Bitcoin Forum

With a strategy to stop the growth of bitcoins by reducing the community behind it, Is it possible that the government (say a collective effort by them all) target bitcointalk since it is the largest community bitcoin has(I think), to stop the activities of forum members from staying together to ensure that this community is disbanded?

We do not have one government in the world. As few countries do not support bitcoin, most support bitcoin in one way or the other. Th few that do noy support bitcoin may still in one way or the other allow their citizens to be able to hold bitcoin. Just like China, but just not considering it as a currency, but instead as a property.

Is Bitcointalk a forum for scammers or for criminal activities? No, it is a forum to know more about bitcoin and beyond as you can know others things, like how to avoid scam.

Maybe in other country like China? Apparently, they have a lot of websites being blocked^[1]. There is also an instance where they block bitcointalk.org^[2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China
[2] https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-strange-case-of-bitcointalks-chinese-ban

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Plus, bitcointalk is simply a place where people can freely exchange their ideas and knowledge -- nothing more. We don't even do some shitty and illicit activities that might cause website banning.

If that happens, it could simply mean that the world or any other countries oppose the idea of free speech.

Well, i don't see this happening, but yeah... it's a forum... It's behind cloudflare but it runs on a (dedicated?) server somewhere in a datacenter and it's using SMF.

There are several governments in this world that could stop bitcointalk in it's current form... either by targeting the DNS, or by targeting cloudflare, or by targeting the hosting company... And by targeting i mean: using legal means to stop these services being provided to bitcointalk.

Other governments might be able to hire hackers to attack SMF (or the lamp? stack), or by DDos'in (eventough we're behind cloudflare, which is so big it's ~basically safe).

Even other governments could target the user's isp's or by putting their whole country behind a firewall.

But once again, i don't see this happening anytime soon... If a western government would do this, the press would have a field day... Sure, governments and banks FUD the hell out of our community, but completely blocking a forum would probably backfire (due to free speech restriction and so on).

I doubt this will happened because it’s easy to transfer Bitcointalk forum to new domain and start again also there’s a lot of existing crypto forum out there so taking them down one by one is a very hard task besides the government can only take down a forum if it was based on that specific country but they can only restrict the use of the forum locally if there’s no registered origin for it.

Same on the exchange crackdown by the US. US can only restrict their residents to use exchange but they can’t force exchange to closed globally. Unless the forum is illegal worldwide, there’s no way that this will happened.

Nothing is impossible, although banning a forum/website of basically geeks discussing doesn't look like an useful move and they may need solid legal ground for it.
And if they take down this forum, people will find out soon enough from Twitter, Nostr and the huge number of Telegram channels what would be the new platform they can gather.
So it would be only a temporary setback.

I think that:
1. You may have the impression that this community is bigger and more important than it is.
2. The crypto related noise on Twitter, for example, is much more visible and much more toxic imho; that could be a much easier and much more likely target.

Other than blocking access to Bitcointalk, I don't see any other way a government would target us. Mods and admin are just like any other admin & mod on other forums, would be weird if they started judging them as criminal just because they manage a bitcoin-focused forum. As others have mentioned, they'd better off looking for a Twitter scammer instead.

Controlling exchanges is also a better choice if they want to control crypto. Not to mention it is definitely more profitable that way. They can just lay some regulations, get some taxes when somebody trades, fine them when they report their tax wrong, and so on. It is definitely more effective and profitable compared to blocking some websites that can get bypassed easily with VPN, DNS encryption, and so on.

Some local communities (Russian board for example) have already been banned from accessing this forum. For them, it is now impossible to participate in discussions except through sophisticated means that allow them to bypass those prohibitions. However, these tools are getting actively banned too, so, with every passing day, it is becoming harder and harder to access the website. Of course, those who lost access to the forum do not necessarily lose interest in bitcoin, but the inability to communicate online with like-minded people may adversely affect the rate at which cryptocurrency adoption is spreading. Also, it may negatively impact the quality of knowledge transferred because many experienced and technically-savvy members have lost interest in this forum because of these inconveniences.

A few hundred or maybe a thousand to two unique users actively participating in the forum in terms of somewhat high-quality discussions is not something that Bitcoin depends on - and even if that happens, I believe that the community would reorganize and continue on a new forum. I am also of the opinion that the governments of the world have much bigger problems than dealing with forums, so don't worry too much about such things.

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I did not notice that members from Russia (at least those who are active outside the RU board) disappeared from the forum because of that ban - and I would not agree that VPN or TOR are something sophisticated that every average user could not use. The latest report on the activities of the local boards does not really support your thinking.

Not all government cant able to ban bitcointalk or any crypto related community. The one and only way to ban bitcoin and activity on bitcointalk community is to ban all kinds of digital devices other than that no one can able to ban anything. Keep in mind that government can ban or stop the supply of a physical asset but the government can't control any digital product.

A country can ban a website if they want but it doesn't mean we can access them, we can simply bypass the ban using proxy server like VPN and the perfect example can be found above this post.

Government doesn't really going to stop bitcointalk either, all they can do is to attempt criticising bitcoin as bad and they have been doing it for decade so its not being that much effective apart from affecting the price for short term.

I don't think this can happen in the future, If it would really needs to happen, it could be happened in past. Day by day we are passing the modern world step one by one. In the past the countries did not accept bitcoin /crypto, they are now accepting or becoming more flexible day by day.

So in this modern world bitcoin is getting more popular, and some enthusiasts are saying crypto could be future money. So there is very less chance that a country can target bitcointalk like what you have mentioned in OP. But yeah if something bad happens, and a country starts to be more serious about crypto they just can ban the website like what are doing for gambling sites for some countries.

This why you need a better understanding of a decentralized network, bitcointalk community is not hosted by the government or neither is it's server controlled by any centralized institutionizations, the domain is hosted by cobra and everything concerning this is fully secured and decentralized, it cannot be hacked or closed down, because the website domain address is controlled by the trusted client which is entirely different from the ones we commonly use when browsing, except Theymos or Satoshi himself wish to do so.

Well for starter we arent doing anything bad against government so we arent not be easily be targetted by them. Im not saying its impossible but if ever that happened that means bitcoin is pretty serious threat already to them if thats the case. Since they can knew that mosr members here are all pro bitcoins.

Plus what can they achieve from doing that? I doubt there is such trophy for them if ever they vanish this forum. Probably someone will juat revive it and make the issue recede first.

It's impossible to stop Bitcoin by targeting Bitcointalk forum, and I am sure theymos is making regular backups in case something bad happens, so it can be restored quickly.
Most of developers and people who are working on Bitcoin code are not actively writing in forum, but in theory we could always create another way of communication.
Nostr was recently released as alternative to Twitter and it is growing in popularity a lot, so maybe it's possible to do something similyr for bitcoin forum.

This forum can't be ban all less Theymos or the Creator wants to short it down but however, No country have the power to ban this forum entirely but can only sets a restrictions to their country based users while others still continue using the forum. Between bitcoin have past the stumbling phase were any agency or Government parastatals would want to hinder the growth of bitcoin globally through Bitcointalk forum.

No. Think of a situation where there was a collective effort by all governments to stop something.
The answer is never.

When there was a ban on alcohol in the US, they were transporting it from Canada that didn't have prohibition.
The US couldn't even agree on country-wide ban on cannabis. In some states you can buy a firearm by showing an ID, some require you to have a license and you think the governments of the world would go against bitcoin when they can't even agree on whether Putin is a mass murderer or not.

You do not think cyber attacks on hosting companies can be possible if any world government or person is interested in taking bitcointalk down? We have regular, though not prolonged DDoS attacks on this forum and that can be an issue also. But I see a side effect too if that should happen because it will create more publicity for bitcoin as many who have not heard about bitcoin will become interested in it. And they want to get all the gist behind what happened. Sympathy for bitcoin will also be there from newcomers because people like to defend underdogs.

I don't know how that will be possible. Even if collective governments of the world move for the motion of stopping the existence of this forum all because it's a bitcoin forum. For me, the least a particular country that opposes this forum can do is prevent its citizens from accessing the forum's server. And its people can still get around such website restrictions by utilizing a VPN. At the end of the day, they learn that their efforts to prevent this forum from contacting its members were a waste of time and resources.

Nations that are not comfortable with Bitcoin might want to reduce the influence of bitcoin through misinformation. They can assign their agents to register as members and use the opportunity it spread false information in the forum. They might also use hacking or cyberattack to try to attack the forum. But the forum is a well-managed platform that can withstand these threads by external forces. Bitcoin awareness is growing thereby making the population of the community experience constant growth.

Bitcoin was easily to stopped a few months or years since 2009 but governments failed to do this.

Now in 2023, after 14 years, it is too late for them to stop Bitcoin eventually. Like the Internet, it could be failed in 1990s but now it has been invaded deeply in human civilization and blockchain technology is on a same pathway.

The bullish case for Bitcoin (https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1)
Lindy effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)
Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/)

Bitcoin has been making a big revolution for human civilization that you would realize after reading all above documents.

although it is quite possible. but I wouldn't think that certain governments have that kind of thinking. I mean, what's there to be afraid of in an online community where the discussion is? maybe, when the world's finances feel threatened by Bitcoin. and it can interfere with the business being done. but so far, I think everything will be fine. nothing to think about too seriously for a situation like that.