Topic: Epicenter Bitcoin interview - Mike Hearn (Read 2277 times)

so have some money in stocks and some in bitcoin. then you win no matter what happens.

When number 2 will happen the corp/gov state (I am sure that you are talking mainly about US here and not considering the rest of the countries) won't be able to do anything. Most of the US senate/gov is backed up by corporate money and when they will shift towards bitcoin the gov will be naked.


Ok. So you know the comments and your points are valid. Fair enough. US is really a joke state when it comes to this shit. Yes I am aware that they are also the greatest nation in the world and that they got us many many good things that can't compare with the other countries, but stuff like this and many others will also get them the fall even if they think that they are invincible.

Yes, I do know the comments. They were listed in a secret subpeona that got leaked. More info, along with explanations why the comments are not threats and perfectly legal can be found here:

https://popehat.com/2015/06/08/department-of-justice-uses-grand-jury-subpoena-to-identify-anonymous-commenters-on-a-silk-road-post-at-reason-com/

One example is:

No, but retroactive paranoia is notoriously ineffective.

Suppose Alice and Bob both run Bitcoin full nodes. Alice is paranoid and runs her node over Tor. Bob thinks she's nuts and runs his in the clear. He doesn't believe there's any risk that a tyrannical government will use the fact that he runs a Bitcoin node to target him and use it as an excuse to punish him (perhaps for something unrelated in his personal life, like multiple visits to an island with Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein).

Two futures are possible:

Alice is right. Bob goes to prison and Alice doesn't.
Bob is right. Neither goes to prison. Bob gets to keep fucking kids with Bill Clinton.

In both possible futures Alice was the prudent one, not to mention that Bob was a pedo who should be taken out back and shot and end up in a special place in hell.

PS: tvbcof beat me to the punch with his "two basic possibilities" post above. I should've typed faster.

I see two basic possibilities:

 1) Everything remains peaches and cream in fiat-land.

  1R)  Bitcoin serves no particularly useful role.  Remains a minor sideshow which cannot compete successfully with Mastercard, PayPal, cash, etc because it does some fraction of what these things do for mainstream users only worse.


 2)  There is disruption in fiat-land.

  2R)  Bitcoin provides an accessible (unlike gold) means of wealth preservation for the non-politically-favored.  In that case it will be attacked by the corp/gov state with no holds barred and some abstract ideas about 'freedom to use Bitcoin' will be among the last of the rights that people will be worried about having lost.


A non-defensible Bitcoin is something I haven't much interest in personally, but whatever floats your boat.

With respect to TOR, the govt doesn't need to outlaw it to kill it; ceasing to fund it would probably be sufficient to accomplish this.  One of the few places I agree with Hearn on is that some reliance on TOR is worth sacrificing much to achieve.  If Bitcoin cannot feasibly run on some combination of a privately maintained and somewhat covert networks and steganographic methods on corporate owned networks, it can easily be degraded to the point of uselessness.  And probably will be just in time for it's having some actually useful role in the world.

edit: added 'cash' to the list which is highly relevant in that context.

Well this is what I call "knowing only half of the information". Do you know what were the actual comments that started this targeting?

Regarding nodes. Do you see a massive increase in people that get arrested for being a peer in the torrent network? Because I don't.

You're probably right. Yesterday I was probably extra paranoid because I saw the story that commenters on an article at Reason about the Silk Road were being targetted by a government prosecutor. In the light of the morning, I can see it's a little outlandish to think that the government will start targetting people because they ran a bitcoin full node. That would be like government revenue agencies targetting people because of their political activism. We're fortunate enough to live in a time and place when that sort of thing doesn't happen.

/s

its a possible scenario..comes down to people's level of awareness and
tolerance for BS whether people will accept that kind of nanny state.
With Bitcoin, at least it is an open system and they cannot enforce
things they way they can with the banking system today.  So it
will be up to the people if they want to be free or not. 

All corporate entities operate at the pleasure of the state and are easily brought under the same pressure.

Making and API call to a validation service would add only an unnoticeable amount of time to a transaction so the only excuse that a would-be Bitcoin enabled retailer (for instance) would have would be loss of customers.  But it would be remarkably easy to argue that people who won't property validate their coins are probably criminals and terrorists so why should they not?  A strong majority of the population would buy that argument.  Fuck, a decent percentage of today's Bitcoin users themselves probably would!

The only way to win this battle would be to enlist the support of power-players to put pressure on the state to lay off.  Individuals simply don't have the pull even in our Democracy.  Lots and lots of individuals love big brother exactly as they are trained to do and would attack something which threatened him anyway.  Power-players might find the idea of breaking the Federal Reserve's monopoly on money supply and taking a piece of the action very tempting and thus apply the kind of pressure to the state that they respond to.  This is one of the hopes I have for sidechains.

Attacking at the point of fiat transfer is a target, true.... Call me an optimist but I don't think blacklisting will have any stick, even if full node operation becomes more centralized.

John Kenneth Galbraith famously stated in describing a debt-based fiat currency,
[white|black]listing is the same deal.  The government simply tells (say) Coinbase that they need to retain the services of a chartered authority such as (say) CoinValidation if they want to do business in the United States.  You think Mellon-Waters-n-crew just went away?  Doubt it.  My strong suspicion is that they are waiting in the wings for Hearn to get his part done.

What do you mean by operators?  Miners?  Exchanges?  I hear what you are saying but I don't see that 'their' attack can work. 

The fact that very few run through Tor makes your statement brainless and useless. I haven't heard of anyone having problems, but maybe you know something that I don't or you are just spreading useless FUD.

To make changes one only needs consensus of infrastructure operators.  Offering them the option of remaining in business and supplied with the necessary bandwidth on one hand, and confiscating their (fairly expensive) gear and throwing them in jail on the other is a good way to obtain consensus. 

Note that blacklisting/whitelisting can be done completely outside of Bitcoin as a separate layer.  That is why bloat and growth is being pushed so hard.  The fewer people who can operate the infrastructure the easier it will be to intimidate them, and the more resources they need the more prone they are to intimidation and the harder it is for them to hide.

People think they are going to 'boycott' operators who honor blacklists/whitelists.  No they are not.  Even if they can find any who remain in business, blacklisted or non-whitelisted BTC will be less usable and command less value.  A few people are going to be willing to take the bullet and give face value for such coins, and those who do will immediately find their stash increasingly tainted.  That is why economically literate people are screaming from the roof-tops about fungibility.

The bloatchain push is the 'extend' part of the classic 'embrace, extend, extinguish' attack.  [white|black]listing will be the extinguish part and it will come not long after.

Ok, well then if he thinks he's going to get consensus on blacklisting, he's dreaming.

The whole point of bloating the blockchain is to arrange for a situation where your 'support' doesn't matter a whole lot.

I think few in this community would disagree with me when I say Hearn can bite my shiny metal ass if thinks I'll ever support blacklisting.

Another disturbing point: Hearn said very few bitcoin nodes are run through Tor. I don't know if that's true, but I think people who run full nodes from an IP that can be traced to them are very naive.

One part of the interview that concerned me: they asked Mike Hearn if he planned to give control of XT over to Gavin Andresen, and Hearn avoided giving a direct answer. It feels a little like witnessing a coup.

easy, I was smiling.

I mentioned SideChains in this context, because testing dangerous new features it is precisely what Adam Back envisioned SC for, among other things.

That said, bitcoin has a test network, bitcoin core has a currently used test suite and Gavin hacked bitcoin core to deal with 20MB blocks and tested it
using the real blockchain txs, you can look at http://gavintech.blogspot.it/2015/01/twenty-megabytes-testing-results.html

Surely this is not enough, though.

So you are telling me that since 2008 we didn't have any testing environment and that we had to wait for a new environment that is currently in alpha mode to be able to test stuff? Is this real life? Because I simply can't believe it!

Why don't we have a testing environment? It appears that nobody can answer this and this is surprising me. I am panicked right now!