Topic: What would happen to bitcoin if all bitcoin-related stuff on GitHub got banned? (Read 1147 times)

I wonder if it's got nothing to do with anything else other then they don't like crypto. Ignore the excuses they give, they are just that, excuses.

They don't like it, and have been looking around for a way to drop those projects without looking bad by saying, 'we don't like crypto, so we are not allowing you to host those projects'

And all of a sudden we have the people talking (incorrectly) about the power wast of crypto, and the people talking about the scams, and now they have a perfect excuse to those outside the crypto sphere to ban them from their platform. We know it's crap, but to the people that don't know it looks like they are doing a good thing. And they get what they want.

I still think any real project should always have a self hosted git with the 'name brand' git hosts as a redundancy.

-Dave

If all bitcoin-related stuff on GitHub got banned, it's possible that development of the Bitcoin protocol and software would move to other platforms or anonymous forums. However, it's also possible that development would continue underground and that the Bitcoin network would remain robust. After all, censorship-resistant technologies have a way of staying alive and thriving in the face of opposition.

My own. The first time I signed up for twitter, I was instantly permabanned for not having a number (surprise surprise). That was sometime in 2018 or so. Had almost the same experience a second time in 2020 and that is how I saved my account.

I'm pretty sure this can no longer happen now that the people responsible for autobanning accounts are most likely fired.

Anyway, it sheds some light on why people think Musk is doing a good job purging entitled people from its platform (or rather, causing them to purge their own accounts).

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Back to topic:

It seems to me, from my short experience of Codeberg, that it is ran by a bunch of people with a very narrow viewpoint. So when they say they're having "discussions" about something, they actually intend for it to be one-dimensional where everyone agrees with them. In this case, they all hate crypto, so when one of them opens a discussion thread about banning it, they are really expecting everyone to say yes, or else they will call you names, degrade you, and threaten to ban you because something you said translates into a death threat in their very narrow worldview.

Talk about groupthink right there. Makes you glad that Bitcointalk moderators don't interfere with free speech, eh?

I wouldn't use a service ran by people with thin skin anyway.

If owners are easily offended by things that people can say or do, them they will just use it as an excuse to make the platform worse for everyone else. Just look how Twitter was before Elon Musk bought it for example.

Keep in mind that their default action for new accounts without phone numbers was banning them (and good luck getting an appeal from an account with no history unless you successfully managed to follow a bunch of woke accounts within a 2-minute window).

And now codeberg.org has closed the issue about cryptocurrencies again permanently. The people on that thread clearly do not understand the first thing about decency and respect. They seem to be incredibly hostile and angry. Well, this just gives a lot of credence to the cryptocurrency community. Now the decision whether to ban cryptocurrencies or not will be made in private by people who hate me because I have a Ph.D. in Mathematics (and can therefore produce new functions using quantum information theory to evaluate the security of block ciphers, but people on codeberg.org hate education). Codeberg seems to be a bastion of intolerance and hostility, and no respectable human should affiliate himself with Codeberg in any way whatsoever other than telling the people there that they are intolerant.

-Joseph Van Name Ph.D.

Creator of Circcash

For those who didn't know, Codeberg closed down their thread last week only to reopen it a few days ago (the reason they closed it, they said, was "media frenzy". I took the time to share my comments about this issue, which I will quote here:


They don't seem to be taking our appeals kindly (they just call them "walls of text" - I mean, this is a wall of text, but it is good text!) so i will be doing two more things:

- I am going to post this on Stacker News (and possibly Hacker News)
- I am going to ask you all reading this thread to make a codeberg account just to comment in favor of our appeal.

Again, people who hate cryptocurrencies just stick the blame of all cryptocurrency failures on developers, when in reality the actual management of failing services is done by businessmen, using code that is not even hosted on open-source repo hosting sites.

This is why all open-source projects have a big capital notice in their license, disclaiming all warranty and liability, because scumbags who run a service down will look for any way to escape from accountability.

The vast majority of OSS devs have no interest in scamming you or running away with your funds, they just want to make good software.

Most open-source crypto projects do not even manage money - they are just supporting infrastructure around the blockchain.

Remember PGP - code is free speech, and nobody can ban it or take it away from people.

PS: Feel free to send me a PM when they re-open that thread. I have a few sucker punches I'd like to make myself.

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Edit: I just saw a post there reading this:


I really wish I heard about this 2-3 days ago so I could fire BitcoinCleanup (a site I made) at them. Sourcehut's announcement, and reasons why Codeberg are doing this is wrong, at every level.

But then again, I have no regrets, because I was busy doing real development during that time and not useless bikeshedding or more accurately, flame warring as these guys seem to fancy.

Looking at the address given for codeberg it's someones apartment, and with so few projects hosted by it I can see someone running it out of their bedroom so to speak.
Sorcehut does not even give an address that I can find and as @ETFbitcoin also looks to have very few projects.

Being smaller like that can be good for some things, but with the amount of malware projects that pop up on github and sourceforge that they have to keep shutting down Microsoft and Slashdot respectively have to be putting some serious man hours into keeping up with it. It is probably easier for these tiny sites to just say no.....


What I still don't get is why real projects don't just host it themselves. Between GitLab / Gitea  / GitBucket / Gogs and many others you can keep your project in your world and not worry about anyone else.

-Dave

I have never heard this service, but at least they give 2 months before it's executed. I also checked hosted public projected[1] and it looks like there aren't too many project hosted there (only 388 pages where each page show 15 project).


I don't know which user is employee at Codeberg. But it's a hypocrisy since Codeberg homepage emphasize freedom.


I have few doubt since they have history of banning several project including Tornado Cash[2]. Although on positive site, activity related with DMCA is transparent[3].

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[1] https://sr.ht/projects
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/10/github_tornado_cookies/
[3] https://github.com/github/dmca

In related news, SourceHut recently announced that it is banning all cryptocurrencies starting on January 1, 2023. But then again SourceHut does not look very professional since the first page says "Welcome to sourcehut!" which is not capitalized. I have never used SourceHut, and I have no intention of using SourceHut since they are anti-innovative.

Codeberg is also considering banning all cryptocurrency projects (I have commented on Issue #794 about this https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/794). It seems like the anti-innovative people at these sites do not want anyone developing new technologies. They are not willing to reason with people who give solid reasons for developing cryptocurrency technologies. I doubt that they will be willing to understand what the people are doing. They do not want people to improve the situation.

With that being said, there are plenty of things that the cryptocurrency community could be doing much better. A lot of the bad reputation that cryptocurrencies have has been earned, but banning innovators who want to innovate is just asinine.

I trust that Github will remain innovative and that the anti-innovative hostile entities will simply stay away from Github (well, at least for now).

I think the main problem will be the spreading of the information (URLs or links) to the new sources, without people pushing exploited repositories or trying to do it. (Now I know most binaries can be verified to make sure that it is a "legit" copy of the actual code, but it creates confusion and possible loopholes for exploitation )

Imagine all the forum posts pointing to the current GitHub and then when changes takes place.... to have legitimate links being distributed to the new repositories. 

The US are not the only country that are offering file hosting services, but they have a lot of influence to pressurize other countries to follow their actions, if these services are hosted in other countries.  I think we (Bitcoin) ...should have redundancy in place for every possible attack on Bitcoin.... even if it is forced to go underground. (DarkNet) 

I have considered the scenario in which CEXes are banned, it's possible, but think about it, there would be enormous backlash.

I believe the most realistic scenario, is the one where they keep the CEXes, keep adding KYC/AML restrictions, and keep getting all the taxed money from trading. There is no other way for them if they want to keep the facade of not being fully totalitarian, which is the key here. Western governments don't want to be perceived as totalitarian, as they do in totalitarian clusterfucks like China or Russia. I don't see a full ban on crypto unless BTC poses a massive systemic risk to the reign of the USD, which right now I don't see it, since it basically follows the SP500. If USD ever decouples from the SP500, and people start putting their savings on BTC more than they do on the stock market, that is where they may just fully ban the stuff.
At that point BTC will be used as cash, but forget about buying property or anything like that, they will not allow it. So your best bet would be moving somewhere where they get away with not banning it.

The solution is much more cunning than you think. It's to convince the overwhelming majority that being unable for the state to control the money supply is bad; that privacy is bad; that using energy is bad; that freedom of choice, speech, thought is bad. Over all, they argue that censorship and surveillance are necessary.

Straight from the source: https://web.archive.org/web/20200919105141/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is?utm_content=bufferadc5f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The only problem is that CBDC can not replace what bitcoin offers people and we and governments both know this so I really don't think they are going to start banning bitcoin after they released their govcoin. At least not all of them (maybe only the modern dictatorships aka democracies).

They already know they can't prevent people from using bitcoin but they still want to surveil. The solution was to force centralized services to implement KYC and report back. CBDCs fall under the same thing, they fill gap in the market that would help the government surveil. Right now what we have are stable shitcoins that are too shady and risky.

Hear me out: arrival of CBDCs, shutdown of centralized exchanges and simultaneously implementation of L1 privacy changes to the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin will be the obvious choice for... literally anyone.
And people will be incentivized to actually use it as a medium of exchange to escape the totalitarian nature of CBDC and avoid going through buying/selling 'hassle' on DEX's.

People will be incentivized to further get involved if (to get back on topic) centralized services were to start banning Bitcoin- and crypto-related stuff, by spinning up own nodes, own Git mirrors and whatever other tech we might have moved to until then.
More decentralized infrastructure is going to make Bitcoin stronger than ever, totally destroying the dreams of anyone attempting to shut it down by such measures.

Yeah it's silly, and we already have examples of some countries like China banning Bitcoin (several times) without much resistance.
I think that other countries won't ban Bitcoin directly yet, at least not until they release their own CBDC projects, but they can slowly start to increase pressure on exchanges, wallets, developers, miners, etc.
It's obvious they want to have full surveillance and tracking in near future, so anything related with privacy is now under attack.

Honestly, betting on El Salvador to fight against the U.S. and EU wanting to ban Bitcoin-related projects from GitHub is one of the worse bets I've seen.
They don't have a lot to work with / to leverage. It's a tiny nation and their adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender is mostly symbolic; it shows what's possible, but it doesn't give Bitcoin more value, more legitimacy or protection from large states' attacks.

Like several other users have said,  I still want to add that I don't think this can ever happen to Bitcoin,  atleast,  bitcoin has grown past the stage where we could ever imagine such kind of ban happening.
Atleast,  not while we have countries that have already adopted bitcoin as a legal tender,  and many other countries in the process to,  alot of quite powerful people, companies,  governments, institutions have invested heavily in bitcoin,  any government rising up to do something that hurts Bitcoin simply means hurting all this entities, and I personally believe that this kind of ban can not happen without this entities fighting back.

It can be solved by using commitments. Each ECDSA-based signature or Schnorr signature is a pair of values. That means, R-value is a "signature public key". It is possible to get a random key, and form a Taproot-based commitment, by creating a TapScript spending path, where the real R-value is revealed, and when there is a TapScript tree with new commits, stored as "OP_RETURN ". It could even be "OP_RETURN OP_SHA1 " to indicate that the commit was hashed with SHA-1. And then, by having R-value of the signature as a random key, and a non-random TapScript with all commits, it is enough to form commitments, with no additional on-chain bytes.

And then, there are two options:
1) Anyone, any developer, user, just anyone, can make a transaction every sometimes, and store as many commitments as needed.
2) Miners can do this, if commitments are standardized, all that is needed is attaching a TapScript in the form of "OP_RETURN " to the miner's Taproot address in the coinbase transaction, then the miner only needs a hash, and every user can attach an SPV proof to such commitment on its own.

Edit: Also note that even if you want to mine commits, then you can do that by using properly done Merged Mining: just mine regular Bitcoin 80-byte headers, and attach them to your commits. Then, your work will normally only protect commits from being overwritten, but sometimes you may be lucky and mine a real block. Also, in the same way you can run any test network you want, there is no need to mine a separate chain just for testing: you can have a full node, producing 80-byte headers, and you can include them in any test chain by using Merged Mining. And if you need to use any coin amounts, then they should be proportional to the heaviest chain of Proof of Work, then it should be also tracked, no matter if this chain is valid or not, then if only 1% of nodes are honest, and the block reward is 1 BTC, they will get 0.01 BTC, and the rest will be locked for the future. But here, for commits, no amounts are needed, just Merged Mining 80-byte headers with proper Taproot-based commitments is sufficient.

Kudos, you nailed it.  

I've already addressed it above thread:
The authorization scheme is hierarchical resembling a pki infrastructure. As long as the root is not compromised, it is possible to grant/revoke authority to new/old keys, it would be possible for root to delegate its authority, share it, and so fort, all happening on-chain and without being considered as a fork. It is done by conventional commits (metadata is part of the repository after all), though downloading and processing of commits to metadata is mandatory for nodes, to check for potential tempering attempts by devs with lower/incompatible authority.


Yes, it is the biggest issue, the only serious issue to be clear, other aspects of the scheme have been explored and addressed as much as it is possible for a lone ranger but the incentive mechanism? It is complicated.

Firs and foremost, it is important to understand how deeply different is the case with a blockchain that supports the scheme I'm proposing for a truly decentralized Git, with bitcoin that is designed basically for solving double-spending of digital cash. Noticeably what bitcoin solves is a threat posed by the potential owners of the asset, whereas for repository owners it is the contrary, they have full incentive to keep their asset intact.

It would be a good analogy that repositories in my scheme are better understood as evolving NFTs, their ownership can be delegated though it is neither common practice nor subject to ordinary double-spending by re-org attempts.

Finally, and most critically, blocks in this scheme are rather batches of commits, they are signed and don't compete with forks or other repositories.

That all said, there is still the incentive problem remained in gray zone. I've been mulling this for a long time, not a conclusive result, just a few ideas:

1- I think, in this context, participating in an ultimately decentralized repository network, the altruistic factor should not be underestimated.

2- As I've said before, the actual download takes place on demand and is not part of the protocol which is only concerned about versioning and forks, it implies that the costs of participation are considerably low if not negligible.

3- Theoretically once a node supports one repository, as long as it tracks forks, it is open to multiple repositories, still in practice it is possible, though not encouraged, for nodes to “choose” a subset of the whole universal  repository space to track, or even sticking with just the main branch. The drawback would be the potential obsoleting of less famous repositories/forks.

4-We have bitcoin p2p and full nodes as potential participant.

Spamming is another issue that I found as being important, interestingly it looks to be resolved by a game theoretic equilibrium, where spammers are suspected to lose support from nodes because of point (3) where nodes are free to restrict each repository they wish from their list.