[25:25] ...by the way, how many of y’all remember Napster? You know, Napster was unstoppable, it was inevitable, until—boom! It was obliterated.
Lessons were learned from Napster and bittorrent was created which has stubbornly been resistant against shutdown. Those same lessons carried forward into the design of Bitcoin.
Thanks, but I’ve heard of Bittorrent. I was torrenting when some of the people here were in diapers. I also thought of torrents when I watched Cruz’s speech. And I think I have adequately demonstrated that
I know a thing or two about Bitcoin, its design, and its implementation. (I can even explain in great detail why Bitcoin does not use a DHT like trackerless torrents, if anyone is curious about that.)
You cut this part from your quote:
Cruz says a few things that I find debatable; but he made some incisive points.
Near the end of his speech, Cruz warned Bitcoiners to remember Napster. Although his analogy is imprecise due to Bitcoin’s greater decentralization, it is nonetheless a good and insightful analogy. Cruz is alarmed, as I am, about Bitcoiners’ naïveté and complacency.
Please stop nitpicking and overextending analogies, as an excuse for continued naïveté and complacency.
What do you suppose would really happen to Bitcoin
globally, if the U.S. were to impose Chinese-style laws? Or even a fraction of that? For one thing, you can forget about rooting for $100k...
For one thing.I myself will continue using Bitcoin no matter what—as long as there is anyone else using Bitcoin. I have advanced technical expertise, and I am ideologically motivated to use Bitcoin regardless of its market value. How many are like me?
Following the China mining ban, what proportion of the global hashrate moved to the U.S.? How many of those miners would continue to operate under adverse regulation? Under an outright ban? In other plausible scenarios?
Bitcoin is resilient. But a major part of its resilience is in its people,
not in technology. There are no technological solutions to some problems. Complacency when the writing is on the wall is one of those problems. I am doing my part right here, right now, to try to help solve that problem.
(I see this as a part of
a multi-pronged attack to push for Bitcoin to go POS; but let’s take one thing at a time...)
Edited to add: As for Bittorrent: Most torrent users do
not understand why it has not been stamped out. Bram Cohen,
et al. went to great pains to run an unimpeachably legal torrent business, without even the slightest hint of copyright violation. By accident or by design, this effectually gave legal cover to widespread publication and usage of torrent software—even if most of the actual usage was probably for copyright violations. Torrenters who think to themselves, “LOL, they can’t stop us” are fantastically naïve and foolish; they have no idea what the hell they are talking about.
Moreover, if you believe that the RIAA/MPAA (private organizations of lawyers) are formidable adversaries, then you have never locked horns with the U.S. regulatory and law enforcement agencies who are tasked with enforcing U.S. laws about money.
And by the way...
Torrents are dying, and remaining torrenters have been going underground—many of them disappearing into closed, insular tiny groups swimming in paranoia. That’s been happening for a reason... I haven’t done much of this stuff for years; but if you would be so kind as to get me a BIB or MAM invite, that would be great. Thanks.
(Hint because this is the Internet: My rhetorical point is that invites are practically impossible to obtain, due to “closed groups swimming in paranoia”. Closed groups under firmly centralized administration, by the way. So much for “can’t stop this, it’s decentralized” bravado. Want to see Bitcoin reduced to furtive, invite-only groups of scared people trading coins in the shadows? That is your Bittorrent analogy.)
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