Topic: If national firewalls go up (Read 4710 times)

Ya, questionable.  I've not been able to feel compfortable with any particular measure of this.


This! ...captures my attention.  Very interesting in-and-of itself, and also because I don't know what the 'right' answer might be, and also what on earth I would do if I were king no matter what the 'right' answer may be...which makes me damn glad I'll never be king.  I'm pretty sure I could come up with a legitimate argument to go an any number of directions.

Pigeon blockchain-carriers, neeuwee… [awesome sound they make flying]. I like it.

Although it may seem that most of you, guys, grossly overestimate the current ‘governments’ and hype up your ‘opponents’ out of fun it is not all just harmless out-of-barrel theorising, unfortunately.

Let’s say this unease is based on a questionable notion that as the population increases and commonly available resources run out, personal liberties would inevitably be cut down.

(What would certainly be cut down is only man-hour waste - less people would be writing tosh on the forums for example . )

The opinion is that while new technology advances constantly make administration more effective we had now reached limits of such advancement due to the very democracy and personal freedoms we so value, putting ‘government’ group of people in a rather interesting moral position. Now they may wriggle for a bit, even put up a show of high morals (aren’t you tired of hearing every day about how mind-blowingly kind they are to those poor one-eyed Pirates and troubled hisPanic women) but when push comes to shove…

Don’t want to state the obvious, but aren’t we all by then supposed to be either long dead of decadently wasting our new fortunes or [cunningly] prematurely frozen in hope to be defrosted by some Chinese alien relic collector?

Tor would work if the governments were not trying to censor Tor traffic. If they were, you'd need to connect to a secret Tor entry node and use obfsproxy (which is separated from Tor).

Well if they can't stop bittorrent, just release the blockchain updates on torrent

For sure (really!)  I actually believe and have believed from day one that Bitcoin (or something) should be a 'guerilla currency' and that there would be a high value (non-monetarily speaking, so forgive the pun) in the existence such a thing.  Simply having it, and having it be credible, may be enough to ensure that it never really need be deployed in anger.

I must point out though that a crypto-currency for widespread use by the masses will have plenty of thorny technical issues to overcome (chiefly simple scaling) and that needing to also fit though the cracks of a police state security scheme could be quite unwelcome.  The two goals may be to complex an engineering challenge to really be workable.  At least for the mid-term future.

If (and it's a fairly big 'if') Bitcoin is attacked on a multi-national level I don't expect that it will die but rather simply freeze for a time while the 'good guys' get their bearings...which could take some time depending on the level of preperation.  That would suck mostly 1/2 of a handful of people who had active transactions underway.

Whatever firewalls "they" being up, the miners will sneak in that elusive next block, just add some fees and they will find a way for sure.

Wait a minute.
The original question was if the network outside the US was cut off would the blockchain inside the US be forked.

And all the posts have been of the opinion that as long as someone has a 300 baud modem connection to the outside world everything would be fine.

If the government was able to cut off only 80% of bandwidth from outside that means the miners in the US would be mostly communicating to the network within the US. They would be getting blockchain information mostly among themselves. Wouldn't that fork the blockchain?

Isn't that what a 51% attack is all about?

Does this make any sense?

The US government would have to go through a considerable legal fight to run a gulag system in which they (or lamentably, 'we') maim various people...including ones who are completely innocent of anything remotely threatening.

Similarly, it would be quite a legal stretch for the US government to have legal justification kill US citizens anywhere on the face of the earth (including within our boarders) and without oversight from the justice department.

Similarly, trolling through vast seas of personal data would be completely antithetical to the fundamentals of our founding principles.

Or, on the other hand, are these things such a stretch after all???

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FWIW and on a tangent, I hypothesis that a fair part of the Bill of Rights has actually been nullified by an order which is a state secret about a decade ago and that the action itself is a state secret.  This hypothesis can explain a lot of mysterious actions and behaviors and I've yet to be able to invalidate it.  Admittedly invalidation is kind of a game/trick like thing due to the 'state secret' aspect, but I assure the reader that this was unintentional in formation of the hypothesis.

Well I'm in China and BTC still works just fine from here despite a national firewall being very much in place

The US government or whatever other country was stupid enough to try something like this would fail pretty hard even with the manpower allocated to the Great Firewall here they can't keep up. Sure tor and facebook are blocked in a few places here but then you use a new node and the net is back.

The US government would have to go through a considerable legal fight to put such thing in place.

But, assuming they've done it (or assuming we're talking about a shameless dictatorship), and assuming they want to forbid bitcoin, they don't need to stop there (forbid international connections).
It's relatively easy to track down most bitcoin nodes, as is the case with all p2p networks I'm aware of. So, a totalitarian government trying to block a particular p2p network would not only block foreign access, but would also cut Internet access of every internal IP it sees running a node in this p2p network - that's what France is doing right now, cutting Internet access of those who use p2p file sharing to upload copyrighted content. In the case of France it seems the effect is more modest since they are required to prove that you actually was uploading a particular forbidden content, and they don't cut your access immediately, it seems you're given some warnings before. A more unscrupulous government could just shut you down for running the p2p node. Eventually even put a few people in jail just to make an example.
Using p2p darknets as Tor or I2P to avoid being seen may not be enough, as the same attack could be done against such networks - I read somewhere that it's already very difficult to access Tor from within China, as all relays and most bridges are blocked.

That would make running such p2p node so difficult and dangerous inside this jurisdiction, that only a small percentage of the population would have the technical skills to do it - not to mention the guts to take the risk.

It's sad, but while governments can control ISPs, they can do considerable damage, even to p2p networks as bitcoin.

I'm someone who actually has used a modem and degraded POTS line in the recent memory.  That might help to explain my agitation over uncontrolled block chain bloat.

As it happens, I also have a better than average exposure to backbone network topologies and various filtering techniques.  This make me paranoid that it may be possible to disrupt just about any network traffic deamed in need of disruption...up to and including all unrecognized encrypted traffic.  It would be difficult on various fronts (technical, political, economic) but theoretically possible and in a sufficient 'emergency' populations will tolorate a fair amount of pain.

I doubt that any Bitcoin-like system could cope with the challenges which could be thrown at it with complete grace.  But I also believe that if Bitcoin is not at least considering some of the potential challenges and the considerations are factoring into core implementation decisions then Bitcoin itself makes a quantum shift in terms of it's potential (in my mind at least.)

Someone takes a flash drive to each continent. Done.

Yep, in that case my personal bitcoind will have you guys covered.  My work network has endpoints in New Zealand (Where I am located), LA (the US) and Ireland (EU).  I would imagine there are a few bitcoind daemons connected like that (at least I hope so, I dont want the sole responsibility to keep bitcoin internationaly linked  ) .

Sadly it does seem to be the case.  I credit the MSM and influences which guide their direction as much anything for this unfortunate reality.

I can't believe I missed this bullsh*t.  There are, in fact, at least three points in Alaska that a person standing on the ground can actually see Russian territory; that fact that this statement was not intended to be taken literally notwithstanding.

Good God, some people are just sucked into the whole MSM image machine.  Do people really think that anyone that can get elected to any governorship in America is actually stupid?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/09/can_you_really_see_russia_from_alaska.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing

jajaja can´t stop laughing man, great idea and hope we never have to use it. A mesh network, like a parallel internet of some kind, of Foneras with OpenWrt and ROBIN would be great but in my city I think 1 person of 1000 heard about it. Shame on us

If they do this, then I expect bitcoins to become the most popular thing overnight. People will run away from all the controls. Remember guys, the government can't even keep drugs out of prison. I doubt they can prevent all bits from leaking.

18 to 24 days, thats about how long it would take to go from US to europe

but if i was going to transfer that much id upgrade to 60megabit consumer grade and it would only take 8 to 14 days, business around here can get a full 100megabit, both are unlimited. however upload would take weeks, in that case you would rent a box with 100mbit each way, with the box it would transfer way more data and be a lot easier. it would likely cost more but not much. and after shipping them HDs could only be used at most 5 times reliably.

edit: only at most 24 seconds assuming they are gigabit optic.

If carrier pigeons are the answer, Bitcoin isn't the problem.

How long does it take and how much does it cost to download 3 TB over sub Atlantic cable? Now compare it with shipping via fedex a 3TB HDD. This is what I mean.