Topic: z - page 2. (Read 4547 times)

I could destroy bitcoins in 20 seconds flat if I was the US government.  Doing nothing illegal... and I could wipe out the currency in literally 6 weeks with about 3 - 5  million bucks..  

3 backroom deals with mt. gox,  tradehill and dwolla ...  1-2 million each for 51% ownership of each....    and any startup that get's a decent volume.. make a similar deal...  that would stop trading pretty quick... the owners would like the payout (which is huge to them, tiny to a country that takes in a few trillion a year in revenue)  so they have no incentive to hide their shit...  and the US government effectively would be in full control of bitcoins.. all without even passing a law.

...

The main problem for us is the fact that the central banking debt based currency is printed out of thin air. All Rothschilds has to do, is print 10 Billion, buy all the bitcoins in existence and they will own 1/3 right off the bat. Then wait 5 years, and buy another 1/3.

"Give me Control over a nation's currency, and I care not who programs the algorithm."

In my opinion, if you are a government, not that hard.
[...]
to get them to change the code of the official client in a certain way is likely
going to be a walk in the park for someone the size of a government.

they could wait until the majority of clients on the network are on devices they control, like smartphones.   If bitcoin takes off, could we see >50% of the nodes being android or similar devices being used at points of sale by consumers?    If so, could they not silently inject a bad client?  Assuming the US government can remotely inject code to your phone, which many people believe they have been able to control mobile phones for years

In my opinion, if you are a government, not that hard. The code is in
fact "controlled" by a rather small-ish group of individuals. Influencing
this small group (especially once the incentives get large enough) to get
them to change the code of the official client in a certain way is likely
going to be a walk in the park for someone the size of a government.

they could wait until the majority of clients on the network are on devices they control, like smartphones.   If bitcoin takes off, could we see >50% of the nodes being android or similar devices being used at points of sale by consumers?    If so, could they not silently inject a bad client?  Assuming the US government can remotely inject code to your phone, which many people believe they have been able to control mobile phones for years

One possibility would be for the powers that be to adopt Bitcoin as legitimate.

Those who have a lionshare of the wealth now could transfer to having a lionshare of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin, like gold, is probably a better tool so subjugate the plebs with than is fiat currency.  Can be hoarded more effectively and it's release can have a bigger impact.

Then the question becomes, what are the plebs to do?

My suggestion would be at that point to vote to switch en-mass to abandon BTC and switch to BTC-II or whatever.  In that way, I consider BTC to be preferable to gold.

(Actually I've got a different idea which I am working on, but it's not mature yet.)

Much of bitcoin safety relies on its distributed nature, and in particular
on the fact that the same code runs everywhere, implementing the
same pre-agreed-upon protocol to reaches a distributed agreement
on the state of the blockchain and what constitutes a valid block.

What this means is that to significantly change bitcoin (for example
changing how many BTC get created by each new block, or removing
the 21M limit, etc ...), all you have to do is change the bitcoin code
and wait a while until it percolates out to all the clients (or actually,
to more than 50% of them).

How hard would that be in practice, I wonder ?

In my opinion, if you are a government, not that hard. The code is in
fact "controlled" by a rather small-ish group of individuals. Influencing
this small group (especially once the incentives get large enough) to get
them to change the code of the official client in a certain way is likely
going to be a walk in the park for someone the size of a government.

Once the source code of the official client has  been changed in a
significant and potentially incompatible way, how long will it take
for the new implementation to "win" out there ?

Another way to think about this: how will bitcoin manage "forks" in the
client code ? What if someone successfully manages to fragment the
bitcoin community into multiple implementations ?

Yet another way to think about this: how does one enforces the "integrity"
of the source code and the folks who have sway over it ?

Thoughts ?

Ah !

Now there's an interesting answer: the bigger the pools the more
sway they'll have on bitcoin's future.

And this is the main reason anarchism unfortunately fails: there is
no mechanism/feedback loop to prevent the accumulation and concentration
of power and influence.

In other words ... democracy, a system which, as you just mentioned,
is rather flawed, especially when the non-techie crowd moves in, one
that can rather easily be manipulated.

BTW, I am not clamoring doom for bitcoin. I am just trying to point out
that however well designed and solid the system is from a technical pov,
I am not yet convinced of its robustness from a social engineering pov.

Ah !

Now there's an interesting answer: the bigger the pools the more
sway they'll have on bitcoin's future.

And this is the main reason anarchism unfortunately fails: there is
no mechanism/feedback loop to prevent the accumulation and concentration
of power and influence.

You've either completely missed my point or never actually
worked on an open source project before (or both).

Assuming it's the latter, you need to realize that opensource
isn't the same as democracy:

opensource projects are very
often in practice controlled by a tiny group of trusted individuals.

When large disagreements about the code occur, there is either
a unilateral decision taken by those folks, or the project is forked
(see gcc vs. egcs for example).

These don't occur that often for open source stuff because there
is rarely an incentive large enough to maintain a fork for very long.
But in the case of bitcoin, the incentive may get arbitrarily large.

Also, for bitcoin, neither of these scenarios (fork or control by
a small group) are particularly pleasant.

Consider the following scenario: at some point in the future,
it may very well become a good idea to augment the precision
of the BTC (that is, allow for more than 8 digit after the decimal
dot).

How will approval for such a change get "voted" ?