Bitcoin Forum

The recent megaupload site shut down made me wonder ... will it happen to bitcoin? All these mining sites; all the government has to do is cut off the head of the snake (the most popular mining sites), and the rest of the sites will be too afraid to continue. If and when that happens, will bitcoin die?

Just curious as to what are some of your thoughts ...

Not really. Bitcoin doesn't rely on mining pools to survive, it's just an easier way to make a profit than mining solo.

Bitcoin only needs enough mining to occur so that no individual or cartel has 51% of the hashing power.  

If half the network were to be blocked or shut down some how (e.g., all ISPs suddenly block port 8332), the remaining half would continue mining away, though the blocks would be solved half as fast for the next a couple weeks or so, depending on the timing.

And it would take a matter of hours probably for alternate methods of mining to start being widely used (e.g., Tor, VPN or privately shared IP/port number)

As far as being "too afaid to continue", if a situation developed where the government were to go after miners by force things would already have deteriorated sufficiently that the miners left aren't necessarily those that would back away from the challenge.

About two decades ago, Philip R. Zimmerman and other cypherpunks were continuously being asked by the press and at business meetings about what the government would do to them when the day came it would crack down on their efforts to get cryptography software (PGP) into the parts of the world where it was badly needed.

Ends up, Philip says, the government "never once" even contacted them.

The bitcoin network will automatically adjust to the amount of miners (more correctly, the strength of the miners), so we don't really need all the miners we have now but it does make the network more secure. If the most popular pools were cut off some people could still solomine, others might stop mining, but the network would survive.

If the Government wanted to shut down Bitcoin, they would have better luck going after the exchanges.

If exchanges had to migrate to tor, I think they would.

If governments really wanted to shut down Bitcoin, they would have to turn off the internet. Even then I have a casascius coin :D

The exchanges can migrate to tor, but how are they going to get money? Cash through the mail?

I think the ridiculous crackdown on poker rooms in the US shows precisely how a very small number of actions can make it very difficult for most citizens to participate in an economy.

Shhhh, why are we giving the government ideas on how to harm bitcoin?

If government ever need private PGP key of someone, they'll just install "keylogger" on the suspect's computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_logging#Cracking