Bitcoin Forum

In a scenario where the USA puts up a national firewall preventing miners/clients in the USA connecting with miners/clients elsewhere, would the blockchain fork into a USA chain and a rest of the world chain? And if so, would my current bitcoins be spendable independently on both chains? And then what would happen when the firewall came down again?

as I understand it as long as one node in the US could still connect to the outside bitcoin world, transactions could theoretically flow

someone will figure out a way to get through the firewall, "internet in a suitcase" type devices will be in the hands of dissident groups.

long range radio wifi links across the border to Canada maybe?

How about connecting via proxy such as the TOR network for one thing?

nahh.. a few "backbone" bitcoin nodes will connect via ssh tunnels/VPN's and that's it.

They are gonna need to shutdown a bunch of satellites and cut a bunch of undersea cables to get somewhere.

In the end of the day (unlike bittorrent) we can dig up old modems and FIDO tech. As long as one can place a phone call bitcoin is going to keep working.

yea we will just use proxies/tor/encryption etc. and it will all be implemented into the client. Gotta love open source.

+1 good old times :)

You could tunnel the peer-to-peer chat over HTTP port 80
That would be pretty hard to shut down.

I've heard that the US couldn't feasibly put up a national firewall because they have waaaay too many outgoing Internet connections.

I don't think a firewall exists today that could block bitcoin at a national or even isp level, and there wont be one for at least another 5 years a minimum. look how hard it is to block BT, this is similar to that, exept BC uses 80% less bandwidth. as said before, we could use phone modems if needed and it would still work.

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Moon Bounce. (EME)
Earth-Moon-Earth communications

This is the terminology for bouncing a radio signal off of, The MOON.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EME_(communications

Maybe, one could modify the ideas brought here http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/
with a ham radio.
Merge this with mesh networking to complete the circuit.

However if the country was very serious it could be a better strategy to bounce through a series of reflectables like planes, boats and whatever else hinted on earlier in the thread by BitVapes.

I don't think that eme would work well, it would have a lot of latency, and would still be difficult to get a signal from NA to EUR. because the earth is a sphere, it is not visible from everywhere at the same time. im sure at certain times of the day you would take advantage of this, but not all the time. for BC to work well, we need it to be up 24/7 with few times of interruptions, because in just 30 minutes the chain could fork.

EME would be unnecessarily difficult and unreliable. It would be much simpler just to send the data over HF.

Someone could create a wireless connection from Alaska to Russia and act as a bridge. Sarah Palin says she can see the "other side" from her home...

That wasn't Russia, it was a cerebral hemorrhage. (It's kinda hard to come up with another explanation for someone who can figure out we have elections, but is otherwise so unbelievably stupid...)

National firewalls aren't likely to have any real effect on Bitcoin, or for that matter, anything else that people would want to block. Encryption at a protocol level solves a hell of a lot of problems, for starters. And face it, if the government actually put up a nationwide firewall that worked by a whitelist (in which event encryption and the like wouldn't help) then we'd have a new government pretty soon in all likelihood... and even if we didn't, there's so many alternate ways available to send data. Shortwave radio signals might even become interesting again!

Blockchain by short-wave? Packet Radio?

But of course, if such things come to pass we'll have more problems than just how to connect to the rest of the world.

How about just via email or twitter (splitting the blocks down to fit) or msn or heck like the joke RFC TCP over Social Network using Facebook :D

that's not nearly as cool as setting up massive mesh networks.

I expend some cycles thinking about attacks on the global internet from time to time.  My thoughts always seem to come back to there being a reasonably high likelihood of a successful and lasting attack under two conditions:

 1) Pretty much 100% of governments are on-board and coordinating.  Thus, if it can somehow be the case that some relatively important country or coalition of countries have some interest served by not cooperating, that would be a good thing.

 2) If countries were willing to take very drastic measures to impose their will (i.e., a bullet in the head), _and_ if life was otherwise tolerable without a free internet, I am not sure that there would be a sufficient core of people to keep a mesh network or whatever functional.  I doubt that it will ever be difficult to track down 'terrorist' who are committing the crime of communicating with one another and 'putting the country at risk.'  A country with a developed and technically competent police state infrastructure could likely do so within seconds.  I think that the best counter to this is to work on things now which would make such assertions of 'public risk' appear as clownish and contrived to the general public as they would actually be.

I guess I was thinking of this kind of scenario: dollar collapses, US can't repay china, precursor to WWIII is a cyberwar, national internets bolted right down, diplomatic pull back from the brink, national internets reopened after 7 days closed, everyone happy again. Will there be lots of national blockchains suddenly competing against each other for the longest one?

You should be more worried about someone gaining over 50% of the network, that is much more likely than the US just deciding to attempt such a thing, and near impossible for them to achieve this goal.

If this became an issue, the bitcoin devs could just build gpu mining in the client. this should be set to turn on automatically, opt out only. then we would have a huge amount of people mining now, it would be far more power than any government could get. id estimate even all the cpu power would be enough.

I am busy hedging against exactly this possibility LOL.

Bitcoin is hardly being tapped as it is now. if BC does become global or even used in only a few countries, i really doubt you could own even 30%.

everyone who has a hacked console will eventually get ports of bitcoin, a ps3 alone would have at least 100mh/s of hashing power per unit, assuming it can use its gpu power.

assume on average 10mh per computer.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p23-207.pdf says 44m has computers with internet assume only 20m want money.

200000000mh/s is what you get with only 20m, thats just half of what the census says at only 10mh per computer.
thats around 150-200 terahashes/s, if i calculate right.

i would like to see you have anything close to 3 terahashes/s

if you even tried to buy that much power you would inflate the prices of gpus so high you simply would not be able to afford it.

this all assumes that bitcoin becomes mainstream and people are willing and do install the mainline software and don't disable the miner. and this does invade ethics, but it would be required to prevent a single entity from abusing power.

latency would kill us and bandwidth would cost a buttload of BC.

latency yes, bandwidth no

well i was thinking of more than just blocks, more like general raw data like secret leaked papers over 10k pages long and such.

Would international airtravel also be forbidden? And would the US finally manage to close down it's land borders?


If the answer to either one is no, the blockchain could still get updated both ways via sneakernet, you would have to raise the threshold to confirm a block getting cracked and transfers being cleared, but overall not much would change (in regards to Bitcoin, other things in the Internet would have significantly more issues).

How long does it take and how much does it cost to download 3 TB over sub Atlantic cable? Now compare it with shipping via fedex a 3TB HDD. This is what I mean.

If carrier pigeons are the answer, Bitcoin isn't the problem.

18 to 24 days, thats about how long it would take to go from US to europe

but if i was going to transfer that much id upgrade to 60megabit consumer grade and it would only take 8 to 14 days, business around here can get a full 100megabit, both are unlimited. however upload would take weeks, in that case you would rent a box with 100mbit each way, with the box it would transfer way more data and be a lot easier. it would likely cost more but not much. and after shipping them HDs could only be used at most 5 times reliably.

edit: only at most 24 seconds assuming they are gigabit optic.

If they do this, then I expect bitcoins to become the most popular thing overnight. People will run away from all the controls. Remember guys, the government can't even keep drugs out of prison. I doubt they can prevent all bits from leaking.

jajaja can´t stop laughing man, great idea and hope we never have to use it. A mesh network, like a parallel internet of some kind, of Foneras with OpenWrt and ROBIN would be great but in my city I think 1 person of 1000 heard about it. Shame on us

I can't believe I missed this bullsh*t.  There are, in fact, at least three points in Alaska that a person standing on the ground can actually see Russian territory; that fact that this statement was not intended to be taken literally notwithstanding.

Good God, some people are just sucked into the whole MSM image machine.  Do people really think that anyone that can get elected to any governorship in America is actually stupid?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/09/can_you_really_see_russia_from_alaska.html

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

Sadly it does seem to be the case.  I credit the MSM and influences which guide their direction as much anything for this unfortunate reality.

Yep, in that case my personal bitcoind will have you guys covered.  My work network has endpoints in New Zealand (Where I am located), LA (the US) and Ireland (EU).  I would imagine there are a few bitcoind daemons connected like that (at least I hope so, I dont want the sole responsibility to keep bitcoin internationaly linked  :-* ) .

Someone takes a flash drive to each continent. Done.

I'm someone who actually has used a modem and degraded POTS line in the recent memory.  That might help to explain my agitation over uncontrolled block chain bloat.

As it happens, I also have a better than average exposure to backbone network topologies and various filtering techniques.  This make me paranoid that it may be possible to disrupt just about any network traffic deamed in need of disruption...up to and including all unrecognized encrypted traffic.  It would be difficult on various fronts (technical, political, economic) but theoretically possible and in a sufficient 'emergency' populations will tolorate a fair amount of pain.

I doubt that any Bitcoin-like system could cope with the challenges which could be thrown at it with complete grace.  But I also believe that if Bitcoin is not at least considering some of the potential challenges and the considerations are factoring into core implementation decisions then Bitcoin itself makes a quantum shift in terms of it's potential (in my mind at least.)

The US government would have to go through a considerable legal fight to put such thing in place.

But, assuming they've done it (or assuming we're talking about a shameless dictatorship), and assuming they want to forbid bitcoin, they don't need to stop there (forbid international connections).
It's relatively easy to track down most bitcoin nodes, as is the case with all p2p networks I'm aware of. So, a totalitarian government trying to block a particular p2p network would not only block foreign access, but would also cut Internet access of every internal IP it sees running a node in this p2p network - that's what France is doing right now, cutting Internet access of those who use p2p file sharing to upload copyrighted content. In the case of France it seems the effect is more modest since they are required to prove that you actually was uploading a particular forbidden content, and they don't cut your access immediately, it seems you're given some warnings before. A more unscrupulous government could just shut you down for running the p2p node. Eventually even put a few people in jail just to make an example.
Using p2p darknets as Tor or I2P to avoid being seen may not be enough, as the same attack could be done against such networks - I read somewhere that it's already very difficult to access Tor from within China, as all relays and most bridges are blocked.

That would make running such p2p node so difficult and dangerous inside this jurisdiction, that only a small percentage of the population would have the technical skills to do it - not to mention the guts to take the risk.

It's sad, but while governments can control ISPs, they can do considerable damage, even to p2p networks as bitcoin.

Well I'm in China and BTC still works just fine from here despite a national firewall being very much in place :D

The US government or whatever other country was stupid enough to try something like this would fail pretty hard even with the manpower allocated to the Great Firewall here they can't keep up. Sure tor and facebook are blocked in a few places here but then you use a new node and :D the net is back.

The US government would have to go through a considerable legal fight to run a gulag system in which they (or lamentably, 'we') maim various people...including ones who are completely innocent of anything remotely threatening.

Similarly, it would be quite a legal stretch for the US government to have legal justification kill US citizens anywhere on the face of the earth (including within our boarders) and without oversight from the justice department.

Similarly, trolling through vast seas of personal data would be completely antithetical to the fundamentals of our founding principles.

Or, on the other hand, are these things such a stretch after all???

---

FWIW and on a tangent, I hypothesis that a fair part of the Bill of Rights has actually been nullified by an order which is a state secret about a decade ago and that the action itself is a state secret.  This hypothesis can explain a lot of mysterious actions and behaviors and I've yet to be able to invalidate it.  Admittedly invalidation is kind of a game/trick like thing due to the 'state secret' aspect, but I assure the reader that this was unintentional in formation of the hypothesis.

Wait a minute.
The original question was if the network outside the US was cut off would the blockchain inside the US be forked.

And all the posts have been of the opinion that as long as someone has a 300 baud modem connection to the outside world everything would be fine.

If the government was able to cut off only 80% of bandwidth from outside that means the miners in the US would be mostly communicating to the network within the US. They would be getting blockchain information mostly among themselves. Wouldn't that fork the blockchain?

Isn't that what a 51% attack is all about?

Does this make any sense?

Whatever firewalls "they" being up, the miners will sneak in that elusive next block, just add some fees and they will find a way for sure.

For sure (really!)  I actually believe and have believed from day one that Bitcoin (or something) should be a 'guerilla currency' and that there would be a high value (non-monetarily speaking, so forgive the pun) in the existence such a thing.  Simply having it, and having it be credible, may be enough to ensure that it never really need be deployed in anger.

I must point out though that a crypto-currency for widespread use by the masses will have plenty of thorny technical issues to overcome (chiefly simple scaling) and that needing to also fit though the cracks of a police state security scheme could be quite unwelcome.  The two goals may be to complex an engineering challenge to really be workable.  At least for the mid-term future.

If (and it's a fairly big 'if') Bitcoin is attacked on a multi-national level I don't expect that it will die but rather simply freeze for a time while the 'good guys' get their bearings...which could take some time depending on the level of preperation.  That would suck mostly 1/2 of a handful of people who had active transactions underway.

Well if they can't stop bittorrent, just release the blockchain updates on torrent :)

Tor would work if the governments were not trying to censor Tor traffic. If they were, you'd need to connect to a secret Tor entry node and use obfsproxy (which is separated from Tor).

Pigeon blockchain-carriers, neeuwee… [awesome sound they make flying]. I like it.

Although it may seem that most of you, guys, grossly overestimate the current ‘governments’ and hype up your ‘opponents’ out of fun it is not all just harmless out-of-barrel theorising, unfortunately.

Let’s say this unease is based on a questionable notion that as the population increases and commonly available resources run out, personal liberties would inevitably be cut down.

(What would certainly be cut down is only man-hour waste - less people would be writing tosh on the forums for example :). )

The opinion is that while new technology advances constantly make administration more effective we had now reached limits of such advancement due to the very democracy and personal freedoms we so value, putting ‘government’ group of people in a rather interesting moral position. Now they may wriggle for a bit, even put up a show of high morals (aren’t you tired of hearing every day about how mind-blowingly kind they are to those poor one-eyed Pirates and troubled hisPanic women) but when push comes to shove…

Don’t want to state the obvious, but aren’t we all by then supposed to be either long dead of decadently wasting our new fortunes or [cunningly] prematurely frozen in hope to be defrosted by some Chinese alien relic collector?

Ya, questionable.  I've not been able to feel compfortable with any particular measure of this.


This! ...captures my attention.  Very interesting in-and-of itself, and also because I don't know what the 'right' answer might be, and also what on earth I would do if I were king no matter what the 'right' answer may be...which makes me damn glad I'll never be king.  I'm pretty sure I could come up with a legitimate argument to go an any number of directions.