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Like goverments banning drugs stopped people from using drugs.
by jerguismi 14y ago
Like goverments banning drugs stopped people from using drugs.
- tsotha 14y agoBitcoins will be much easier to stop than drugs.
- moe 14y agoAnd how exactly would that work? Do you expect all governments of the world to collectively agree on a ban of digital currencies? When was the last time all governments of the world agreed on anything? Bitcoin's future is certainly uncertain, but I doubt its demise will stem from this angle.
- betterunix 14y agoHow hard do you think it would be for the US or Chinese governments to amass the computing power needed to maliciously fork the Bitcoin block chain? You are looking at what, $20 million of ASICs? $30 million? Let's be completely unrealistic and say $100 million. That is less than a tenth of what the government spent on the NSA's new datacenter in Utah. It's pocket change, barely even a blip on the budget of the US government. It requires a very small commitment of personnel and no fieldwork at all, and no real agreement from any other countries. If we called Bitcoin a money-laundering scam, if we attacked under the guise of evidence gathering (just reversing transactions so criminals won't get paid by our cops), I doubt many countries would object even if their citizens lost money in the process. That is just with the known, well-documented polynomial time attack on Bitcoin. Given that there is no security proof and little formal analysis of the Bitcoin protocol, and not even the kind of heuristic analysis we rely on for block ciphers and efficient hash functions, I seriously doubt that an attack would even require that much effort.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoWhy bother doing that when you can just hack or seize exchanges? If MtGox and the next 20 largest bitcoin exchanges get shut down how much more difficult would using bitcoins be?
- guard-of-terra 14y agoMany exchanges are outside of their jurisdictions. They'll need to call in favours. And favours are money.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoSo they maliciously fork block chain, now what? Surely, they can double spend their money, but it doesn't affect my coins as long as I don't to transactions with them. They can't kill bitcoin: the moment they leave life returns to normal. If they don't leave, bitcoin client will learn to reject their blocks.
- betterunix 14y agoSo if you knew people were double spending the currency, you would just shrug it off and continue trusting that currency?
- guard-of-terra 14y agoI still have my coins and can sit on them and then decide.
- moe 14y agoThe original argument was about governments making bitcoin de facto illegal. That's quite different from a deliberate attack. As said, I agree that bitcoin may be heading for trouble, I just disagree it will happen through legislation. And more generally I disagree it will happen by a third party deliberately disrupting it (either via legislation, the 51% attack or by other means). For a simple reason: A collapse of bitcoin (for any reason) will inevitably spawn a new, more resilient crypto-currency. The exact opposite of what the attacker was looking to achieve.
- baddox 14y agoAre you serious? I would say that the opposite is true.
- tsotha 14y agoWhy?
- baddox 14y agoBecause drugs are physical items that must be exchanged in person or sent across distances. For bitcoin transactions, literally all you need is two people on the planet with computers that are connected to each other on a network.
- tsotha 14y agoRight. On a network governments have access to.
- lukifer 14y agoVPNs are cheap.
- tsotha 14y agoVPNs can be made illegal if necessary. That's already the case in some countries. I think people generally grossly underestimate the reach of the government when it comes to the internet. Ultimately they can change the very foundation of the net if they see a compelling reason.
- lukifer 14y agoA cryptography cat-and-mouse game would be very, very interesting; secure channels can be used to secretly architect new channels, whereas broken channels can uncover secret methods and identify nodes in order to break more channels. (I suppose it's not much different than the Drug War or WW2; most wars revolve heavily around information.) It would take some serious marketing effort to convince most Americans that encrypted communication must imply criminality, but sadly, it could be done.
- iso8859-1 14y agoGiven that child pornography is government enemy #1 and still runs rampant on Tor, I doubt this.
- dublinben 14y agoCP is hardly "government enemy #1." Terrorism is. You do not see one hundredth the attention or money of anti-terrorism activities directed towards 'protecting children.'
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- illuminate 14y agoExactly. Besides, it takes very little money and resources to seek out and capture the traders of such materials.
- tsotha 14y agoChild pornography isn't even on the top ten list. It doesn't threaten anybody's rice bowl. A crusade against child porn might get you elected, but actually doing something about it doesn't matter to governments. If it did they would have shut Tor down already.