My reaction: stop spreading FUD.
Commercial broadband providers are monitoring and manipulating users traffic. This is not some 'moon landing' consipricy theory. It's happening now.
maybe you are talking about something else but ... ISP's have manipulated P2P traffic in the past but that was at levels way above what Bitcoin uses. That was that whole Network Neutrality thing. These days some ISP's still claim they need to do throttling because of all the bandwidth being used but the reality is it is a revenue generating thing because they want to push people into a metered service. I actually testified at the class action court hearings for this issue because Comast blocked some of my ports and forced me to get a higher level of service because I run my own e-mail server.
So the issue is whether you have or don't have p2p communication, not the amount of p2p traffic when you are talking about Bitcoin. The blocksize is not really an issue as far as ISP throttling p2p traffic is concerned.
The things which concern me most are deep packet inspection and targeted blocking. These have been toyed with off and on in the US, and are under active use in other countries. I have zero confidence that one 'cyber-attack' would not sway a majority of people to support whatever means are necessary to stop 'al-quida' or whoever the baddies are advertised to be. Especially if the filtering left their porn and media theft habits available. Nor do I believe that it would be technically unfeasible to filter with enough effectiveness to throw a wrench into the workings of many systems including Bitcoin.
If the infrastructure required to operate Bitcoin needs to be of commercial grade to be effective, I believe that the task of disrupting it would be even more simple. Again, that would just require a law, and a law would just require an emergency. Such an emergency does not even have to be a 'false flag' for those who are not prone to conspiracy theories.
You might argue that Bitcoin is global and can survive be packing up and moving to a 'free' country. I say that very few countries are not going to feel some threat to their own financial infrastructure posed by a robust Bitcoin and it may be hard to find a welcome home. The countries which are not set up to quash 'threats' such as Bitcoin and are not under pretty strong influence of a powerful external political body are rare...and I believe that you've find a dearth of datacenter and backbone fiber within their jurisdictions.
You might argue that people will switch en-mas to using cryptography and other forms of cloaking. I will say that it will hasten the requirement for traffic which is not auditable by authorities to be blocked.
You might say that it will damage legitimate uses, industry, etc. I will say you've got 90 days to re-compile or use the solution provided by a certified vendor. Nobody is going to hunt down illegal crypto users...just flip a switch and start blocking traffic. That is kind of a checkmate unless I want to make the argument that I don't trust the government, and that's going to be a loser in certain very possible environments.
You might argue that it has not happened yet and we won the strong crypto battle of two decades ago and SOPA recently so we're all good. I will argue that it was a close call in both cases, the adversaries learned lessons for their next attacks and learned that it is possible to make some pretty good lemonade out of the lemons that we delivered in those to instances. In short, "it ain't over yet."
Or you might just be a pimple-face Internet tough guy who will state the acronym 'tor' to solve any problem. If so, you are likely to end up being an Internet tough guy with a dead internet connection. Good luck using Bitcoin in that state.
---
Now I do believe that there will be plenty of technically inclined people will be able to move with relative freedom through almost any conceivable network environment. How much 'guts' they will need is the main question. My whole thing about the block size comes down the difficulties of moving through a hostile environment while trying to pack a big load of data.
It is important to note that I'm not talking about today's legal and cultural environment. Obviously Bitcoin can scale hugely under the environment we enjoy today. I'm looking down the road and asking 'then what' under certain changes which are, I am pretty certain, distinct possibilities. If the Bitcoin Foundation is doing such forward threat analysis, they are doing a damn bad job of communicating it, and if they are not, they are negligent in my opinion.
---
It just hit me that it is the case that many animals when they wish to quit a fight will lay prostrate and 'expose their jugular'. This is an indication to the winner that the loser no longer poses a threat. In short, it is the ultimate demonstration of good will. I wonder if the Bitcoin Foundation is, in an effort to demonstrate goodwill to the authorities, putting themselves (and us) into such a position (by laying defenseless against certain forms of attack.) If so, I think this is a totally wrong strategy. I think that Bitcoin should maintain a cordial relationship with the authorities and make good faith efforts to comply with reasonable requests, but should (and could) operate from a position of power. Centralization and reliance on corporate controlled systems is a position of extreme weakness whereas full and credible p2p is an expression of extreme strength and possibly enough to actually win the war which seems likely to at some point be fought.
