Bitcoin Forum

I've been meaning to ask this for a while. I don't know if this is the right board though.

A hypothetical situation. Say, the government could decide to prevent average users from using the internet to send their transactions to the blockchain. I'm sure there are ways to enforce this. For example, what comes to mind first is a kind of regulation enforced on the internet service providers to block transactions.

As already probably discussed many times, this would force people to become creative and find alternative ways to broadcast their transactions. This could range from

• disguising transactions as SMS messages and broadcasting them with cell phones,
• to even using shortwave radio transmitters attached to computers (this is something Andreas Antonopoulos mentions in his book "The Internet of Money") as a very creative idea to bypass these kinds of attacks on the network.

However, what about the communication between the miners? According to this bitcointalk post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2852931.msg29426613#msg29426613)

What if the links between the most important miners were compromised in a similar way? Is this a real danger with respect to the normal functioning of the network, and what could the potential response be?

To prevent average users from sending their Bitcoin's transactions, the government should turn the whole Internet off.

LOL. Also they can use Morse code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code). :D

I think the better way is to use a steganography to embed the transaction data into some media file, then share it to be broadcasted by another users which have an access to a node of Bitcoin.

The majority of Bitcoin's miners (actually, of a mining pools having a huge amount of ASICs powered by electricity) is located in China, therefore it is possible to restrict the connections between them (or between foreign miners). I guess this is a weak place of Bitcoin's network.[/list]

No. If I understand correctly, he meant that it is optimal for the miners to be in direct connection with each other and hence are able to get the new blocks the fastest. When a block is mined, the propagation of the block throughout the network can take quite sometime; potentially up to several seconds depending on your connection. If the propagation is this slow, the miner is losing on time to potentially mine on the next block.

The government can certainly block the direct linkage but the miners would still be able to get the block data by connecting to other peers. It's also hard for the government to fully block any connections.

There's really no way to enforce this, short of turning off the whole internet for the country.
Previous attempts to censor or limit the information or connections of citizens have always been bypassed easily. See China's Great Firewall.

Say a user was able to broadcast a transaction as an SMS, how would the user monitor the transaction without access to a bitcoin node?

First of all let's say this is not an attack on bitcoin, this is an attack on the liberty of transmitting/receiving data over the internet. And when you block this, it is not only an attack to bitcoin... You may want to change the headline a bit :-)
Once certain traffic is disallowed, you have censorship. Bitcoin was made with censorship resistance in mind. So when all the major miners in one location of the globe are disconnected by a government, there is a high chance that any other person in a different part of the world starts to mine blocks (it becomes beneficial suddenly!). The bitcoin system would need some time to adopt to this new situation (adjusting blockheight etc), but would not fall. Only if all Internet is restricted by all governments, then you can "kill" bitcoin. Highly unlikely.

I see, that makes a lot of sense. So the entities that actually mine the majority of the blocks have an additional advantage of being connected with fast connections, increasing their advantage (if only by a couple of seconds) over the rest of the network.

These are all pretty reassuring facts. Thanks for taking the time to clear these things up.

Encryption and VPN's could keep Bitcoin safe and away from government control but not at these silly prices
and anyway Bankers have taken over Bitcoin via the lightning network so it's all academic anyway.

Another example of Bitcoin not living up to it's original goals and shows that the prices is hyped up so lets see if anyone
is left here if/when the price is back below a dollar 

Take your medicine boys, will do you good in the long term.

Indeed bitcoin attracted so much attention and I do believe some would attempt to attack the blockchain to gain control all the funds exist. But it would really be a long shot to do that  probably with a super ASIC computer miners will perform a brute force attack but like I have mentioned, its a long shot.

The ability to attack the network of bitcoin is very strong and fast. Recently reported that many computers infected with bitcoin virus. Professional bitcoin diggers will set up a system to infiltrate the computer to steal data and dig a bitcoin. They will receive free BTC.

Application-Specific Integrated Circuits [1] can only perform one task (the one they were created for).
Miners ASICS do calculate SHA256 hashes. They can't start bruteforcing private keys.




Bitcoin virus?  ::)




Professional bitcoin miner don't do that.
Its the blackhat developer who creates malware which will then mine coins for them.



[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit)