Topic: What would happen to bitcoin if all bitcoin-related stuff on GitHub got banned? - page 3. (Read 1149 times)

It would be really hard for them to ban BTC code unless there was some "National Security" label attached to it.

Given that, I'm sure dozens of private Gitlabs would start springing up with the source code (mine included).

Ultimately, even in the most extreme of worst cases, a Gitlab (or any other code versioning tool, such as Google's in-house created Gerrit) would spring up over VPN and TOR and BTC would go on just fine.

GitHub is just a Git hosting service. What are you doing when working with GitHub? You're actually working with Git, and pushing to GitHub.

That's what makes the last quoted sentence sound a little hilarious.. You can use any other hosting service, such as one you run yourself.

It's actually not really complicated at all; most of the steps are general Git usage information.
As far as I know, if you want the GitHub web frontend: that's closed-source, last I checked. But GitLab and indeed Gitea, are open source and can be hosted anywhere.

If anyone's interested in running an 'archival' / redundant GitHub mirror of various important Bitcoin projects, it would be a piece of cake auto-pulling those repos and pushing to a self-hosted Git server by the minute.

GitHub is not Git! The latter is just an engine, but GitHub goes far beyond that.

It is very disappointing to see so many posts in this thread, touting Git as an alternative.

Anyway, I just read something about a dev being arrested by Dutch police, accused of writing the smart contract behind Tornado Cash, they are now going after devs. They weirdly sanctioned a smart contract, for the first time in the history, now some stupid judge approves arresting a 30 years old programmer who coded the contract.  

Christ, why do they make it so complicated? In the case of Gitea (which is still using actual Git), you just have to make a Git working dir, copy the binaries to /bin and copy the supplied systemd service to the respective systemd folder. There's even a Docker container to avoid all this hassle.

That exists already.

https://gitlab.com/
https://bitbucket.org/
https://sourceforge.net/
https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/

Just to name a few. It's also easy to set up your very own Git server.
Here's a guide for anyone interested, directly from the actual Linux Foundation's blog: https://linuxfoundation.org/blog/classic-sysadmin-how-to-run-your-own-git-server/

Someone would create "HitGub" what would be a copy of GitHub, set it up in eg Malta and we would go on as usual.

The beauty of Git is that it's decentralized. Not in the traditional way, maybe, but anyone who clones a GitHub repo, holds the entire repository on their hard drive, including full commit history back to the very first commit.

Anyone who followed one of my guides, like the ones below, already has such full copies of various pieces of Bitcoin software on their machine.
[Guide] FULL NODE OpenSUSE 15.3: bitcoind + electrs + c-lightning + RTL
[Guide] Futurebit Apollo BTC Custom Linux Install - Node

If anything were to happen with GitHub / Microsoft where they categorically remove such projects, even if it was without prior notice to the developers, thousands of people are going to have more or less recent versions of the repositories on their own computers and can push those to new Git remotes; either self-hosted or from other centralized service providers.

Of course, whichever developer created the last commit pushed to the GitHub remote, will be able to do this in the least destructive fashion (no loss of commits), but e.g. in case they tried to abuse this position to include malicious commits or anything like that, everyone with a recent pull would notice.

Based on the article you cited, the case in question was never appealed, and only cases at the appellate level or higher are actually case law. However, I do believe that the US Supreme Court would likely agree with the district court ruling.

The problem is that a third party has a long hill to climb if GitHub removes content and is unwilling to fight back. GitHub has its own free speech rights, which would include its right to not publish something. In this case, Tornado Cash developers would likely need to prove that GitHub was acting as an arm of the government when they took down their repo.

That's correct. But they will care to know Bitcoin maintains (or grows) its price, and that cannot happen if it's unmaintained, or if people are panicking that the devs cannot access the source code.


Although I understand very well why the vast majority don't want to run a server, I tend to believe that our devs are not like the average Joe, nor like the average software developer. Also I think that some reputed entity will step up and say "hey, we've deployed this repository for you to use", in a somewhat similar way the whitepaper got "adopted" on many websites (I know that it's not that much similarity between the two, still...)

I am not a lawyer myself but haven't we already had such a precedent[1] where the US Government tried to prohibit the distribution of open-source code and where the court ruled out that code is speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment? In this case, the US Government also attempts to censor free speech expressed via computer language, thereby violating the said amendment.

https://www.eff.org/ru/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech


I doubt that they will start sanctioning those "privacy-oriented" projects that voluntarily agreed to infringe on the privacy rights of users. It won't be long before such projects providing "compliant" CoinJoins voluntarily agree to inject  "harmless" backdoors in their software to keep the flow of revenue intact.

achow101 response in the thread you mentioned basically answers my question regarding decentralization of development, but I find it too pessimistic and can't agree it is not possible. If bitcoin cannot be developed or updated in a decentralized manner, it risks being overtaken by centralized decision-makers who will dictate the course bitcoin should follow.

Honestly, I don't think institutional investors are that interested in bitcoin being censorship-resistant or private, they rather value the "store-of-wealth" aspect of bitcoin that allows them sort of hedge against money printing. If some platforms or persons get banned for doing bitcoin, it is not a big deal as long as bitcoin works and produces new blocks.

Self-hosting of repositories or spinning up a server is a solution to the problem of censorship, but most people won't bother running their own servers.

For ordinary individuals like myself who are not developers, self-hosting of a Git server is more of an overkill. I have been thinking about writing a simple bash script that would make automatic backups of the bitcoin repository and put them on an external hard drive. This way, I would ensure that I can access the code regardless of what the US Government thinks about bitcoin.

...Which is why I told everyone to host their own Gitea server. It's not some read-only mirror that lets people download the source code, it lets people sign up and commit code to it, and not only that, but it has access control for multiple repos and IIRC they can even open their own style of issues and PRs.

For what it's worth in this context there is no difference between github and gitlab since both of their companies are located inside United States so any laws applied to github should also be applied to gitlab.

Well, git works in a decentralized manner. This is independent of github, which is just a website.

It's not like, say, subversion (SVN) where you have a server with all the story of the code and you just get a part of it locally. With git, every person that has cloned the source code has a full copy of the entire history of the source code. By the way, Bitcoin was first released via SVN in SourceForge. Times have changed, and now the main Bitcoin client is developed with git on github.

The important thing is that every developer has a full copy of the source code, so it would be simple to just port it to another website that is not github, like gitlab, or literally you could host it in any custom server you want. There's nothing magical about github, it's just very popular.

The one thing I learned is that you can never compare Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies in the market. Yes, Tornado cash was a decentralized, non-custodial privacy solution operated through a smart contract but they know the team who created the platform, and want they want is for them to shut it down just like they did with Blender.
About you bothering if all contributors, dev, etc of Bitcoin are taken down someday?

"Que Sera, Sera and remember the future is not ours to see."

You are right, the core engine is opensource but Github is a proprietary web application with so many features besides being truly a hub where millions of devs are collaborating, years, "GatesHub", made me angry by applying stupid restrictions because of my nationality, an obvious act of discrimination, so I decided to do some research even started designing an alternative application based on GIT engine, documenting some ideas, planing a roadmap, stuff, but I couldn't convince a single investor to support, I'm used to reaching this point, dozens and dozens of projects with no sponsor, so, I moved on.

I'm curious tho, amid escalated regulatory threats and the way scam coin lobbyists are doing their nasty job, is it the right time for me to resume my decentralized Git application project?

"GatesHub" sounds funny, BTW

Not much.

For many (most?) BTC users I don't think it would matter. They are using some wallet or exchange that has nothing or very little direct interaction on github.

Think about it, how many people are REALLY building core from source? Same with electrum and most others, they click a download link and move on. The downloads can be re-directed somewhat quickly and easily and the development moved elsewhere in a few days / weeks. So development would pause / slow for a while as people transitioned to another service and then everything would continue as it was.

BTC price would probably take a hit as everyone ran around panicking but beyond that, not much else would happen in my view.

-Dave

Microsoft is going to create their own version called Billcoin, because they own Github anf they are the ''good'' guys 
Seriously now, people should think about making transition from Github to Gitlab and other self-hosted alternatives.
It's unlikely this would happen for Bitcoin, but it could happen for many Bitcoin related services and exchanges, so it's better to be vigilant in time.

They have no reason to ban Bitcoin developers because they are not doing anything illegal, but in theory they can make anything illegal, even breathing.
Git is already decentralized by design, and there are some hosting option based on ipfs or onion that can be used, and anyone can host their own version.
It's a game of cat and mouse, they can't stop torrents for so many years and they won't be able to stop Bitcoin for sure.

Aside from self-hosted/decentralized solution, Codeberg[1] which operated on Germany could work. I've no idea how they handle sanctions law though.


Link you mentioned also say SourceForge comply with U.S sanction list.


I'd say it's very dependent on GitHub. Aside from Bitcoin Core which have lots of mirror, i found almost all Bitcoin-related source code on GitHub.

[1] https://codeberg.org/
[2] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#what-is-codeberg-e.v.%3F

OP,
I started the topic @pooya87 referenced above,  eventually mods for an unknown reason decided it as being off-topic: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/github-is-shitty-why-not-a-decentralized-solution-5169284 I wish yours not to end that way.

That said, it is more than obvious that github is the worst option to rely on for development if you get too addicted and dependent. It is an open question though, how much bitcoin ecosystem is addicted to github, and what is the cure?

I don't think it is legal for Tornado Cash to be on the OFAC SDN list. I don't think it meets the criteria.

The fact that Tornado Cash is not an actual entity (nor a person) makes it difficult to get it off the SDN list. I am not an expert in the relevant law, but most likely, someone who sends/receives coin to/from the Tornado Cash smart contract and subsequently encounters problems would need to pursue litigation.

Tornado Cash has essentially been "banned" via intimidation. That means the US government is threatening severe consequences for using this particular smart contract. From a technical perspective, nothing is preventing an arbitrary person from sending an arbitrary amount of coin to the smart contract address, however, I think few (if any) people will because of these threats.


See my above comments. The Biden administration is not exactly known for its competence, or its ability to follow the law. From a technical perspective, many people have copies of the code for bitcoin core, and people would need to obtain the code from what they believe to be a reliable source if they need the code for whatever reason. However, I would again refer you to my comments about the intimidation by the US government.

Using automated tools, it is possible to match the inputs and outputs of CJ and Wasabi transactions.