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The US has shown they are serious about anti-gambling and if this starts taking off The US has NO jurisdiction on many of the Bitcoin exchanges (btcchina.com,

by mrb 14y ago

The US has shown they are serious about anti-gambling and if this starts taking off The US has NO jurisdiction on many of the Bitcoin exchanges (btcchina.com, btc-e.com, bitcoin.de, virwox.com, cavirtex.com, bitcoin-central.net, etc). In fact, if the US were to seize the biggest US-based exchanges (mtgox.com, etc) I would expect the exchange rate to naturally go up on all the other worldwide exchanges, because of the reduced supply of Bitcoins due to the seizure. (The US only represents a fraction of the total Bitcoin economy, so I doubt non-US Bitcoin users would sell in panick.) That is a nice consequence of the fully decentralized nature of Bitcoin. No single government can take it down.

DanBC 14y ago
> The US has NO jurisdiction on many of the Bitcoin exchanges (btcchina.com, btc-e.com, bitcoin.de, virwox.com, cavirtex.com, bitcoin-central.net, etc). The US claim jurisdiction on anything with a .com - and they've seized control of .com domains hosted abroad previously. > No single government can take it down. The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to.
- tomp 14y ago
  > The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to. Care to elaborate?
  - DanBC 14y ago
    There's something called the 51% attack. The attacker generates a blockchain that's larger than the real blockchain. That prevents any transactions being confirmed. To do this the attacker needs as much computing power as the rest of the Bitcoin economy, and they need to want to spend money to destroy Bitcoin. (Because they'd make more money either mining or double spending).
    - mike-cardwell 14y ago
      As much computing power as the entire history of computing power spent on the block chain. They don't just need to exceed the amount of computing power working on bitcoin today, but all of it that has been put into bitcoin since it was started, put together. Even if that did happen, I think bitcoin could recover. All you'd need to do is get everyone to agree on a point in time where the blockchain was untarnished and to reset to then. That would be easier than it sounds, given the small number of existing clients. It would be damaging, but only in the short term.
- mrb 14y ago
  You are naive to think that if btcchina.com would lose their domain they would close shop. They would simply register a .cn or other ccTLD and continue business as usual. "The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to." No they cannot. For the same reason that the US cannot take the illegal drug market down, or cannot take Bittorrent down. Decentralized systems or industries (whether in the digital or real world) are very resilient.
  - DanBlake 14y ago
    They dont need to 'destroy' bitcoin- Only to make it worthless. If 10,000 bitcoins arent even worth 1$ to a user, that is the end of the btc market.

by mrb 14y ago

DanBC 14y ago

> The US has NO jurisdiction on many of the Bitcoin exchanges (btcchina.com, btc-e.com, bitcoin.de, virwox.com, cavirtex.com, bitcoin-central.net, etc). The US claim jurisdiction on anything with a .com - and they've seized control of .com domains hosted abroad previously. > No single government can take it down. The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to.

tomp 14y ago
> The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to. Care to elaborate?
- DanBC 14y ago
  There's something called the 51% attack. The attacker generates a blockchain that's larger than the real blockchain. That prevents any transactions being confirmed. To do this the attacker needs as much computing power as the rest of the Bitcoin economy, and they need to want to spend money to destroy Bitcoin. (Because they'd make more money either mining or double spending).
  - mike-cardwell 14y ago
    As much computing power as the entire history of computing power spent on the block chain. They don't just need to exceed the amount of computing power working on bitcoin today, but all of it that has been put into bitcoin since it was started, put together. Even if that did happen, I think bitcoin could recover. All you'd need to do is get everyone to agree on a point in time where the blockchain was untarnished and to reset to then. That would be easier than it sounds, given the small number of existing clients. It would be damaging, but only in the short term.
mrb 14y ago
You are naive to think that if btcchina.com would lose their domain they would close shop. They would simply register a .cn or other ccTLD and continue business as usual. "The US would find it trivially easy to take down Bitcoin if they wanted to." No they cannot. For the same reason that the US cannot take the illegal drug market down, or cannot take Bittorrent down. Decentralized systems or industries (whether in the digital or real world) are very resilient.
- DanBlake 14y ago
  They dont need to 'destroy' bitcoin- Only to make it worthless. If 10,000 bitcoins arent even worth 1$ to a user, that is the end of the btc market.