Thirdly, as for the interaction of law and permissionless block chain smart contract outcomes, the law will not be able to reverse the outcome of a permissionless block chain, so the law will irrelevant.
One might point out that if a block chain is resistant to control by the law, then anonymity protocol should also be immune to the law. However, the distinction is that the governments can regulate their own citizens and require they reveal their transactions. I think it is nearly impossible to prevent the NSA from tracking our metadata.
It is true that without the control over 51% of the hashrate (the miners) in order to fork the protocol to enforce something like MIT's ChainAnchor, the government might have difficult gaining complete complliance:
1. The protocol change can in theory eventually be implemented on Bitcoin (and even Monero once it scales up) because Satoshi's block chain design centralizes. With a block chain design which doesn't centralize, it becomes more difficult to implement such a protocol change. A block chain should be practically unforkable. One of the issues that my design fixes, is that the miners are everyone, not just a few farms in known locations. The governments are not very successful when they try to regulate end users, because some people are hard-headed and there are always outliers who disobey and take their chances which causes others to become emboldened and copy them. The government can't stop what becomes popular and which is a leaky sieve (e.g. decentralized file sharing). They need a smaller set of entities (the miners) to regulate. Don't give up yet, I still have something to offer as a potential solution.
However, my point is that the government forcing users to reveal their transactions does not force a protocol change. The government doesn't need to force the block chain to change its data. Whereas, I contrasted this above with the outcomes of smart contracts on the block chain, where the law can't force the block chain to change its data (e.g. to force some money to be credited to another party). Of course the law could compel some user to pay another user something, but this would not undo the result of the smart contract in terms of the congruence of the data on the block chain with the rules of the contract. Any risk of intervention by the law will be factored by humans who use smart contracts.
My prior posts that are relevant:
TPTB will allow a privacy coin and use it for themselves so they can hide their wealth, but they will demand they have the viewkey for all of us. Btw, the best technology for anonymity appears to be Zcash, because the anonymity set is the all tokens. But I don't yet know how the viewkey will work on Zcash, someone may need to fork the technology and add a better viewkey. Monero/Cryptonote/RingCT is a weaker technology and overlapping rings could in theory break the anonymity. That is why I didn't appreciate your bullshit when you tried to pump Monero as being better than Zcash.
The only possible way to counter TPTB, is if the masses want something which TPTB can't give them. The masses want privacy, but they don't want anonymity and to destruct taxes, governance, and socialism. I argued to generalizethis recently that just paying our tax on each transaction anonymously would not be sufficient, because governance is a power vacuum (winner-take-all) and since we will never have a uniform distribution of wealth, it will always be the case that the peons want TPTB to steal from the collective on their behalf and thus it will always be the case that TPTB must know what all the millionaires are doing so they can keep them down and prevent them from rising to compete with TPTB. This is why anonymity without a mandatory viewkey for TPTB will not be a sustainable nor mass adopted direction.
The only possible way to counter TPTB, is if the masses want something which TPTB can't give them. The masses want privacy, but they don't want anonymity and to destruct taxes, governance, and socialism. I argued to generalizethis recently that just paying our tax on each transaction anonymously would not be sufficient, because governance is a power vacuum (winner-take-all) and since we will never have a uniform distribution of wealth, it will always be the case that the peons want TPTB to steal from the collective on their behalf and thus it will always be the case that TPTB must know what all the millionaires are doing so they can keep them down and prevent them from rising to compete with TPTB. This is why anonymity without a mandatory viewkey for TPTB will not be a sustainable nor mass adopted direction.
When China's mining oligarchy can implement MIT's ChainAnchor which turns off your ability to spend unless you comply with your local government's taxation and capital controls, then where Bitcoin is accepted is less relevant than whether it is no longer a permissionless system.
In order for Bitcoin to scale, the mining must become (already is!) centralized. Blockstream's SegWit makes that even more so.
A centralized control over which transactions are allowed, is not an alternative to fiat. It is just fiat by another name or metaphor.
In order for Bitcoin to scale, the mining must become (already is!) centralized. Blockstream's SegWit makes that even more so.
A centralized control over which transactions are allowed, is not an alternative to fiat. It is just fiat by another name or metaphor.