This person works at an ISP provider in South Africa, he told me that from morning to 8PM only traffic on port 80 is allowed, this is done to prevent torrenting. He told me that if someone wants to use any other port than port 80 he needs to call them and ask for permission to open X port up.
How will this affect Bitcoin?
ISP's could/would deploy packet filters?!? That's just tinfoil hat paranoid. Doh!
No problem. We'll just switch to some other country like South Africa. Doh!
Now it is perfectly possible to tunnel just about anything through just about any port even without active support of the system developers...who in Bitcoin-land seem to view packet filters as a fringe theoretical threat which could not possibly be deployed by our benevolent protectors in corp/gov-land. That's not to say it is trivial, particularly if one wishes to remain undetected in doing so.
As I've always said, I consider the blockchain itself to be safe from attack to a high degree of confidence. The same cannot be said for the actual protocol. I structure my Bitcoin activity with the anticipation that it is possible for the system to become unusable, and even potentially dangerous to attempt to use, for protracted periods of time.
