Topic: Protecting bitcoin from government (Read 3895 times)

Another possible scenario is government agencies which go after individuals who continue to use the service after it being deemed illegal or whatever; I proffer secure servers in far-flung reaches of the globe, actually as many places as possible, acting as CoinReserves whereby people store their bitcoins in confidence for the long-term.

It's not banking, it's more bitcoin storage. As my servers are in Africa naturally I've been getting a lot of stick for the idea in my thread, but consider the link in my signature.

 

The thing that controls the USA government the most is businesses and greed of politicians, so I use strategies where government attacking me would work against the goals of those 2 groups in the short-term, and in the long-term they are too busy with their immediate criminal activity to bother with it.

It is not a question of legality, really.  If the Federal government and the executive branch in particular wants to do something, they just do it and make up the rules as they go.  That's why the president can enter into war without congressional approval, bailout GM and cut out the bondholders, print money, and cheerfully violate every every amendment in the Bill of Rights whenever he wants or thinks he needs to.  Same goes for Congress, the judicial branch and the states, only to a more limited extent.

They ALL pretty much do what they like and call it law, but it is really a dangerous lawlessness that threatens the end of the Republic.  I know that sounds alarmist, and maybe it is, but you can't read the news every day and come to any other conclusion other than the Federal government seems to have no meaningful limits on its power. 

What I'm saying is there is probably nothing wrong with Bitcoin under current law, nor should there be.  However, if the government and the media decide they don't like Bitcoin, they can destroy it without even bothering to pass a new law by constantly investigating people, taking down websites, freezing bank accounts, and writing scare stories.  You've seen this process happen in other contexts, like with Paypal or raves or rap music, or anything else they disapprove of.

The trick is for Bitcoin to somehow survive and come into wide use internationally before tactics like these can ruin it.  If it gets big enough, Bitcoin will take on a life of its own and move beyond their reach.  Then the nannies and statists of the world will just have to grit their teeth and live with it.

Another solution is to legally protect the exchange stores like mtgox. Maybe wikileaks can provide legal advise on how to protect. they themselves took an coporate libel protection strcutre... maybe a copy paste to the exchanges is an option.


And IF (big IF) we the users keep using it to buy and sell. it would be theoretically possible to maintain the value.. or am i missing something. Basically the same mentality goes into accepting the dollar right..?

Since that video was made, the projections have changed again.  The new estimations show the object arriving more quickly and not coming quite as close.  Also, when we cross the trail, it will be later after it passes, so there should be less debris still there.  The model can be found here: http://secchi.nrl.navy.mil/STEREOorbit/C2010_X1.html  Still, it will probably have a large effect.  Unfortunately, the latest data is from March, so until we get an update these projections could be way off too.

Protecting Bitcoin from government might be the least of our worries right now.

I can't say I find it likely that any government as we know it today will survive "comet" Elenin.
If Elenin is a Brown Dwarf, as I suspect, Bitcoin won't survive either. How's that for alarmist?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfOfBrNUOGA

The main point to understand from this video is that if this were just a normal comet it would
not have the gravity pull that would cause earthquakes each time we swing around into alignment.
I don't what Elenin is, but it's no comet. Something BIG is out there, and coming our way.

Do your own research, I have nothing more to say on the topic, see the off-topic thread:
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=12643.0

I haven't read this entire thread but I just want to point out that this is a very alarmist thing to say.

As a newbie and also one aware of the problems in my country (US) I appreciate this discussion very much.  Most of the large corporations and controlled by the same criminals who control our government and the majority of the politicians.  I say, screw all of them.  As Gerald Celente has recommended many times, we should be supporting local businesses and individuals and not even waste our time interfacing with "the big guys."  Let them outlaw it.  The criminals are going to outlaw just about everything eventually, including growing your own food.  But their old system is failing and the less energy we invest in that system, the sooner it will fail.  I am so pleased to have found this information and am looking forward to getting into it big time.

They could just outlaw it, making sure it never hits mainstream. No respectable company will have anything to do with it. While it probably will live on it will be of little or no significance to most people.

Or the NSA itself decided to create Bitcoin. Things as big as megacorps and governments work against themselves all the time, I wouldn't be too surprised if the NSA has some part in at least supporting it.

These are good thoughts which need to be considered.
    
A lot of thought as already been done in this area in regard
to finding a good censorship workarounds for those who live
under the "Great Wall" of China's Internet restriction.

There is the "Freedom Stick"
http://chinesewall.ccc.de/freedomstick-en.html
Freedom Stick Overcomes Firewalls

Developed by Chaos Computer Club of Germany, it relies on
The Onion Router network to cloak your connections, routing
traffic through the world using anonymous computer in order
to avoid getting one’s Internet usage tracked.

There is "MafiaaFire Redirector"
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/
Un-censor illegally taken down domains

This Firefox add-on makes it easy for users to access sites that
used some of the confiscated addresses. It does this by redirecting
you to substitute domain names that were out of the reach of US
courts, such as those with a .de top level domain.

You simply type getbitcoin.com into your browser as usual. The browser
sends the address to the add-on, the add-on checks if getbitcoin.com
is on the list of sites to be redirected and immediately redirects you
to the mirror site.

US officials alleged MafiaaFire circumvented their seizure order and
asked Mozilla to remove it. The open-source group said, "Our approach
is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates,
but in this case there was no such court order." Good for Mozilla!

I would like to see these two products offered as an extension for
for "SRWare Iron" (http://srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php)
that I could run as a portable app off a USB drive.

Then I would want to find a way to set up a Bitcoin client to run entirely
from the thumbdrive, so that no data is sent to the C: drive. Then I
would clone a few iron key USB drives, using USB Duplicator Now, and
start to selling them to all my friends and family.

If someone else has already done this, let me know, I'll buy one.
 

Well if any politician sees the title of this article they will be all over bitcoin. Especially ones near the Mexican boarder. Sheesh....

http://blogs.forbes.com/benzingainsights/2011/06/03/how-to-purchase-guns-and-drugs-anonymously/

Putting up a forum is easy. Getting people to visit and use it is not.

"How can we protect Bitcoin from the threat of a government wanting to kill it off by various nefarious means?"

1) By pointing out that it is a more open currency than the one they already have so reduces the risk of terrorism, money laundering etc (definitely a good thing as far as I'm concerned). True anonymity on the Internet is damn near impossible.

2) By growing the Bitcoin economy so that it can stand alone. If everything you can get with alternative currencies is available by Bitcoin then you don't need to move outside the currency. Hey, you can live entirely through VISA/Mastercard payments in Western economies so why not Bitcoin?

3) Many Western governments want to phase out cash (the UK is starting this process by getting rid of cheques) and many businesses view it as a hassle due to the increased chance of armed robbery or egregious fees charged by banks who also view it as a hassle to move around. Welcome Bitcoin, thanks for solving our problem and speeding up the process!

OK, I'll take my rosy glasses off now. But let's try to be optimistic about the future of Bitcoin - it's more open than what we have at the moment.

Bitcoin is everything but anonymous.

There is a very interesting article on legal tender in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender. Essentially, in the US, while the USD can be used to pay off debts, it is not required by businesses to accept USD in exchange for goods or services. That seems to open the door (by a tiny crack) to allow alternative payment methods to be acceptable without the government having a cause for concern.

This is probably one of the major reasons Satoshi never let anyone know who he was.  I wouldn't be surprised if he is actually an American working for the NSA specializing in cryptography.  Then he got sick of the government's monetary polices and decided to create bitcoin.

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Looks like Anonymous will have to keep an eye on this. :>
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I agree. Decentralization of everything is the key. Not just because it makes it harder to hunt people down technologically, but because it distributes the risk so that no one person can really get into too much trouble. If the risk is low, and the government has to expend lots of resources just to hunt down one bit player (because nobody is more than a bit player), it really becomes impossible to fight this.

One really cool project would be to try to port a forum like this, with all the functionality people expect from a forum, to a p2p network like Tor. Is anybody interested in putting up bounties for that?

I only found out about Bitcoins a few hours ago, and I've been lost in deep, deep thought about since, about how the system works and what it will do. Controlling the money is an EXTREMELY large blow to the government. If even a large minority is ever willing to freely accept Bitcoins in place of real dollars, it's a giant exclamation that the government is unneeded there, and with the way governments seem to be gobbling up as much power as possible lately, they certainly don't need to be questioned on such fundamental level. Running the currency system has been a political move practically as long as there have been currency systems, and it's a strong reminder that you're part of a nation under their control. They will not like such an attack, and they will fight back fiercely, and it will be a dirty fight.

Pretty much all the grim predictions people have mentioned already seem extremely likely to me. If it ever looks like it might be a threat, it will be attacked legally, rejected by and lobbied against by major competitors, and there will be serious litigation against the creators and anyone they think has been seriously enough involved. In line with the Chinese hackers idea, I think something like that will be attempted. I think some organization will attempt to overpower the mining community so they can overwrite the block chain to wreak havoc on the economy.

In order to survive, the community is going to have to be willing to fight back. When the pressure turns up, people will need to stick to Bitcoins through the massive storm it will have to weather. We'll need to continue to build the community and get the mining community as large as possible, in case opponents attempt to overwhelm it. The community will, like the currency itself, need to be decentralized. If they can't ruin the currency itself, they will try to break up the community. Sites will be seized and shut down for little or no real reason. Perhaps a community feature could be built into the Bitcoin software to share major sites over the network in case the servers are ever shut down. Such a move would still cause damage to the community and certainly limit growth, but it would also give the community more strength in case of collapse.

Our strength and their fear is decentralization, the removal of power from a single entity. Any part of it that loses that decentralization will be a target and be viciously attacked.