Topic: Can the U.S. government meddle with BitCoin code? - page 2. (Read 5287 times)

X.509 for the de-anonymising win.

Unless you got a source for those #s, you just pulled them out of your ass.

Although you can say people can choose not to update to their fork.
But how much willpower an average citizen has?

Government can always manipulate average joe's mind with media, if lots of normal people are using bitcoin qt, the government can easily convince them to use their fork.
So next time when you are convincing others to use bitcoins, take a moment and remind yourself why we need bitcoins. The currency is meant to wake the people up, not to make quick money.

Is there even a single example of a hashing algorithm with a backdoor?

There's no proof that such a market really exists in any currency.

For all we know, 99.9% of the child porn market is just sting operations selling to other sting operations, serving no purpose other than to keep a convenient digital bogeyman around to demolish inconvenient civil rights.

if the NSA could use heartbleed for anything useful, then why did they need to contact google to get DPR's emails. why did they then contact the UK's GCHQ to brute force password break DPR's files??

Because the NSA are not as great as they claim. so chill out.

NSA dont have a backdoor into sha256

There is no proof of a widespread market for CP in BTC though. There is certainly proof for black markets that deal in CP for UDS.

They could've modified the downloadable binary and force a dev to sign the compiled binary so that it looks legit. Not sure how fast a slight modification would've been noticed this way.

Checking the code and diffing it with previous releases would show nothing nefarious, and compiling from source and comparing it to the released binary might as well not work very well, as I guess different environments have different build environments and builds will be slightly different unless environments are duplicated exactly?

So the change in the binary might for instance allow siphoning of private keys to an adversary. And if the adversary was careful, stealing of coins could go on slowly as not to raise too much suspicion, or it could be used to just control bitcoin addresses, and then freeze them once it's necessary. Ie. 'freezing' it by transferring coins using the stolen private keys.

I don't know if there currently is any process whereby the binaries released are checked by several parties before they're ok'ed. The Sha256 checksums and pgp signature only proves that the holder of that signature has vouched for those checksums.

There should ideally be some 'paranoid bitcoin' project, or better yet several of them serving as watchdogs alerting the larger community once something nefarious happens.

Ideally to stay safe, one should always diff a new release against a previous release by checking what code is added, then understand this code and ensure nothing nefarious has been added, and then compile it yourself.

But how could one be sure that eventually sometime some distributor of a linux system doesn't distribute it with a compiler that will insert some nefarious code once it discovers that a bitcoin binary is being made.

There's a lot of trust we need to place in other people - and if you become too paranoid, you could worry about details all day long.

Where are you getting the data from for the blackmarkets? And CP is most certainly being bought and sold with BTC, just like it is with dollars and Paypal too, but of course the government will signal its illicit uses out to make their point.

if this true im sure hackers would have done so, and if not then we are safe. im sure bitcoin would have fallien by now

You cannot prove that however, the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL was introduced to Bitcoin despite the pleading of many members to just use PGP private keys to authenticate connections.


If you calculate the worth of the top 10 marketplaces on the dark web you get 1.25%, as it stands we have no reason to believe that Bitcoin assassinations or sale of arms is taking place. I have never seen any evidence suggesting that pedophilia is being funded with BTC.

The USD black market is worth 29.75% according to their calculations.

It all comes down to what the miners do.

Interesting.  Please explain how you calculated this or give us a link to the calculation.

Enough qualified people constantly monitor the changes that are made to the code.  Anything even the slightest bit hinky would be spotted and removed or, failing that, virally exposed all over these boards, Redit, etc.

There is no way the goobermint could put something directly in the code without us finding out about it.

Libraries are a different matter (eg Heartbleed in OpenSSL) but that was an implementation bug in a library used by the Bitcoin software and not a deliberate attempt to change to the Bitcoin protocol.

No but they are working by other means such as either buying off or infiltrating software companies in order to introduce vulnerabilities that favor them. (aka the OpenSSL bug which was introduced to Bitcoin despite the fact of having a huge additional attack vector)

The Bitcoin Foundation have also voiced their intentions of helping the CIA fight Bitcoin funded pedophilia (by which means?) which is huge anti-Bitcoin propaganda. If you run a simple calculation the Bitcoin black market is currently worth 2% of its economy (and all of it is drugs, we have no proof to believe otherwise) versus the nearly 30% black market of USD which includes organ sale, children, pedophilia, human trafficking, weapons of mass destruction etc etc.

True that. That's the thing for me. There are so many ways for us to resist that destroying bitcoin could not be done in a cost effective way. Mess with BTC and it will just mutate into a harder to control form. It's why I think we have already largely won the war.

I will not. Want to trade? Ok then it's on again. Bye bye govbtc.

well i am sure my mother would welcome the govbtc just as she accepts fiat under pretext of security

then expect that governments can mess with the protocol. but as said before, know it wont last forever.. possibly a few days of problems or a decision to move over to litecoin permanently. either way the government wont win in the end.

It is good if only one qualified person reads it. It can't be me; so it's true that I must trust someone else, but I do.

wrong. open source is only good if the majority bother to read it.

i know for sure that 99.9% of people have not read the code line by line... and that is the flaw, lazyness