Topic: IF the NSA wanted to take control over Bitcoin, how would they do it? - page 6. (Read 5987 times)

Number of [ex] Bitcoin Foundation directors doing time: 2 that I know of (Charlie and MagicalTux). No smear campaigns required

NSA would most likely not be working alone in this manner and they could use dirty funds to manipulate the price if needed to make bitcoin look unstable. They could run smear campaigns on high ranked bitcoin founders and celebrities. Any step that did not work would escalate the issue till it was dealt with once and for all.

Are you sure you know what are talking about?

Gold is "means of production"?
Though many countries that are considered to be capitalist "nationalize" the means of production when times are tough. Think Britain during WW2.

FTFY

Capitalism is based on private ownership of the means of production. When you start talking about nationalizing things, you are no longer talking about capitalism.

What would be easiest is just making cashing out into fiat difficult (banking regulations),

 they can try ... but I don't think they will achieve their goal . (unless the Bitcoin community goes retard and don't care about decentralization and privacy etc... anymore).

It would be easier for them to reverse engieer every address as there will be similarities between that and the rivate keys.
Alternatively, broardcasting transactions and bypassing the initial core requirements for sent transactions would also allow for them to control Bitcoin.

Whilst improbable there will always be a way for certain eople to take over the network and manipulate it in their favour.

What would be easier, to buy a billion Bitcoins and sell them on in stacks of 1 million at $1/Bitcoin deflating the market of Bitcoin and forcin people to withdraw from Bitcoin (they could also buy all the bitcoins mined and found at £500 each).

Good point, that too!

When was the last time you audited the code? Do you even code? And sure, devs have much more control than everyone.

You think NSA can't raise millions, billions, or trillions of dollars? You think NSA is poor? The sort of money needed to buy out the miners is probably in their petty cash drawer

It would not require every provider, just your provider. Also see the Great Chinese Firewall, Easily done on nationwide level.

Please. You really think American people accept strip-searches before boarding a plane, no smoking in bars, but will somehow revolt when the currency already responsible for 40% of criminal payments on the internet gets banned? Just lol.

Capitalist governments can also make BTC illegal/nationalize mines and even peoples possessions.

>heavily invested miners


Miners aren't heavily invested, at least not in actual BTC, they sell it. Cometh teh halvening, their operations will be outright unprofitable, and then...

NSA can search cell phones and laptops of people travelling through airports and just create a program to quickly look for bitcoin addresses and wallets. Starting with harrassing travellers would get enough message out that people need to be weary that it will trickle outwards into concerned parents and family.
Crossing a state line/border could become a issue for any one with bitcoin and they could start rounding known bitcoin supporter up in roadblocks.
It really would not be as hard as people think to start making bitcoin harder to use. Have internet providers ban access to wallets,exchanges and anywhere that buys and sells.
Always point to this but look at black friday for poker online and how effective that was at dropping traffic.
You could make bitcoin illegal and easily get the same outcome but most likly more severe.

-Dirt on Devs? Why would that make a difference in mathematical calculation? This is an open source project and any person on the planet can be a dev. The bitcoin core dev team is the most recognized team, but the community can chose any distro by simply running it.  Devs have absolutely no more control than anyone. They come up with ideas that are adopted by consensus. Some people may adopt whatever the devs write or support their work. That is a choice we all make equally.

-So the NSA is going to offer millions (billions?) of dollars to miners in China? Where is that money coming from? It would take congressional funding. "Congress I want a billion dollars to give to the Chinese so that we can disrupt the bitcoin network for a few weeks. Oh, and we get nothing in return." that is not logical.

-Blocking port 8333 is extremely easy to deal with. It would also require the cooperation of every single provider on Earth. It is impossible to imagine. As I mentioned earlier, loss of net neutrality is the only way to broadly disrupt transactions. This would, however, only apply to servers in the U.S. I would just rent some server space in Panama and carry on.  

Illegal on what grounds? The law is not just a guy who says what is illegal. There has to be a legal justification and the courts in the U.S. have already made their decision. Some people point out that liberty dollars and other currencies have been found to be illegal in the past. But none of those arguments were found to be valid in the case of bitcoin. If you live in a dictatorship or something then this may be a problem.

You can control bitcoin if only you show heavily invested miners that you can destroy it.

Safe from NSA, not safe from Communist government which can make BTC illegal/nationalize mines

So, bitcoin is safe because majority of miners are beyond the reach of NSA in China.

If the NSA was really hell-bent on taking over Bitcoin, they would have to basically get at the core of Bitcoin; the miners. If they can control them, either through technical or physical control, then they can decide how to move coins, restrict blocks, and other various things. They would have to strike at the heart in order to kill it, anything outside of that wouldn't mean anything.

This thread is not about destroying Bitcoin.

Maybe you're just not looking?