Can bitcoin be blocked too by the government or isp ??

[countryfree]

Oh yes, it's possible and very easy to do. It's already being done in many places.

As I travel a lot, I often use free wifi services in cafes and the like, and in most places, FTP doesn't work. Sometimes I cannot use email at all, sometimes I can read my mail but I cannot reply (I'm using ports 995 & 465), and very often Electrum cannot connect. Some websites such as those of airlines companies which are heavily secured do not work everywhere, too.

If it can be done in a cafe, it can also be done at the ISP level.

[mindrust]

Bitcoin system is like torrent P2P system. If they want to destroy bitcoin, they will have to ban everysingle IP which is connected to the blockchain. Which is pretty dump. Doable but it won't happen.

[Shiroslullaby]

Im glad there are users in the thread who realize that the government actually has power to harm Bitcoin.
Some people undersetimate the capabilities of the major powers when it comes to cyber warfare, control of the internet, etc.
It's also foolish to think that they don't already have plans for Bitcoin or any other transaction system that requires the internet to function.

I remember five years ago telling people that the NSA was collecting phone data on everyone in the country and no one believed it.
"There is no way they could collect that much data!"

[Wind_FURY]

ok. another worse case scenario.

a government could via united nations/interpol set up a sudden international tactical strike

this can be done by
https://bitnodes.21.co/
getting all the IP's and finding out which ISP that ip belongs to.
EG in the UK its under 230..in the U.S its under 1500

so imagine tomorrow under 230 homes out of 20 million households have their internet disconnected
at the same time
in america under 1500 homes out of 100mill households have their internet disconnected
and so on
even things like proxies are useless because the landline has been literally cut off for upto 6000 locations
think its impossible? its not. ISP's have millions of customers and regularly turn the internet off on 10's of thousands of users every week due to breach of contract/non payment of bill.

they would also take bitnodes and other DNS seeding locations offline to further cause drama of new node locations not being able to link up, though smart people will just join an IRC channel and request a list of working ip addresses to manually add node connections

as for the network
what would happen is that the countries with no "partnerships" to whatever agency is organising this tactical strike will continue on. and people who are affected would need to either move house or go to court to get their internet ban lifted or change ISP which can take upto 10 days in some cases.

again it wont require an all out "ban the internet" of 1.5billion people. but instead disconnecting the land lines of under 6000 people to cause alot of drama and issues.

the solution is to get more diverse. instead of bitcoin nodes running in just 91 countries it needs to be running in all 200 countries. and also needs to be running via satalite and other non landline/ISP reliant methods

Then we are witnessing one threatened and angry government using everything they got just to stop an independent, decentralized and peer to peer internet tokens system which is giving more potential benefit to humanity just like the invention of the telephone. If they were to use their powers that way then they should start using it to stop child porn or something morally wrong.

[prabowo96]

governments cannot take down the network because the IP's are vast.
but lets not get lazy and think we are safe. apathy leads to vulnerability. by not keeping the network as secure as possible.

so lets be realistic and not have an apathetic utopian mindset.

worse case scenario:
(1) governments can take down this forum. the subreddits, github, and some IRC channels, and a couple other bitcoin sites/exchanges to cause some drama.
because that is only under 10 places to hit.

this will take more then a few days for people to try communicating with each other via social media to re establish a new assortment of collaboration of minds, code, markets.

but what i say above wont affect the bitcoin network at all.
however,
(2) governments take down the mining pools internet. because there are only ~20 pools.
causing block creation delays while mining pools switch servers.
this is a short term delay of under an hour. because pools do (well some should) have multiple servers(within their control but in different jurisdictions) to allow miners to "pool hop" to another server quite quickly.
some pools dont have a couple servers. meaning it will take more then an hour to allow their asics to "pool hop"

but what i say above wont see much interruption/delay on the network.

actually government can block the internet for all users but this will break the world nowadays...

I don't think the governments will ban the bitcoin use, it's something harmless...

[mrcash02]

governments cannot take down the network because the IP's are vast.
but lets not get lazy and think we are safe. apathy leads to vulnerability. by not keeping the network as secure as possible.

so lets be realistic and not have an apathetic utopian mindset.

worse case scenario:
(1) governments can take down this forum. the subreddits, github, and some IRC channels, and a couple other bitcoin sites/exchanges to cause some drama.
because that is only under 10 places to hit.

this will take more then a few days for people to try communicating with each other via social media to re establish a new assortment of collaboration of minds, code, markets.

but what i say above wont affect the bitcoin network at all.
however,
(2) governments take down the mining pools internet. because there are only ~20 pools.
causing block creation delays while mining pools switch servers.
this is a short term delay of under an hour. because pools do (well some should) have multiple servers(within their control but in different jurisdictions) to allow miners to "pool hop" to another server quite quickly.
some pools dont have a couple servers. meaning it will take more then an hour to allow their asics to "pool hop"

but what i say above wont see much interruption/delay on the network.

actually government can block the internet for all users but this will break the world nowadays...

I don't think the governments will ban the bitcoin use, it's something harmless...

Some governs don't like bitcoins, principally dictators. Some time ago I saw that Russia government didn't want people there using BTCs, don't know if it continues. But more governments don't want the use of bitcoins, because they don't want to see independent people using an independent currency. The only thing they can offer to their people is poorness, and when their people find a way to have prosperity, they just forbid it...

[arransiv]

If I good remember, some state of USA already blocked exchanges, so it's hard to deal with bitcoin in this conditions...
If government want, they can broke bitcoin...

[traderethereum]

i think government and isp can banned bitcoin for the connection like what they did with gambling and porn website. but i hope the government will not banned bitcoin so we can still make money and we can still doing trading. if in case government is banned bitcoin, i really don't know what i am going to do.

[franky1]

Then we are witnessing one threatened and angry government using everything they got just to stop an independent, decentralized and peer to peer internet tokens system which is giving more potential benefit to humanity just like the invention of the telephone. If they were to use their powers that way then they should start using it to stop child porn or something morally wrong.

governments care about money. they pass on the duties of child porn investigations to local law enforcement.
after all you never see a senator or a MP raiding perves houses.

the government are restricted from directly getting a ISP to ban individuals from using the internet. hense why i said it would have to be done via interpol.
also interpol would need 'good cause' to get a court order to do such things.

with things like perves. stopping their internet is just an alarm bell for the perves to destroy evidence. and thats why they prefer to do 'morning raids' to surprise the perverts and avoid evidence being destroyed. rather than shut down their internet.

though cutting off the internet is both physically and technically possible. the procedures involved in doing so are not straight forward. a government would need to create a law to allow law enforcement to apply to courts to accept and create a court order without question.
much like a bitlicence can be used to stop a unregistered business in new york by applying for a takedown order.
so at the moment i cannot see it happening in reality any time soon to stop individuals.. but that can change much like the change that affects businesses in newyork

but just because there is no bitcoin ban law for individuals in 200 countries right now does not mean we should be apathetic and not secure bitcoin more to prepare/prevent the chance of future changes to the law. we should not leave bitcoin weak to internet banning of just 6000 landlines and then sit on our hands and hope to lobby government to not open the weakness to an attack.
we should not rely on government to solve bitcoin security/utility weaknesses. we should secure bitcoin to not rely on governments.

bitcoin should be at a self sustaining state that no law or individual can hamper it. and not at a mediocre state of hope and faith that bad things cant happen.

apathy and hope which causes lazyness is a security risk.
much like blind faith in devs without  personally checking what features and code actually does become a risk.
its how trojans end up on peoples computers because they trust too much that something wont go wrong.

[zahra4577]

Recently many file sharing sites and torrents had been banned in my country to stop piracy.

Is there a way that the government or the isp may block the connection to bitcoin network by its users ??

NO.bitcoin wallets or exchanges ip may be banned but banning the entire blockchain network is not possible as far as I know

[error08]

People will just connect to these sites via proxies and anonymous browsers and find ways to bypass firewall restrictions. We have seen this with the Chinese " Golden Shield Project " where censorship and surveillance are applied to restrict internet use. You might find some ways to bypass these restrictions, but you might also end up with some jail time, if you did that.

The other thing they might also do, is to ban "Crypto currency" use on the merchant side. If these merchants are forbidden to accept "Crypto currencies" then you would have no place to spend your bitcoins.

In the end, we just have to work with these governments to find a solution to satisfy everyone's needs and hope that they would not over regulate it, which I doubt. ^hmmmmm^

Yeah, I think nothing in our country that could be escape from government attention if they want to.
Government maybe can not blocked bitcoin if just doing sites blocked which could encounter through VPN, but if they ban merchant, store, ATM that accepted bitcoin, it may inconvenience bitcoin user at the country.

[Adbitco]

That depends on the use or abuse of the crypto currencies, if bitcoins are excessively used for some illegal or destructive activities then governments might make or introduce some legislation to regulate or ultimately block the digital currency

[tenk]

I think they can do it as bitcoin transaction, or anything for that matter has some code that would determine that it was a bitcoin transaction. However, similar to censorship in other countries, like China, there are ways to bypass such censorship. I think, in the event, Bitcoin does get blocked by the government or an ISP, there would be workarounds to it.

[2double0]

Bitcoins might get blocked by ISPs but we have alternatives with which we can use it without letting them know that we are doing it.
Why are we so worried when we are having many things available to bypass the blocks?

[clickerz]

Bitcoin system is like torrent P2P system. If they want to destroy bitcoin, they will have to ban everysingle IP which is connected to the blockchain. Which is pretty dump. Doable but it won't happen.

Yes its very possible, but why they should do it in the first place? The government will receive a backlash from bitcoin community. But when it happens, more great minds will seek any way to overcome this blockade.Remember,necessity is the mother of invention.  

[avikz]

If bitcoin becomes a headache to the government then they can certainly block it. Because government never wants that their citizen earns some free money which is hard to be taxed. They want you to pay taxes in everything. Since bitcoin is anonymous, it is hard for them to track it unless and until you exchange it in your local currency.

However, you can certainly use VPN service to open the blocked website. So it will not be much of a problem. But the risk of trading bitcoin in your local currency will have higher risk of getting caught.

[wahb]

as still not a single country has taken step about this , therefore no one know about the fact that either it can be block or not.

[kryptqnick]

Well, if you are talking about countries in which BTC is illegal, they can search the players of online casinos by IP, for instance. I don't think people use TOR that much. The same holds for torrent websites or something else like that. But bitcoin can't be absolutely blocked and people from countries where it is illegal may still find a way to use bitcoin for online purchases.

[Milkduds]

Have read a few articles on this topic lately and some say that places like China are getting better and more sophisticated at breaking loopholes but then there are others that point out the cost.
The cost is really a interesting dynamic because they are double fisting the issue and bleeding money till something cheaper comes along.

[ekoice]

Even if the government tries to block Bitcoin, it will be useless. We can easily surf the blocked websites with some IPs. So the government block will not have any impact in using Bitcoins.