Bitcoin Forum

Does anyone here remember egold?  An ecurrency that was shut down by the US Government.  What's to say they won't do the same ehre?

How can they? It would have to be pretty creative 'cause you can't really bring down the network.

Perhaps if they invested in huge amounts of computing power to get over 50% of the hashing they could case some problems, but since our hasing power is something like 40x the worlds biggest supercomputer they would really have to sped big time. They could try to crash the market with a big influx and outflux of cash and i guess there is a chance that could happen but I think in either case it would become quite apparent very quickly and we would have a good chance of stopping it.

One route they might go down is to prevent trading by shutting sites like MTGox. We need to decentralise our trading urgently. If MtGox went down it would cause pandemonium.

In the end if we keep going for a just a little while longer i think the bitcoin userbase will be so big and so diverse that one government acting alone would stand very little chance.

If you haven't read the following, please do:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoins_will_be_shut_down_by_the_government_just_like_Liberty_Dollars_were

Remember though, bitcoin is just data.  The assumption is that if there were government action, the first moves would be directed towards the exchanges.  Without being able to easily exchange bitcoins for fiat, and vice-versa, at this stage would have a significant impact on the market value -- which affects everyone, not just the country(ies) that the government took actions.

Here is how we easily fix that problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion

I think you would have a slightly hard time shutting that down.

It's the same deal as torrenting, my friend. No one can shut down peer to peer... Without essentially shutting down the internet.

especially since they let it spread this far  ::)

The exchanges are obviously an issue as far as converting your money to fiat, but bitcoin could still survive based on bitcoin only trades as well. Not to mention that you would still be able to make private purchases of btc through whatever method.