of security or privacy tool can help US interests as much as it can harm spooks. Tor was originally developed to protect government communications, and can be used both by the government's allies as well as its enemies. So, I don't think that Bitcoin or Tor are under serious threat of full-frontal assault from a first world government, nor do I think they could survive such an attack. But I think that said first world governments are probably more interested in keeping them running and keeping an eye on them quietly than very visibly shutting them down.

urlwolf 14y ago

I'd like to have a dead easy way to implement bitcoin payments, stripe like. This would help it spread to mainstream population. Right now, using bitcoin is a bit of a pain, you have to do a bank transfer, etc. Fix that, and make it as fast as paypal. Money ensues.

PeterisP 14y ago
That's exactly what governments can (and will) prevent. Offering money transfer services or accepting money deposits from the public are regulated activities. And part of such regulation are anti-money laundering rules that essentially mandate that you're not allowed to execute a) anonymous transfers; and b) 'on behalf' transfers if you don't know the 'ultimate payer' and the 'ultimate beneficiary'. IIRC, skirting such rules just last week led to a fine of some two hundred million for banks that anonymised payer data for some transfers that turned out to be for iranian oil.

evoxed 14y ago

>Now in Japan they will begin jailing people for something as harmless as viewing a copyrighted work on fucking Youtube. Well... we'll see how that pans out. I've never had any problems myself, though the new rules only just kicked in. When you consider the conviction rate it can be worrisome, but then again I don't believe they really have the competency or care to really keep track of any of it. Just a slight push and a shove, and anyone who tries to shove back becomes a person of interest.

mahyarm 14y ago
Any conviction rate needs to be accompanied with a total potential case rate. In japan, unless there is a high probability of a successful prosecution, will chose not to prosecute so the DA doesn't have an embarrassing 'non-guilty' verdict.
bluedanieru 14y ago
Just to add to that, the laws already on the books for quite some time can get you potentially ten years for sharing copyrighted works over Bittorrent and the like (the new law is for downloading, but a similar law for uploading is already there). Never heard of anyone getting pinched by it though. It's still fucking lunacy.

nullc 14y ago

It's not resilient to such a thing. If you think _anything_ widely used can be, you are woefully underestimating the power of a modern major state. This isn't a question about technology; as much as the geeks love to obsess over it. Technology is just one part. Non-technology attacks are simply much more powerful. E.g. "Anyone caught using Bitcoin will be executed on the spot by large caliber fire from attack helicopters flying far enough away that you can't see or hear them targeting you", and suddenly Bitcoin is only some obscure and irrelevant thing— even outlaws have no use for outlaw 'money'. There is no question of _ability_ to suppress it, only a question of sufficient motivation. And motivation is where it comes up short. Bitcoin is just another thing people can barter. Not different from beanie babies or lumps of coal, and it shouldn't be legally or politically different. This whole weird concept of something being unlawful until proven otherwise must be some kind of crazy fallout from the drug and copyright wars, and I fear that thinking will greatly harm society in the long run. If Bitcoin turns out to be an efficient 'money' then sane and efficient governments should support it: because a more efficient money will make everyone more prosperous. Some people love to feel all counter-culture and subversive with their hobbies, but as disruptive a technology Bitcoin is it's just not politically disruptive. Most of the few establishment risks that go along with Bitcoin apply doubly to cash, the others apply to other valuable commodities that goverments can't just create out of thin air. The motivation to attack just isn't there.

kmm 14y ago
> Non-technology attacks are simply much more powerful. E.g. "Anyone caught using Bitcoin will be executed on the spot by large caliber fire from attack helicopters flying far enough away that you can't see or hear them targeting you", and suddenly Bitcoin is only some obscure and irrelevant thing That's still a technology problem. Make the use of it undetectable. A sufficiently technology savvy Bitcoiner would just wrap his stuff with some encryption and with minimal hassle, you would need to be much faster and harsher to stop them. Besides, if we're assuming civilian execution without trial, then we're not talking about the modern major states. Not a single of the major states could even remotely do such a thing without consequences. The harshest punishments for comparable offences would be for the distribution and possession of child pornography and that is not stopping the offenders, on the contrary.

api 14y ago

I completely agree with your first speculation. I don't think they want to go after these and fail. I think they'd rather have them exist in their present possibly less hardened form and try to monitor and reverse engineer them passively. Attacking them would just harden them.

sausagefeet 14y ago

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/29/1743201/attacking-and-defending-the-tor-network http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/29/1743201/attacking-and...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

lambda 14y ago

Bitcoin could be attacked pretty easily right now. It really isn't big enough to stand a substantial assault from a major government. In part it's due to being too small of a network; while there is a lot of CPU power mining, it would have to grow a couple orders of magnitude before I seriously considered it resilient (an in order for that to happen, the value of Bitcoins will have to grow the same amount, to make mining worthwhile). A DDOS against the top miners and pools, plus a few million dollars in CPU cycles, could probably allow you to successfully fork the block chain. Furthermore, there isn't much of a pure-Bitcoin economy. There are a few things you can buy in Bitcoins, but you cannot make your living in Bitcoins and pay for all of the goods and services you need in Bitcoins. As such, Bitcoin relies on the exchanges to keep the economy going. And there aren't that many of them, and they aren't that resilient. Taking down the top couple of exchanges could devastate the Bitcoin economy. Heck, just taking down Mt.Gox would probably do it. And there are some weaknesses in the current implementation as well. Most discovery of peers is still done through a single centralized IRC channel. There are a few hard-coded peers to bootstrap the network even if the IRC channel is unreachable, but again, for a sufficiently motivated government, that probably wouldn't be too hard to deal with. But you also have to wonder if a government would want to attack Bitcoin. After all, there are a lot of people who think that it's an anonymous method of transferring money, but it really isn't. It's pseudonymous, but the entire history of transactions is publicly available to everyone. With a little bit of knowledge of who own certain keys (by buying or selling from people, using compromised vendors, or the like), you could start to generate some pretty good data on where money is flowing. Given that you also publish your IP publicly, and someone listening into the network could start to watch for which IP addresses initiate certain transactions, a party with sufficient resources could probably de-anonymize a large amount of the transactions that go over Bitcoin. Yes, there are ways to protect yourself; connect to the network via Tor or a proxy, launder the money through online exchanges or wallet services, be careful about breaking up transactions randomly across addresses and time to hide any laundering. But there are many people who are not going to be sufficiently technically savvy or motivated to do all of that. Bitcoin probably provides a lot of interesting data to snoops; why try to shut that down? There are similar arguments for Tor. For one thing, running a Tor exit node and snooping the traffic can get you a lot of interesting data. Given the technical and legal risks of a private citizen running a Tor exit node, I wonder how many of them are run by governments looking for interesting data? Anonymity is pretty hard; there are lots of ways to leak information allowing yourself to be uniquely identified, like browser fingerprinting, forgetting to turn off cookies when using Tor, and the like. There are also reasons why the government might want to encourage the use of Tor and Bitcoin. Remember, Tor was originally funded by the US Naval Research Laboratory. Any type of security or privacy tool can help US interests as much as it can harm spooks. Tor was originally developed to protect government communications, and can be used both by the government's allies as well as its enemies. So, I don't think that Bitcoin or Tor are under serious threat of full-frontal assault from a first world government, nor do I think they could survive such an attack. But I think that said first world governments are probably more interested in keeping them running and keeping an eye on them quietly than very visibly shutting them down.