Any protection against such an attack?..

[Come-from-Beyond]

1. Declare Bitcoin mining an illegal activity.
2. Launch Bitcoin client.
3. Collect IPs.
4. Ask ISP for physical addresses.
5. Send the police to these addresses.
6. Shutdown mining hardware, arrest the owners.

What can be done to counteract such an attack? TOR seems to be very slow to use it all the time to transfer recently found blocks. Any other technical solutions?

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[bjf]

making bitcoin too big to fail would help

[Akka]

I have a hard time to think of any reason how they could justify declaring it illegal.

Same goes for Bitcoin itself. But don't you worry, the US have already unleashed their Behemoth called FinCEN and their "experts" are probably thinking of ways to regulate it to death right now.

This is the most promising and efficient way to stop new Ideas, see E-Gold and the early days of PayPal.

However, if Bitcoin will take this hurdle it will be unstoppable.



* Site note: This regulation Crab really pisses me off. If every new technology has to fit into the current system, then at some point we won't have any technological advancements at all and end up stagnating.

Systems need to able to adapt to new technologies, or die out. Not the other way around.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I have a hard time to think of any reason how they could justify declaring it illegal.

If in the future someone sends bitcoins to fund terrorism then Bitcoin miners will be considered as terrorist accomplices.

[gglon]

TOR, VPN, change of protocol, moving abroad, remote mining.

[Come-from-Beyond]

TOR, VPN, change of protocol, moving abroad, remote mining.

As I said TOR is slow, we already have a lot of orphaned blocks due to their big size.
VPN is not a solution coz VPN provider will tell ur real IP to the police.
Moving abroad could help only if u have an oil platform somewhere in the ocean.
Remote mining won't help much coz ur hardware still will be seized.

What change of protocol have u meant?

[gglon]

What change of protocol have u meant?

Since mining is defined by protocol, if you change it, you are no longer mining in the old sense. So you are no longer breaking the law. Eg. if they would regulate sha256 you can change it to other algorithm.

[wumpus]

Yes that's easy: just mine in a country where it's not illegal.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Yes that's easy: just mine in a country where it's not illegal.

Sorry, I need a technical solution.

[gmaxwell]

TOR seems to be very slow to use it all the time to transfer recently found blocks. Any other technical solutions?

Mining over Tor works okay generally... more so as a solo miner than a pooled one, since a solo miner can have multiple connections and will still hear new blocks even if one link is lagged out. Of course, if many people are mining behind delays then it won't be a disadvantage at all.

There are also parties solo-mining without themselves accepting incoming connections, and instead just making sure they are connecting out to other well connected nodes. This creates a bit more privacy.

I have a hard time to think of any reason how they could justify declaring it illegal.
Same goes for Bitcoin itself. But don't you worry, the US have already unleashed their Behemoth called FinCEN and their "experts" are probably thinking of ways to regulate it to death right now.

I saw the FinCEN stuff as generally positive. There were many other negative things they could have said and didn't, in particular I consider their delineation between decentralized systems and not as quite positive.

making bitcoin too big to fail would help

Exactly.

My general view is that Bitcoin is strongly supportive of the interests of the public and no equitable democratic nation should have reason to take adverse legal action against it.  There may be some authoritarian dinosaurs who might try— but I hope and expect that they'll continue to be asleep at the wheel until long after Bitcoin is far too widely adopted by boring and normal people for them to successfully suppress it.

Trying to dodge policy with technology is something of a losing game here. It can be fun to think about, and there are many things you can do to try to keep Bitcoin more robust against powerful attacks... the most potent of which would be to constantly adapt. But mining is certainly a soft spot: the conspicuous usage of energy is a bit hard to hide, though not impossible.

But I don't think it's very relevant in any case: Sometimes people will compare a war on Bitcoin to a copyright-war or drug-war... but I don't think the comparison is apt.  Illicit drugs still make the user high, unlawfully copies movies still make their audiences laugh— both of these things still work even if none of your friends are willing to partake.  A money-like good is another matter— it gains value from people's willingness to accept it— and so even outlaws don't have much use for outlaw currency.

What protects Bitcoin is that its fundamentally a very just and wholesome technology, and not that different in terms of abuse-risk from cash which is still a norm even in highly authoritarian places. No government is a monolith, and some of the aspects of Bitcoin helpfully cut through a lot of gnarly public policy issues:  It's really hard to resist inflating your currency when you are technically able— when resisting it means accepting some obvious negative outcome at the expense of some fuzzy long term principle.  Sometimes to achieve freedom it's essential to take some options off the table.

[fible1]

1. Declare Bitcoin mining an illegal activity.
2. Launch Bitcoin client.
3. Collect IPs.
4. Ask ISP for physical addresses.
5. Send the police to these addresses.
6. Shutdown mining hardware, arrest the owners.

What can be done to counteract such an attack? TOR seems to be very slow to use it all the time to transfer recently found blocks. Any other technical solutions?

You can't declare it illegal worldwide. The US has a track record of regulating the shit out of stuff like Bitcoin but that wont stop miners in any other country. Even if they did, there are ALWAYS country's that would let people do it just to piss the US off (IE: Venezuela) and there is a huge economic incentive for them to do it. You have to be more worried about the tax man, the can and will do that to BTC in the very near future.

{Edit} I just noted that you want a technical solution, I can't speak for that, but the hard facts laid out above really make a technical solution a moot point.

Best.

[gmaxwell]

The US has a track record of regulating the shit out of stuff like Bitcoin

Amusingly, the US's track record for technology and internet freedom is actually quite excellent— far more so than much of the developed world (e.g. the UK). Part of the reason it's so good is that there are a great many people who speak out about any threat, so you hear more about it. Even our bad-and-often-complained-about laws like the DMCA are also tremendously protective (E.g. DMCA creates an absolute immunity for service providers, removing them from having to be in the business of playing copyright nanny).

[fible1]

The US has a track record of regulating the shit out of stuff like Bitcoin

Amusingly, the US's track record for technology and internet freedom is actually quite excellent— far more so than much of the developed world (e.g. the UK). Part of the reason it's so good is that there are a great many people who speak out about any threat, so you hear more about it. Even our bad-and-often-complained-about laws like the DMCA are also tremendously protective (E.g. DMCA creates an absolute immunity for service providers, removing them from having to be in the business of playing copyright nanny).

As someone already pointed out above, I am reminded of how they murdrered e-gold for example. There are a couple of other examples out there. Authorities worldwide are worried about peoples ability to move large amounts of money undetected and with relative security, and rightly so, but the US is very active in trying to curtail this as they should be (terrorism, drug money, etc.) They will be going after the exchangers soon enough, that is a bigger problem. This is the main reason Gox has implemented the AML/KYC program, they are required to.

BTC is not really as anonymous as we like to think if you are using any of the main cashin-cashout gateways. Even at the personal exchange level.

[Mike Hearn]

If I had a liberty dollar forged of eGold for every time those two came up, I'd be a rich man by now. Wait, no, I wouldn't.

Let's review the cases again.

eGold got smashed because the government was able to show a judge that eGold knew criminal abuse was rampant and - more importantly - that they were actually keeping records on which accounts were engaged in what kind of behaviour (trading child porn, etc), yet didn't shut those accounts down. In other words they knew about specific instances of criminal activity on their system, could have stopped it, but chose not to. You will find it very difficult to convince the man on the street that knowing an account is used by criminals and keeping it open is OK.

The Liberty Dollar guy (von Nothaus) got busted because he actually had on his website videos of himself going into random shops and trying to confuse shopkeepers into accepting his Liberty Dollars by claiming they were just as good as the real thing. He also encouraged his users to do the same thing to try and give the LD value. The government was able to convince a judge that these repeated attempts at confusing people into believing Liberty Dollars were real dollars amounted to forgery, and again, I think most reasonable people would have agreed.

Bitcoin has neither of those issues. Firstly, even though we know criminals do use Bitcoin, most of us aren't in a position to take any action to stop it. Very rarely some institution-like body might, eg, a hosted wallet or an exchange that learns a particular account is used by a bad guy, and the law would expect them to do something. But knowing a service is abused in general isn't enough to have any liability because, hey, cash gets abused to, the internet gets abused, etc. What matters is whether a judge can be convinced that a system is overwhelmingly being used for abuse or whether there's plenty of legitimate activity too. In the beginning I was worried about this because so much media coverage dwelled on the Silk Road, which got very large. But there's now so much legitimate white market activity I think any reasonable judge would conclude Bitcoin was no different to any other new technology. Also, the community was pretty clearly rejected this kind of activity - there's no mention of it on the website and even this unofficial forum has rules against it.

Secondly, bitcoins cannot possibly be confused with dollars no matter how hard somebody might try. So the LD situation just doesn't apply.

It's clear FinCEN are still trying to figure out what to do about mining. Their worry is that drug dealers or whoever might buy some ASICs with dirty money and convert it into nicely fresh new minted money. The simplest solution (from their perspective) would be to try and regulate mining equipment rather than the act of mining itself. Of course if they get too heavy all they'll do is push the activity elsewhere, and most drug profits seem to end up in LatAm anyway, so this seems like it's riven with problems. But then one can argue AML is generally like that.

[jimbobway]

Getting Senators and Representatives to accept bitcoin is another strong reason to prevent such an attack.

We already have some congressmen accepting bitcoin, and we should get more to accept it.  It will be unlikely to be illegal if the congressmen themselves won't create laws against themselves.

Edit: Oops, you said technical solutions...nevermind.