Bitcoin Forum

Recently, US Treasury Department has put sanctions[1] on Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash, taken down their website[2], added all associated with the mixer addresses to the OFAC SDN list, and also, which is more important for this topic, compelled Microsoft to suspend Tornado Cash's Github account[3], all repositories and accounts of code maintainers[4].

So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin?

What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos?

What if they ban all contributors, maintainers, and lead developers?

Is there a place where the bitcoin codebase can migrate to?

Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence? Is it possible to build a decentralized and distributed code hosting platform that no one can censor or shut off?

So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin?

What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos?

What if they ban all contributors, maintainers, and lead developers? Is there a place where the bitcoin codebase can migrate to? Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence?

Is it possible to build a decentralized and distributed code hosting platform that no one can censor or shut off?

It is important to emphasize that Tornado cash is not a company but a smart contract that no particular person controls

Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence?

Back to India! SourceForge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge)!

It is important to emphasize that Tornado cash is not a company but a smart contract that no particular person controls; it is essentially as censorship-resistant and decentralized as the underlying blockchain upon which it is built. In other words, it cannot be "banned" easily.

So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin? What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos?

And yet CoinJoin projects on GitHub like Wasabi (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5389567.0) are never shut down. Hmmm. LOL.

Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence?

Back to India! SourceForge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge)!

It is an open question though, how much bitcoin ecosystem is addicted to github, and what is the cure?

So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin? What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos?

What if they ban all contributors, maintainers, and lead developers? Is there a place where the bitcoin codebase can migrate to? Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence? Is it possible to build a decentralized and distributed code hosting platform that no one can censor or shut off?

The got you use/call from the command line is still fully open sourced afaik from when Linus made it.

The server was open sourced too afaik so that can be freely installed or run anyway by the developers (there may be ways it can be easily decentralised and run on core if the community wants to).

Recently, US Treasury Department has put sanctions[1] on Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash, taken down their website[2], added all associated with the mixer addresses to the OFAC SDN list, and also, which is more important for this topic, compelled Microsoft to suspend Tornado Cash's Github account[3], all repositories and accounts of code maintainers[4]. It is important to emphasize that Tornado cash is not a company but a smart contract that no particular person controls; it is essentially as censorship-resistant and decentralized as the underlying blockchain upon which it is built. In other words, it cannot be "banned" easily.

So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin? What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos? What if they ban all contributors, maintainers, and lead developers? Is there a place where the bitcoin codebase can migrate to? Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence? Is it possible to build a decentralized and distributed code hosting platform that no one can censor or shut off?


[1] https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-tools-places-sweeping-restrictions-on-all-americans/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220808144431/https://tornado.cash/
[3] https://github.com/tornadocash
[4] https://nitter.net/semenov_roman_/status/1556717890308653059

it would be simple to just port it to another website that is not github, like gitlab,

For what it's worth in this context there is no difference between github and gitlab since both of their companies are located inside United States so any laws applied to github should also be applied to gitlab.

I'm not familiar with tornado cash whatsoever, and I'm pretty ignorant about smart contracts too, but I did take a look at the article and I think what needs to happen is for this action to be challenged via the legal system, lest it set a precedent that might put into motion all of those github removals and negative actions against bitcoin that you suggested could happen.

And yet CoinJoin projects on GitHub like Wasabi (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5389567.0) are never shut down. Hmmm. LOL.

There was a topic about this a while ago when GitHub restricted a lot of accounts:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5169284.0

I don't think so. Bitcoin is not illegal and its current direction is getting adopted by large institutions. They can easily lobby against this kind of measures if it's the case.

In theory anyone can host a system similar to Github on his computer, just if it's not publicly visible there may come trust issues.
And obviously all the bigger systems like this are centralized. The most known is GitLab, but a list would be here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24256558

No, you host your own Git server (https://gitea.io) (Gitea). That is what I and many others did when Hollywood came knocking on youtube-dl's door.

As far as Bitcoin the currency is concerned, it's not a mixer or a "laundromat", so it has nothing to fear. Even in a hypothetical situation, we can fight back, print shirts and all kinds of stuff with Bitcoin Core source code on it, just like the 90's cypherpunks fought back for PGP.

Honestly, I don't think institutional investors are that interested in bitcoin being censorship-resistant or private, they rather value the "store-of-wealth" aspect of bitcoin that allows them sort of hedge against money printing. If some platforms or persons get banned for doing bitcoin, it is not a big deal as long as bitcoin works and produces new blocks.

Self-hosting of repositories or spinning up a server is a solution to the problem of censorship, but most people won't bother running their own servers. (https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html)

I am not a lawyer myself but haven't we already had such a precedent[1] where the US Government tried to prohibit the distribution of open-source code and where the court ruled out that code is speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment? In this case, the US Government also attempts to censor free speech expressed via computer language, thereby violating the said amendment.

https://www.eff.org/ru/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

What would happen to bitcoin if all bitcoin-related stuff on GitHub got banned?

Someone would create "HitGub" what would be a copy of GitHub, set it up in eg Malta and we would go on as usual.

Here's a guide for anyone interested, directly from the actual Linux Foundation's blog: https://linuxfoundation.org/blog/classic-sysadmin-how-to-run-your-own-git-server/

GitHub is not Git! The latter is just an engine, but GitHub goes far beyond that.

It is very disappointing to see so many posts in this thread, touting Git as an alternative.

Christ, why do they make it so complicated? In the case of Gitea (which is still using actual Git), you just have to make a Git working dir, copy the binaries to /bin and copy the supplied systemd service to the respective systemd folder. There's even a Docker container to avoid all this hassle.

It would be really hard for them to ban BTC code unless there was some "National Security" label attached to it.

It would be really hard for them to ban BTC code unless there was some "National Security" label attached to it.

GitHub is just a Git hosting service. What are you doing when working with GitHub? You're actually working with Git, and pushing to GitHub.

The beauty of Git is that it's decentralized. Not in the traditional way, maybe, but anyone who clones a GitHub repo, holds the entire repository on their hard drive, including full commit history back to the very first commit.

It is the technical sub of the bloody original bitcoin forum, we are all supposed to avoid spreading misinformation.

Github is a web application that uses Git, the latter is a Version Control System, CVS. When you work with Github you are offered dozens of features and utilities that are not part of a CVS.

GitHub, Inc., is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git^{[emphasis mine]} plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project.

As much as it is needed, it is hard to replace Github, but not impossible. The alternative is neither bare Git, nor another Github-like centralized service. What we need ( and it is inevitable, imo), is a decentralized network of Git repositories behind a decentralized web application.

What about just having mirrors on other Git 'hosting services' / Git remotes - self-hosted ones and popular, known ones?

as long as the different mirrors are hosted in jurisdictions that are separate. For example if both are located in US or any country that follows US (UK, Japan, South Korea,...) then it will only create false sense of security.

In my design, we abandon "reference repository", "fetch","pull", etc., altogether. To be more specific, we push them behind the scene using an abstraction layer, keeping the legacy Git intact.

On a p2p network, an attacker can replace the devs' keys with theirs.

But the forged attacker's keys don't match the real dev's key signature. If you don't compare that the obtained key is actually the proper key, you miss an important step.

So we don't abandon them. We just stop being dependent on Github.com for their maintenance.

Decentralizing git (which isn't already accomplished with Gitea servers?) doesn't break the core idea of distributing and tracking software versions, which includes fetching and pulling requests.

One thing I don't understand is how you do ensure for the integrity of the software.

On a p2p network, an attacker can replace the devs' keys with theirs.

But, the attacker carries both the developers' public keys, the binaries / source code, and finally the signatures. Therefore, they have everything needed to alter the software effectively, without notice. For example, I can change Electrum's source code, replace Thomas' key with mine, replace the Thomas' signature with mine, and give it to you. How can you know I've compromised it?

Everyone in the world who has imported ThomasV's PGP key (assuming his email is verified), can retrieve the key from a keyserver, attempt to verify your binary, and notice that it fails because of wrong signature.

So the keyserver plays a very important role (I just wish GPG shipped with a default keyserver that actually works! >:()

Everyone in the world who has imported ThomasV's PGP key (assuming his email is verified), can retrieve the key from a keyserver, attempt to verify your binary, and notice that it fails because of wrong signature.

So the keyserver plays a very important role (I just wish GPG shipped with a default keyserver that actually works! >:()

When it comes to violating human rights, defending the rich, suppressing the poor, preserving the corrupt fiat based monetary system, etc.,  there is only one jurisdiction across the globe, it is the US jurisdiction nowadays. Mirroring doesn't work, decentralization does.

But, the attacker carries both the developers' public keys, the binaries / source code, and finally the signatures. Therefore, they have everything needed to alter the software effectively, without notice. For example, I can change Electrum's source code, replace Thomas' key with mine, replace the Thomas' signature with mine, and give it to you. How can you know I've compromised it?

Once a repository is initialized, it comes with a built-in authentication metadata that includes a root public key which is committed by the fingerprint of the whole repository, hence immune to forgery.

You are forgetting about an essential part of PGP which is called Web of Trust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust), you don't just trust any key that signs a binary. You have to first spend time finding the correct key that you can trust then import that and verify the signature that it created.

You are forgetting about an essential part of PGP which is called Web of Trust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust), you don't just trust any key that signs a binary. You have to first spend time finding the correct key that you can trust then import that and verify the signature that it created.

This root public key. How can you make sure it isn't altered effectively, since repository is distributed among nodes. For example, what forbids a node change it, and send the entire repository to other nodes?

That said, I'm working on a project for implementing an overlay network above bitcoin P2P for a more general purpose networking, the main challenge here is incentivizing bitcoin full nodes to participate, whether maintaining their own software repository is enough incentive or not is subject to further assessments.

In the scheme, authenticity of a repository is hard-coded to its genesis and is not forgeable ever, though the genesis itself is a different story:
[...]

What I like about your idea is that a Git commit history is one of the few data structures that slightly resemble - and because of that might actually make sense to implement as - a blockchain.

I see 2 issues:
[1] Embedding developer keys in the 'genesis commit' means they can't revoke them, add new ones or add new developers to the project down the road.

[2] You need a consensus mechanism, and as so often discussed on the forum, nothing works as well as PoW (if at all). So either it's built on top of a PoW cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, or you need to incentivize people to 'mine commits' using real-world energy resources.

[2] You need a consensus mechanism, and as so often discussed on the forum, nothing works as well as PoW (if at all). So either it's built on top of a PoW cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, or you need to incentivize people to 'mine commits' using real-world energy resources.

So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin?

I personally believe that this kind of ban can not happen without this entities fighting back.

Honestly, betting on El Salvador to fight against the U.S. and EU wanting to ban Bitcoin-related projects from GitHub is one of the worse bets I've seen.
They don't have a lot to work with / to leverage. It's a tiny nation and their adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender is mostly symbolic; it shows what's possible, but it doesn't give Bitcoin more value, more legitimacy or protection from large states' attacks.

Yeah it's silly, and we already have examples of some countries like China banning Bitcoin (several times) without much resistance.
I think that other countries won't ban Bitcoin directly yet, at least not until they release their own CBDC projects, but they can slowly start to increase pressure on exchanges, wallets, developers, miners, etc.
It's obvious they want to have full surveillance and tracking in near future, so anything related with privacy is now under attack.

I think that other countries won't ban Bitcoin directly yet, at least not until they release their own CBDC projects, but they can slowly start to increase pressure on exchanges, wallets, developers, miners, etc.
It's obvious they want to have full surveillance and tracking in near future, so anything related with privacy is now under attack.

They already know they can't prevent people from using bitcoin but they still want to surveil. The solution was to force centralized services to implement KYC and report back.

Hear me out: arrival of CBDCs, shutdown of centralized exchanges and simultaneously implementation of L1 privacy changes to the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin will be the obvious choice for... literally anyone.
And people will be incentivized to actually use it as a medium of exchange to escape the totalitarian nature of CBDC and avoid going through buying/selling 'hassle' on DEX's.

People will be incentivized to further get involved if (to get back on topic) centralized services were to start banning Bitcoin- and crypto-related stuff, by spinning up own nodes, own Git mirrors and whatever other tech we might have moved to until then.
More decentralized infrastructure is going to make Bitcoin stronger than ever, totally destroying the dreams of anyone attempting to shut it down by such measures.

In related news, SourceHut recently announced that it is banning all cryptocurrencies starting on January 1, 2023. But then again SourceHut does not look very professional since the first page says "Welcome to sourcehut!" which is not capitalized. I have never used SourceHut, and I have no intention of using SourceHut since they are anti-innovative.

Codeberg is also considering banning all cryptocurrency projects (I have commented on Issue #794 about this https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/794). It seems like the anti-innovative people at these sites do not want anyone developing new technologies. They are not willing to reason with people who give solid reasons for developing cryptocurrency technologies. I doubt that they will be willing to understand what the people are doing. They do not want people to improve the situation.

I trust that Github will remain innovative and that the anti-innovative hostile entities will simply stay away from Github (well, at least for now).

With that being said, there are plenty of things that the cryptocurrency community could be doing much better. A lot of the bad reputation that cryptocurrencies have has been earned, but banning innovators who want to innovate is just asinine.

I trust that Github will remain innovative and that the anti-innovative hostile entities will simply stay away from Github (well, at least for now).

I beg to differ with cryptocurrencies in regard to the environmental aspect: Proof-of-work based cryptocurrencies definetly have a bad impact on the environment because of wasted CPU power and hardware, while cryptocurrencies that use Proof-of-stake or some other proof mechanism that doesn't need complex calculations don't have that bad impact. They may have other problems..

Looks like my watch notifications paid off then.

I intended to comment here, but you locked the thread two days earlier.

Let me make one thing clear here, I do not use Codeberg - this account was made a week ago just to comment here. I am an open-source developer of various projects on Github including software which interaxts with cryptocurrencies: https://github.com/ZenulAbidin

As it stands, I lose nothing by a Codeberg ban on crypto projects. However, other devs who have crypto code on Codeberg have everything to lose, so what I write is is for them, not for me.

Everyone - You know, this thread is called: "Taking a stand against cryptocurrency/blockchain", and it would be more accurate to call it "Taking a stand sgainst cryptocurrency/blockchain scams". Because that's what most of the idea behind this thread seems to be about.

It is quite trivial to get rid of blockchain/cryptocurrency scam projects online - using the Report Abuse button. This particular button has been fantastic on Github for taking down various scam copies of crypto projects. I assume you have such a button already - in that case, half of your problem is already solved.

Now that we have got the scams out of the way, let us deal with your second issue surrounding this topic: Excessive energy use of cryptocurrencies. Incidentially, I am also the creator of https://bitcoincleanup.com (NOT cleanupbitcoin). This is a website I made to challenge Greenpeace's and Chris Larsen's (the Ripple Labs co-founder who donated all that campaign money to Greenpease in the first place) false claims about crypto energy usage. They were claiming that if you "Change the Code", everything would be fine and Bitcoin's energy usage would go down.

Isn't it ironic, a crypto guy making a campaign against crypto. But all that is a different topic.

First of all, some cryptos like Ethereum are using Proof of Stake, which uses no energy, so this is a non-issue for them. You can't say: "Let's ban the projects of all Ethereum dApps on CodeBerg", because as of September - long before SourceHut contemplated any crypto ban - Ethereum does not even use enormous energy anymore.

Second, for Proof of Work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin - the myth of excessive energy use has been totally debunked on my website, I suggest you study it carefully. I will quote a few key points from the site:

Myth: Bitcoin uses as much energy as <country>

The IT, plane, car, transportation, and other industries must utilize large amounts of electricity for data centers, chemical or fuel generation, or heating, in order to provide their services. The same is true for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin needs to use a lot of energy so that its Proof of Work can prevent hackers from stealing people's bitcoins. So far it's been going great, compared to several Proof of Stake coins, which have been breached with 51% attacks.

Some people claim "We know crypto doesn’t need much energy to work." This is very ignorant because freedom from censorship is only possible in Proof of Work - transactions can still be embargoed in other algorithms.
That is to say, that the massive energy use serves to fend off attacks against the Bitcoin network in the same way that CloudFlare generates terabytes of traffic in the process of fending off bot attacks against websites. And incidentially, a lot of energy use from their networking infrastructure. But hey, I don't hear anyone complaining about Cloudflare's carbon footprint, do I? So why are cryptocurrencies so important? Because it's "useless" to you?

I could also make the argument that Cloudflare is useless to me because I do not use it on my website I just linked. But that would be a very ignorant statement, because thousands of businesses, including most of the Fortune 500 companies, rely on Cloudflare to protect their websites from DDoS attacks. It's very effective, and does the job. So its carbon footprint cannot be complained about.

As for Bitcoin and other Proof of Work cryptocurrencies, they server as a form of digital money for people who have no access to banks. This happens to include most of Africa and South America, just so you don't forget. Already in 2022, thousands of people rely on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to store their life savings and conduct day-to-day transactions, because their banking infrastructure is either unreliable and prone to failure, or it is corrupt and liable to funds theft by the respective governments. That is why a large percentage of the world population remains unbanked. So cryptocurrency is the prefect solution to them.

As you know, cryptocurrency relies on software to provide its networking and financial services. The protocols are hosted online, the wallet software are also hosted online, and in some cases the websites of the projects themselves are hosted in some open-source community repo online. Without this software, cryptocurrency cannot work, and the revolution that is providing financial access to so many ubanked people snce 2009 will grind to a halt.

To instantiate a ban of crypto projects just because you heard a few things you don't like about the industry is, at best, madness. It does two very bad things: First, the developers working on crypto projects on your site will have their work disrupted and they will have to migrate to a new webste. For what?

Second, it sends a negative signal across the industry that code hosting projects do not care about the mission statement that underlines most crypto projects - to provide financial access of money to everyone.

And you are doing this for what exactly?

To prevent crypto scams? Sorry, but even if all open source hosting sites like Github banned cryptocurrency projects this instant, there would still be crypto scams being perpretrated because the developers would just move to self-hosted Gitea.

Or is it as a protest against crypto's excessive energy use? Well we have already established that excessive energy usage is not useless when it is to protect services.

So, then, what benefit will banning crypto projects from Codeberg bring?

The only thing that will come out of this is crypto developers on you platform will be frustrated and will have to move their entire repo to another website. Is this really all that you want this proposal to bring about? Because I know that there is some sense of altruism in the goal of this proposal.

Unfortunately, that sense of altruism is misguided, for reasons I have explained above.

A version control platform is not supposed to make developers' lives difficult. It is supposed to make them easier.

If we were talking about banning malware projects, gambling projects, or adult projects, then you would be on to something here. But this is cryptocurrency, whose use is legal in all jurdistinctions - with the exception of a handful of nations who don't seem to like it at all, but I will leave them out of this discussion.

I completely agree with @jvanname that, and I quote: "We need people to develop cryptocurrencies without being harassed, banned, and shamed because cryptocurrencies can save countless lives."

Do you guys agree with this or no?

We are already protecting the rights of minority groups, sexual orientations, and activists. Is crypto really that malicious to you guys to go as far as believing that crypto developers need to be bothered?

Some of you believe SourceHut did "an incredibly brave thing" by banning crypto projects from its platform. But far from being brave, it is a misguided thing, and a very dangerous decision to make because it could sway other source control sites to harass crypto developers on their platforms. Do not enable repressive behavior.

Don't forget that the following is on your own homepage (emphasis mine):

Respect
Your data is not for sale. No third party cookies, no tracking. Hosted in the EU, we welcome the world.
So this means you welcome everyone except for crypto developers? As a privacy-focused source control site, I expected more inclusion to be granted to users.

My last remark, before closing this post, is one of history.

In the 1990s the NSA attempted to make distribution of strong cryptography software illegal. They failed. Why? Because everyone distributed the source code via different mediums such as CDs, books, coffee mugs and T-shirts.

You know, "crypto" got its name from cryptography. And also, many regulators and web services who similarly do not understand crypto properly also want to ban us. But our motto is: If you ban us in one place, we will appear in ten more places.

If you don't believe me, just look how many websites are hosting a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper ever since Craig Wright tried to sue bitcoin.org to take it down.

-Ali Sherief (Zenul_Abidin)

And now codeberg.org has closed the issue about cryptocurrencies again permanently. The people on that thread clearly do not understand the first thing about decency and respect. They seem to be incredibly hostile and angry. Well, this just gives a lot of credence to the cryptocurrency community. Now the decision whether to ban cryptocurrencies or not will be made in private by people who hate me because I have a Ph.D. in Mathematics (and can therefore produce new functions using quantum information theory to evaluate the security of block ciphers, but people on codeberg.org hate education). Codeberg seems to be a bastion of intolerance and hostility, and no respectable human should affiliate himself with Codeberg in any way whatsoever other than telling the people there that they are intolerant.

-Joseph Van Name Ph.D.

Creator of Circcash

Is this your own or someone else experience?