Topic: scenarios if US Govt tried to take down bitcoin? - page 3. (Read 11940 times)

i think this is a pretty good analysis in one sense, and it may be accurate, but i think it overlooks something important. The government isnt ACTUALLY concerned about child porn or and less than you might imagine about drug smuggling and tax collecting. the real threat that bitcoin represents to them is its potential for undermining their monopoly over the issuance of currency. this is where they get the vast majority of their power. taxes are a drop in the bucket compared to the power the get from the printing press. what you have outlined above does not solve this problem, it does not allow them to reclaim their monopoly over currency issuance. What ever solution they attempt will probably have to be ultimately aimed at reclaiming their most important monopoly.

north？iran？china？

i think it will  push up price

The economic for freedom，The government for management

They will do it in two ways.  The velvet glove, and the steel fist.

The velvet glove is that they will tempt greedy bitcoin users, developers, entrepreneurs, and spokespeople to acquiesce in the formation of a "safe" bitcoin, which allows them influence and control through requiring their blessing, and giving assurances that all government laws will be followed, from those relating to child porn to drug smuggling to tax evasion.  The general public (sheep) will heave a big sigh of releif, and mass adoption will follow.

This will provoke a response by those bitcoiners who refuse to participate, develop their own clients, or even a forked blockchain.  After some time, users of this "dark, unregulated, anonymous, and illegal" bitcoin will  suddenly start having their front doors kicked in by SWAT teams, and will be charged with enabling all manner of horrific crimes.

Then the real revolution begins.

"Franchised monopoly"?  Lol, a government in this case is both the franchisor & the franchise.  You got to stay away form them soapbox words

The proof of nation-state success is success itself -- the fact that our entire *planet* is controlled by nation-states.
Thus far you're yet to show any product, regardless of the Liberstriation you subscribe to.
All you have done thus far is critique.  As they say, the most dispensable person in the theater is the critic

Looks like we agree then.  Despite having the franchised monopoly power on all those, they are incompetent at enforcing it.

"...monopoly on the right to kill, steal and imprison and impoverish."  
Lol, i take it you'd rather have everyone kill, steal and impoverish?  What a wacky, wonderful world that would be!

Soapbox rhetoric aside, governments have pretty lousy monopolies on murder, as anyone on the receiving end of "stand your ground" laws would tell you if the sucker could talk.
Some governments are so bad at killing they don't even kill murderers -- the free market killing entrepreneurs.
Some monopoly

As far as wholesale theft/impoverishment goes, i'd say folks here are doing just fine without any government help.  Check the securities subforum.
Money-revolutionary known as DPR tried to do some murdering too, but he botched that up.  Oh well, maybe next time

Incompetent and archaic as nation-states may be, they appear to control approximately 100% of this here planet Earth, while neo-anarco-capital-libertarian-whatevers control exactly goose egg.
Go figure.

Very interesting discussion.

Really, to totally kill Bitcoin they need to break the encryption. Instead of spending billions to buy all the bitcoins and make you all rich, or passing laws that they can't enforce, they would spend their time/money on efforts defeat the encryption. This would send their message that cryptocoins are inherently unsafe. Their ability to defeat the encryption (if they haven't already) should only increase over time.  If they break Bitcoin, then no typical altcoin is safe and we would looking and needing start over with something magnitudes of orders stronger, and not based on a standard where NSA has had any working-group influence.

Will Bitcoin's encryption be safe 5 years from now? 10, or even 20?  Cryptography thought to be impenetrable during WWII can be broken by your android phone today. At some point, SHA256 will not be enough. I don't know when that will be, exactly, but it makes me curious about what options their will be, if any, to migrate the value of our btc to a stronger SHA512 algorithm, or to a different currency altogether.  

One realworld parallel would be the arms race between governments and counterfeiters with paper currency, requring special papers, inks, serial codes, etc.  It's naive to think that SHA256 is the strongest algo that the world will ever need, for all time.

Perhaps this problem has already been solved by btc deep thinkers and I'm late to the party.

It's greatest strength is that it's decentralized, there is no issuing authority i.e. no top banker pressing a button creating more bitcoins.


Bitcoin is a p2p network... meaning you can hack/takedown as many pieces of the network as you want but as long as one survives the entire network survives.  Obviously the billionaires aren't moving their money into bitcoin!  When you have offshore bank accounts, stocks, investment funds, etc etc why the F would you start putting your money in a brand new uncertain digital currency?  Furthermore, it's not just about where you put your money, it's where you put your faith.  These guys would be betting against their own country if they moved their money outside the dollar.  It's like if they were to start buying Chinese bonds: that's borderline treason.  Not gonna happen.
On the subject of China: has anyone considered that China's interest in bitcoin could be in part an attack on the dollar's supremacy?

Also Schiff is one of the most respectable economists out there but there's some stupid s**t that comes out of his mouth.  He has a vested interest in the system, keep that in mind.

I'm pretty new here and to bitcoin so anyone please correct me if I'm wrong.  The above post just 100% contradicts everything I have learned so far.

The bitcoin infrastructure is vulnerable to an attack. It's centralised.

I read on another website that the government can confiscate the domain, mess with the dns servers, shutdown the hard coded nodes. You won't be able to rollout new updates because they have the main website. Note: All this infrastructure is located in the United States. I'll try find the site, but it's a really popular forum. It's as easy as shutting down a botnet. They will destroy confidence. Furthermore, the wealthy elites don't have their money in bitcoin. Warren Buffet, George Soros, and other billionaires aren't moving their money into bitcoin. Even a small guy like Peter Schiff says it's stupid.

Furthermore, no wealth is destroyed if bitcoin disappears, because it never existed. Value is only transferred when a transaction against fiat or another commodity takes place. You can't argue that it will destroy value if it never existed. There is still the same amount of USD out there in the market. It's like the stockmarket, you gambled, you played, you lost. A Zero Sum Game.

Why any anti-government person would risk all their life savings in bitcoin is beyond comprehension. Even Alex Jones says to tread cautiously.

That's why bitcoin should only be used as a temporary medium of exchange. It might pay to use one of the altcoins instead as a result of this. Which really leaves bitcoin without it's clothes.

A large proportion of miners use linux. 

They are forgetting also another thing , the most important. China is keeping their yuan undervalue to help their exports. A global currency in which they can't keep the value incheck is the last thing they would want.

Not sure it's on their radar yet.  But a recent china btc exchange that ran off with 4 million will wake them up.

True but it seems that they have very much differentiated Bitcoin from QQ coin (which was really just one company printing its own money).

I think that you're forgetting that China is much better than the USA in every possible way, else Satoshi would be an American. 

I think you are forgetting china is a communist country with high inflation and various bubbles.  The government also isn't big on individual liberties.  They got pretty pissed off with qq coin so assuming china will be super cool with bitcoins isn't a given.

China all the way!

+1
The government generally isn't bad as in evil, generally its bad as in incompetent. 
Problem is, when you have the monopoly on the right to kill, steal and imprison and impoverish, it amounts to about the same thing.
It wants to do the right thing, but usually since that means not doing anything, it gets that part wrong and does something anyhow and poorly.

The problem is that they don't have a world government. So bitcoin infrastructure could always flee to more bitcoin friendly jurisdictions. so for the sake of discussion, lets say we had a world government, or the us government had the leverage to sufficiently twist the arms of every other government on the planet in order to gain compliance. In this case there would be two possible attack vectors that i can think of. They could outlaw the production of CPU's without hardware back doors and then search through peoples computers for bitcoin activity or they could force people to purchase licenses to use encryption and monitor the isps for anyone who violated encryption licensing laws.

Neither of those things are very likely, so whats more important to talk about than what they could do to outright kill it is what they will probably do to harm it. Instead of trying to kill it out right they will try to strangle it slowly with regulation. they will make it more and more difficult to get it in and out of fiat by creating more and more invasive regulations for exchanges. They may create regulations that force businesses that accept bitcoins to reject mixed coins and/or relay information about the transactions to a centralized database. Or they may even make it illegal for businesses to accept bitcoin as payment.

the largest exchange is now in china. they have taken jobs, markets and now bitcoin. for the US to stop bitcoin it would have to stop china

the government can and will take down bitcoin

1) claim bitcoin is used to facilitate terrorism, money laundering and drugs - check!
2) have the bankers get worried about bitcoin and pressure the puppets into taking action - check! eu paper and senate hearings
3) prevent any banks from doing any bitcoin related anything
4) ban all the bitcoin exchanges
5) pressure all trading partners of EU and US to follow suit, which is basically everyone


once bitcoin is locked out of the fiat world, it is dead, done, finished.

no business with any presence in the US or EU will touch bitcoin with a 10 foot pole, same with banks.

at that point what will you do with your bitcoins? just hoard them?