Topic: What would the effect be if ISPs are asked to block Bitcoin protocol traffic? (Read 3528 times)

apparently Sonic.net (isp) is blocking Bitmit.net. They said it was reported as a phishing site and I couldn't finalize an order for 3 days

I'm trying to find out if other sonic users also can't access it. I could get to it through a proxy tho, but not directly. weird stuff

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28733662-Sonic-blocking-Bitmit.net-

Couple good things about Namecoin.

First, is something you can buy with at relatively fixed prices (domain names in .bit fake-tld) so has value supported by particular good.  This kind of like "trade money" sellers used to make say, "Redeem for 50-lb bag of flour at Ivan's Grocery" or similar.  So has minimum value as trading commodity, better than Bitcoin.  Bitcoin value is self intrinsic commodity due scarcity, but has not intrinsic redemption value.

Second, has primary use clearly legitimate.  So has Bitcoin, but must argue about because so much crooks use Bitcoin on silk road etc.  "Ebay for Maniacs" and "Most Brazen Illicit Drug Market on Earth" has been called, also first time many legal beagles hear Bitcoin.  They think like Paypal and Ebay, same underlying provider, same purpose.  Requires argument and education teach otherwise.

i don't think bitcoin will use a lots of bandwidth

and its dual node so apparently you can mine both Namecoin and Bitcoin simultaneously at the same rate as one

At the moment, the design of namecoin means that a secure "lite" node resolver is not really possible.

So in order to resolve namecoin names you need the whole namecoin blockchain & history.  If you ask someone to resolve one for you they can give you a undetectable fake NXDOMAIN or a stale result.

This is fixable, along with other challenges... but namecoin isn't getting a ton of active development. (Last I checked it also had a pile of serious vulnerabilities inherited from, and now fixed in, Bitcoin— but they've been working on forward porting the codebase to be v0.8 based).

im glad i dont live in america....

Can't may not be the right word choice here. BitPay already has more than 8,000 merchants paying a fee far lower than traditional payment processors. Bitcoin will only become more and more simple to use with time and acceptance. Remember we are still in Beta and "real" infrastructure is still very limited.

Well, this only prevents the fleshbags at the Top Level Domain authority (ICANN) from making arbitrary decisions (enforcing trademark and copyright ownership decisions, politically expediency of when to allow and award certain suffixes, etc). Don't get me wrong about Namecoin, I like it, but it solves a narrow problem to have a whole alt coin based around it, it is after all a protocol layer below/depending on a protocol layer (http). Bitcoin functions entirely independently of http, so Namecoin doesn't solve anything for the Bitcoin network in that respect. I expect/hope Namcoin will expand to encompass other transmission protocols which require DNS resolution of a type, so maybe the protocols that drive meshnets could benefit from their distributed model, although I'm not at all versed in their mechanics just yet.

That's the part that pisses me of. I get it when U.S. citizens call their country America or refer to themselves as Americans since they consider their country the only one of the continent that's worth mentioning. I even get it when people from other continents refer to the USA as America since it's the only country of the continent they can spell. But other Americans?


I know they misuse the word and 99.9 % percent of the time they'll be talking about their country, but saying "American" to imply "not Canadian" is just wrong in my opinion.

As you might have guessed by now, I'm American as well. Paraguayan, to be exact. One of those countries nobody knows how to spell (and, from personal experience, most Europeans believe to be somewhere in Asia).


Good thinking.


There's only one phone company here, so DSL cannot have any competition. Cable is available only in a handful of cities (mine not included), wireless antennas usually won't work because of interference and mobile internet makes you pay big bucks after the first 1 GB / month.

What about Namecoin? The .bit domain may be censorship resistant, would the ISPs be able to block transactions by refusing connections if you already have the addresses?

I just recently found out about Namecoin and am quite intreagued by the possibilities of a distributed DNS system.

Here the incumbent phone companies are required to lease out their lines to resellers. The Cable companies also provide some competition (but apparently don't have to lease out their lines). Wireless is also an option (but don't have line-of sight).

I suppose most Satellite providers will block BT traffic as well.


US is short for "United States of America" a person living in the USA is called an "American" instead of a U.S.A'ian.

So when you see "America" or "American" by itself, it almost always refers to the USA. To talk about the continent, that would typically be specified to avoid confusion. For example: by saying "North America", "American continent (not to be confused with continental US)", or "Americas".

Seeing some of the devs thinking seriously about such things goes a long way toward maintaining my confidence in the Bitcoin solution.

The decisions about how to balance the defenses against potential threats and the very real problems associated with growth are tough ones, particularly since a lot of the threats are hypothetical and it thus seems rational to de-prioritize them.  A further complexity is that many of the design decisions are 'one way' meaning that it would be effectively impossible to back them out.  I think that these features conspire to create a fairly complex set of problems that not very many people fully comprehend.

Because Bitcoin can't compete with VISA, MasterCard, etc. due to scalability issues. THEY just do not worry.

It's almost as if someone powerful might have an actual business incentive to keep the DVD street selling going...

Bitcoin makes _two_ fundamental security assumptions, one of them people talk about all the time: that conspiring badguys don't get control of a near-majority hashpower; the other is that "information [is] easy to spread but hard to stifle": If nodes can't communicate without partitioning they can't come to a consensus, or any consensus they think they have may be false and erased once communication is restored.  So in one sense Bitcoin is potentially very vulnerable to censorship.

But at the same time: Bitcoin works great without using the public internet at all— at least if you're using the reference software.  There is a whole network of hidden service Bitcoin nodes that communicate over tor without using exits.   Connecting out to this network is as simple as installing Tor and pointing Bitcoind / Bitcoin-qt's proxy settings at it.

Receiving connections in on takes a couple more lines of configuration and is a good idea to do because we can only support a lot of hidden service using nodes if there are a lot of hidden service offering nodes.

Tor has been at the anti-censorship game for a while now and has a fair amount of resources to throw at it and there are some benefits to sharing a network with other kinds of usage... I don't think there is any real concern with censorship in most of the world, but I like my backup plans to have backup plans, and so it's good that there is a health hidden service infrastructure in advance of needing one.

Since I also like the backups of my backups to have backups: More fundamentally, the blockchain validity rules limit the maximum long term average data rate of Bitcoin to only about 14kbit/sec. Because of this low rate there are lot of steganographic techniques that could be employed to keep hosts connected very surreptitiously ("blockchain over cat pictures"), at least if the user isn't mining and can tolerate fairly high latency (Mining is much more sensitive, however, and to keep latency down needs bandwidth a large multiple of the average rate).  Beyond steganography over the internet, the low rate means that we could not-unreasonably broadcast Bitcoin data world wide over relatively inexpensive satellite channels or HF or even VLF radio (well, at least headers over VLF). Perhaps a hardfork changes the block size limits in the future, but at least for now in a censorship war I think Bitcoin would fair very well.

So, even though breaking the flow of information breaks Bitcoin fundamentally, our narrow requirements for information and the nature of our communication (broadcats) means that to block Bitcoin, given a community of adaptive users and developers, probably requires blocking damn near everything.

I don't consider censorship a critical risk given our current network parameters, but it's something we could be preparing a little better for, especially making sure that big "hash colocation points" and mining pools aren't big censorship targets that are too conspicuous to vanish.

Unless you download the blockchain over and over again, finding a proxy that will tolerate your Bitcoin traffic will be fairly easy. So my guess is none.


Agreed.


Define evil.

My ISP blocks BitTorrent traffic, and I can assure you that there wasn't a single legal complaint. (Pirated movies are openly sold on the street here, so downloading them is no biggie.)

Most ISPs block BT traffic because they like to advertise unlimited traffic at X Mbps, although they have no intention of keeping that promise. This goes hand-in-hand with other shady tactics like capping the per-connection bandwidth, which are justified by the fine print stating that X Mbps is "best effort" and you might get pretty much any speed in practice...


That might be a choice if you live in one of those fancy first-world countries. Here, we have only one DSL provider and it blocks BT traffic. You can either bend over and take it or find a way around the restriction.


So Canada isn't part of America? Mind blown.

Then bitcoin traffic would be concealed within unrestricted traffic. Bitcoin transactions are small. Blockchain changes could be broadcast on ham radio.

Your bitcoins will be safe, but temporarily unspendable. Sell your aunt and buy a ticket out to a free country, and you are good.

Incidentally, this is all pure thought experiment territory from my side, I'm not expecting ISPs to suddenly swoop here. I expect things will probably move in less expected directions for Bitcoin if we have the rumoured hike in interest from the financial investments world, coupled with dollar reserve status problems. Hopefully being a grown up currency will over-trump the money-laundering terrorist thing.

The U.S. strategy currently appears to be to "regulate" cryptocurrency exchanges.  That means keeping records of everyone who buys or sells cryptocurrencies through these U.S. regulated exchanges.

http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html

so ... our choice is either

• Buy and sell Bitcoins through registered and regulated exchanges
• Buy and sell Bitcoins somewhere else

In either case Bitcoin protocol traffic is identical, and neither the U.S. government or the exchanges control the protocol.