Excuse me if this has been talked about before, but I'd like to get peoples thoughts about how, as a community, we will protect/insure that our assets are secure as "possible".
Mainly, I'd like to focus on how we communicate with each other. Bitcointalk.org , solely in my opinion, is the main source for updates/conversation about BTC and it's future in our lives. A few friends and I were discussing BTC and we tend to jump from subject to subject about any topic we are talking about. We got into the subject on how the Bitcoin community needs a more secure way to communicate with each other in-case of a organized assault on the community. By organized assault, we meant a government / corporations attempt to disrupt the day to day flow of information with the users/developers of bitcoin.
First off, Is bitcointalk.org technically able to mitigate a DDOS for a prolonged period of time. Do you have plans, if need be, to change Domains? What I'd like to see is bitcointalk.org to be as/more resilient than pirate bay. I know they have been brought down for some periods, but you have to admit, the site admins are fantastic to reacting to attacks against the service, and adapting to maintain service throughout an attack.
Is bitcointalk.org being pen-tested by a professional company? As even the best plans can be laid, you never know if they will work until you test them. Any/all plans should be checked/tested frequently in my opinion.
Secondly, has bitcointalk.org discussed how a organized effort could affect it's operation? A topic that was brought up is, if the government wanted to get rid of Bitcoin, all they would have to do create a history on this forum with a user name, mainly one that is a extremist, publicly buy some questionable thing from other fake users, and than transfer BTC to a terrorist account that NSA would happen to just be monitoring that account for incoming bitcoin payments. As I even smiled at this idea because of how radical it is, you can't deny the fact that the government could launch a massive PR campaign against Bitcoin and rally the uninformed US citizen to turn against Bitcoin, at least in the US. I know, as we all do, that bitcoin is world wide, but you can't think that our governments couldn't pull off a push worldwide if they really thought Bitcoin was a threat to their fiat currency. It's a interesting subject that needs thought about if it already hasn't been.
Thirdly, more of a idea, but couldn't we develop a chat platform that would utilize bitcoin's network/cryptography to send/recieve messages from a "ID." That ID can be discussed later, but wouldn't that serve as a secondary form of communicate in the event that a government seizes/blocks any domains that is used for bitcoin communication? It would work on a already self-regulated network that is supplied by it's users, and would allow a certain amount of resiliency for communications to be delivered.
Just some idea's we've talked about, and I'm interested in your thoughts about these. Thanks!
the short version,,,,,
IRC #Bitcoin
medium version,,,,,
when bitcoin was going to fork in the past due to different versions of 0.7x the development teams were all in communication with the pools, etc to get through it within a couple hours.
worse comes to worse if bitcointalk went down. the discussion dies. i would not recommend every run off to #bitcoin to continue random topics, but i would recommend that they use #bitcoin to see where the new domain is or find out how soon the issues may become resolved.
IRC seems to be the best way to communicate. it does not have to be that one Sole room. there are already altcoin rooms, dev rooms, community group rooms to ensure a thousand random topics of conversation dont occur in one place, which should allow the devs to get on with their important word without trolling. and have designated area's for whatever topic you want to discuss..much like this forum has sub categories.
