Would international airtravel also be forbidden? And would the US finally manage to close down it's land borders?
If the answer to either one is no, the blockchain could still get updated both ways via sneakernet, you would have to raise the threshold to confirm a block getting cracked and transfers being cleared, but overall not much would change (in regards to Bitcoin, other things in the Internet would have significantly more issues).
Topic: If national firewalls go up - page 2. (Read 4709 times)
well i was thinking of more than just blocks, more like general raw data like secret leaked papers over 10k pages long and such.
latency yes, bandwidth no
In a scenario where the USA puts up a national firewall preventing miners/clients in the USA connecting with miners/clients elsewhere, would the blockchain fork into a USA chain and a rest of the world chain? And if so, would my current bitcoins be spendable independently on both chains? And then what would happen when the firewall came down again?
A great firewall of EU is also currently being discussed.
We can use an updated version of RFC 1149 "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers". Have pigeons carry the encrypted and signed block chains on USB memory sticks to miners over seas. US air force fighter jets must be avoided at all costs for reliable operation.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
latency would kill us and bandwidth would cost a buttload of BC.
You should be more worried about someone gaining over 50% of the network, that is much more likely than the US just deciding to attempt such a thing, and near impossible for them to achieve this goal.
If this became an issue, the bitcoin devs could just build gpu mining in the client. this should be set to turn on automatically, opt out only. then we would have a huge amount of people mining now, it would be far more power than any government could get. id estimate even all the cpu power would be enough.I am busy hedging against exactly this possibility LOL.
Bitcoin is hardly being tapped as it is now. if BC does become global or even used in only a few countries, i really doubt you could own even 30%.
everyone who has a hacked console will eventually get ports of bitcoin, a ps3 alone would have at least 100mh/s of hashing power per unit, assuming it can use its gpu power.
assume on average 10mh per computer.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p23-207.pdf says 44m has computers with internet assume only 20m want money.
200000000mh/s is what you get with only 20m, thats just half of what the census says at only 10mh per computer.
thats around 150-200 terahashes/s, if i calculate right.
i would like to see you have anything close to 3 terahashes/s
if you even tried to buy that much power you would inflate the prices of gpus so high you simply would not be able to afford it.
this all assumes that bitcoin becomes mainstream and people are willing and do install the mainline software and don't disable the miner. and this does invade ethics, but it would be required to prevent a single entity from abusing power.
You should be more worried about someone gaining over 50% of the network, that is much more likely than the US just deciding to attempt such a thing, and near impossible for them to achieve this goal.
If this became an issue, the bitcoin devs could just build gpu mining in the client. this should be set to turn on automatically, opt out only. then we would have a huge amount of people mining now, it would be far more power than any government could get. id estimate even all the cpu power would be enough.I am busy hedging against exactly this possibility LOL.
You should be more worried about someone gaining over 50% of the network, that is much more likely than the US just deciding to attempt such a thing, and near impossible for them to achieve this goal.
If this became an issue, the bitcoin devs could just build gpu mining in the client. this should be set to turn on automatically, opt out only. then we would have a huge amount of people mining now, it would be far more power than any government could get. id estimate even all the cpu power would be enough. 
You should be more worried about someone gaining over 50% of the network, that is much more likely than the US just deciding to attempt such a thing, and near impossible for them to achieve this goal.
And face it, if the government actually put up a nationwide firewall that worked by a whitelist (in which event encryption and the like wouldn't help) then we'd have a new government pretty soon in all likelihood... and even if we didn't, there's so many alternate ways available to send data. Shortwave radio signals might even become interesting again!
I guess I was thinking of this kind of scenario: dollar collapses, US can't repay china, precursor to WWIII is a cyberwar, national internets bolted right down, diplomatic pull back from the brink, national internets reopened after 7 days closed, everyone happy again. Will there be lots of national blockchains suddenly competing against each other for the longest one?
I expend some cycles thinking about attacks on the global internet from time to time. My thoughts always seem to come back to there being a reasonably high likelihood of a successful and lasting attack under two conditions:
1) Pretty much 100% of governments are on-board and coordinating. Thus, if it can somehow be the case that some relatively important country or coalition of countries have some interest served by not cooperating, that would be a good thing.
2) If countries were willing to take very drastic measures to impose their will (i.e., a bullet in the head), _and_ if life was otherwise tolerable without a free internet, I am not sure that there would be a sufficient core of people to keep a mesh network or whatever functional. I doubt that it will ever be difficult to track down 'terrorist' who are committing the crime of communicating with one another and 'putting the country at risk.' A country with a developed and technically competent police state infrastructure could likely do so within seconds. I think that the best counter to this is to work on things now which would make such assertions of 'public risk' appear as clownish and contrived to the general public as they would actually be.
1) Pretty much 100% of governments are on-board and coordinating. Thus, if it can somehow be the case that some relatively important country or coalition of countries have some interest served by not cooperating, that would be a good thing.
2) If countries were willing to take very drastic measures to impose their will (i.e., a bullet in the head), _and_ if life was otherwise tolerable without a free internet, I am not sure that there would be a sufficient core of people to keep a mesh network or whatever functional. I doubt that it will ever be difficult to track down 'terrorist' who are committing the crime of communicating with one another and 'putting the country at risk.' A country with a developed and technically competent police state infrastructure could likely do so within seconds. I think that the best counter to this is to work on things now which would make such assertions of 'public risk' appear as clownish and contrived to the general public as they would actually be.
How about just via email or twitter (splitting the blocks down to fit) or msn or heck like the joke RFC TCP over Social Network using Facebook 
that's not nearly as cool as setting up massive mesh networks.
How about just via email or twitter (splitting the blocks down to fit) or msn or heck like the joke RFC TCP over Social Network using Facebook
Blockchain by short-wave? Packet Radio?
But of course, if such things come to pass we'll have more problems than just how to connect to the rest of the world.
But of course, if such things come to pass we'll have more problems than just how to connect to the rest of the world.
National firewalls aren't likely to have any real effect on Bitcoin, or for that matter, anything else that people would want to block. Encryption at a protocol level solves a hell of a lot of problems, for starters. And face it, if the government actually put up a nationwide firewall that worked by a whitelist (in which event encryption and the like wouldn't help) then we'd have a new government pretty soon in all likelihood... and even if we didn't, there's so many alternate ways available to send data. Shortwave radio signals might even become interesting again!
Someone could create a wireless connection from Alaska to Russia and act as a bridge. Sarah Palin says she can see the "other side" from her home...
That wasn't Russia, it was a cerebral hemorrhage. (It's kinda hard to come up with another explanation for someone who can figure out we have elections, but is otherwise so unbelievably stupid...)
nahh.. a few "backbone" bitcoin nodes will connect via ssh tunnels/VPN's and that's it.
They are gonna need to shutdown a bunch of satellites and cut a bunch of undersea cables to get somewhere.
In the end of the day (unlike bittorrent) we can dig up old modems and FIDO tech. As long as one can place a phone call bitcoin is going to keep working.
They are gonna need to shutdown a bunch of satellites and cut a bunch of undersea cables to get somewhere.
In the end of the day (unlike bittorrent) we can dig up old modems and FIDO tech. As long as one can place a phone call bitcoin is going to keep working.
Someone could create a wireless connection from Alaska to Russia and act as a bridge. Sarah Palin says she can see the "other side" from her home...
EME would be unnecessarily difficult and unreliable. It would be much simpler just to send the data over HF.
I don't think that eme would work well, it would have a lot of latency, and would still be difficult to get a signal from NA to EUR. because the earth is a sphere, it is not visible from everywhere at the same time. im sure at certain times of the day you would take advantage of this, but not all the time. for BC to work well, we need it to be up 24/7 with few times of interruptions, because in just 30 minutes the chain could fork.
This is Tasty, right now you have the chance to learn something that will completely negate any question as to whether or not any country's authoritarian nature could possibly do something to this degree.
-What you are about to read, may just blow your fraking mind. xD
-This information has monetary value. xD
-There is no spoiler tag here so the only choice you have is whether or not to read what comes next.
-The ideas you gather and mix inside your braincase after having read this, may even help to cure Our Planet. B)
-The obligatory donation address for this sweet set of information.
1CRcJUNAPvHYd888jLiwRZacwSQDNSFPfh
Moon Bounce. (EME)
Earth-Moon-Earth communications
This is the terminology for bouncing a radio signal off of, The MOON.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EME_(communications
Maybe, one could modify the ideas brought here http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/
with a ham radio.
Merge this with mesh networking to complete the circuit.
However if the country was very serious it could be a better strategy to bounce through a series of reflectables like planes, boats and whatever else hinted on earlier in the thread by BitVapes.
-What you are about to read, may just blow your fraking mind. xD
-This information has monetary value. xD
-There is no spoiler tag here so the only choice you have is whether or not to read what comes next.
-The ideas you gather and mix inside your braincase after having read this, may even help to cure Our Planet. B)
-The obligatory donation address for this sweet set of information.
1CRcJUNAPvHYd888jLiwRZacwSQDNSFPfh
Moon Bounce. (EME)
Earth-Moon-Earth communications
This is the terminology for bouncing a radio signal off of, The MOON.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EME_(communications
Maybe, one could modify the ideas brought here http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/
with a ham radio.
Merge this with mesh networking to complete the circuit.
However if the country was very serious it could be a better strategy to bounce through a series of reflectables like planes, boats and whatever else hinted on earlier in the thread by BitVapes.
I don't think a firewall exists today that could block bitcoin at a national or even isp level, and there wont be one for at least another 5 years a minimum. look how hard it is to block BT, this is similar to that, exept BC uses 80% less bandwidth. as said before, we could use phone modems if needed and it would still work.
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