What would the effect be if ISPs are asked to block Bitcoin protocol traffic?

[Carlton Banks]

And why (after 4 years and counting) have they not done so anywhere at all?

It took roughly that long for Bittorrent protocol to get barred in many a Western country, and you would think that the inclination and motivation to stop a money service would be much more vociferous than just a file transfer network. 

[Gordon Bleu]

tor i2p  or the for the wealthy Bitcoiners a Private Satellite Internet Sevice

[theymos]

ISPs don't currently have any incentive to block Bitcoin. BitTorrent uses a lot of expensive bandwidth. ISPs block it to save money and reduce the number of expensive legal complaints that they receive, not because they're evil. Bitcoin is very low-bandwidth, and no one is going to send a complaint to your ISP just because you're running a Bitcoin node. If ISPs did block Bitcoin, they'd be pissing off their customers without getting anything in return for it.

If Bitcoin is blocked (which is very easy), the blocked users would just need to use Tor.

[Carlton Banks]

BitTorrent uses a lot of expensive bandwidth. ISPs block it to save money and reduce the number of expensive legal complaints that they receive, not because they're evil.

At what stage will Bitcoin be (or construed to be) expensive to the financial services industry? Do we need the technical innovations that will take the network to millions of transactions per day, or will it just be the quantity of money in a given period that will be seen as harmful? I see that Bitcoin would have to become much more prevalent than Bittorrent ever was for it to ever be cast as a threat to the entire monetary system (and it will probably accompany a very different social attitude backdrop, too).

If ISPs did block Bitcoin, they'd be pissing off their customers without getting anything in return for it.

This I'm not sure about, they wouldn't piss all too many off right now, and those they did are far more dependent on their ISP than the ISP are on them.

[phillipsjk]

If your ISP is blocking Bittorrent, find a better ISP.

Technically the ISP I am using right now bans Bittorrent ("no servers") but tolerates it. My bitcoin node is going up on another ISP. That ISP may complain if Bitcoins are declared illegal, however.

[acoindr]

Since Bitcoin is global it wouldn't stop Bitcoin overall. It would piss off everyone that suffered such action, especially miners, and market forces would pressure Bitcoin-accepting ISPs to pop up. That is unless it's made illegal of course. Then users would need to use it discreetly over Tor.

However, sending and receiving coins can be done with online wallets (in other countries) like Blockchain.info which use HTTP so blocking Bitcoin protocol traffic means nothing there.

[01BTC10]

Some Canadian ISP are throttling BitTorrent traffic but none block it. I guess you're american?

[TippingPoint]

The U.S. strategy currently appears to be to "regulate" cryptocurrency exchanges.  That means keeping records of everyone who buys or sells cryptocurrencies through these U.S. regulated exchanges.

http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html

so ... our choice is either

• Buy and sell Bitcoins through registered and regulated exchanges
• Buy and sell Bitcoins somewhere else

In either case Bitcoin protocol traffic is identical, and neither the U.S. government or the exchanges control the protocol.

[Carlton Banks]

Incidentally, this is all pure thought experiment territory from my side, I'm not expecting ISPs to suddenly swoop here. I expect things will probably move in less expected directions for Bitcoin if we have the rumoured hike in interest from the financial investments world, coupled with dollar reserve status problems. Hopefully being a grown up currency will over-trump the money-laundering terrorist thing.

[xxjs]

Your bitcoins will be safe, but temporarily unspendable. Sell your aunt and buy a ticket out to a free country, and you are good.

[lavalampoon]

And why (after 4 years and counting) have they not done so anywhere at all?

It took roughly that long for Bittorrent protocol to get barred in many a Western country, and you would think that the inclination and motivation to stop a money service would be much more vociferous than just a file transfer network. 

Then bitcoin traffic would be concealed within unrestricted traffic. Bitcoin transactions are small. Blockchain changes could be broadcast on ham radio.

[redtwitz]

What would the effect be if ISPs are asked to block Bitcoin protocol traffic?

Unless you download the blockchain over and over again, finding a proxy that will tolerate your Bitcoin traffic will be fairly easy. So my guess is none.

ISPs don't currently have any incentive to block Bitcoin.

Agreed.

BitTorrent uses a lot of expensive bandwidth. ISPs block it to save money and reduce the number of expensive legal complaints that they receive, not because they're evil.

Define evil.

My ISP blocks BitTorrent traffic, and I can assure you that there wasn't a single legal complaint. (Pirated movies are openly sold on the street here, so downloading them is no biggie.)

Most ISPs block BT traffic because they like to advertise unlimited traffic at X Mbps, although they have no intention of keeping that promise. This goes hand-in-hand with other shady tactics like capping the per-connection bandwidth, which are justified by the fine print stating that X Mbps is "best effort" and you might get pretty much any speed in practice...

If your ISP is blocking Bittorrent, find a better ISP.

That might be a choice if you live in one of those fancy first-world countries. Here, we have only one DSL provider and it blocks BT traffic. You can either bend over and take it or find a way around the restriction.

Some Canadian ISP are throttling BitTorrent traffic but none block it. I guess you're american?

So Canada isn't part of America? Mind blown.

[gmaxwell]

Bitcoin makes _two_ fundamental security assumptions, one of them people talk about all the time: that conspiring badguys don't get control of a near-majority hashpower; the other is that "information [is] easy to spread but hard to stifle": If nodes can't communicate without partitioning they can't come to a consensus, or any consensus they think they have may be false and erased once communication is restored.  So in one sense Bitcoin is potentially very vulnerable to censorship.

But at the same time: Bitcoin works great without using the public internet at all— at least if you're using the reference software.  There is a whole network of hidden service Bitcoin nodes that communicate over tor without using exits.   Connecting out to this network is as simple as installing Tor and pointing Bitcoind / Bitcoin-qt's proxy settings at it.

Receiving connections in on takes a couple more lines of configuration and is a good idea to do because we can only support a lot of hidden service using nodes if there are a lot of hidden service offering nodes.

Tor has been at the anti-censorship game for a while now and has a fair amount of resources to throw at it and there are some benefits to sharing a network with other kinds of usage... I don't think there is any real concern with censorship in most of the world, but I like my backup plans to have backup plans, and so it's good that there is a health hidden service infrastructure in advance of needing one.

Since I also like the backups of my backups to have backups: More fundamentally, the blockchain validity rules limit the maximum long term average data rate of Bitcoin to only about 14kbit/sec. Because of this low rate there are lot of steganographic techniques that could be employed to keep hosts connected very surreptitiously ("blockchain over cat pictures"), at least if the user isn't mining and can tolerate fairly high latency (Mining is much more sensitive, however, and to keep latency down needs bandwidth a large multiple of the average rate).  Beyond steganography over the internet, the low rate means that we could not-unreasonably broadcast Bitcoin data world wide over relatively inexpensive satellite channels or HF or even VLF radio (well, at least headers over VLF). Perhaps a hardfork changes the block size limits in the future, but at least for now in a censorship war I think Bitcoin would fair very well.

So, even though breaking the flow of information breaks Bitcoin fundamentally, our narrow requirements for information and the nature of our communication (broadcats) means that to block Bitcoin, given a community of adaptive users and developers, probably requires blocking damn near everything.

I don't consider censorship a critical risk given our current network parameters, but it's something we could be preparing a little better for, especially making sure that big "hash colocation points" and mining pools aren't big censorship targets that are too conspicuous to vanish.

[Carlton Banks]

My ISP blocks BitTorrent traffic, and I can assure you that there wasn't a single legal complaint. (Pirated movies are openly sold on the street here, so downloading them is no biggie.)

It's almost as if someone powerful might have an actual business incentive to keep the DVD street selling going...

[Come-from-Beyond]

And why (after 4 years and counting) have they not done so anywhere at all?

Because Bitcoin can't compete with VISA, MasterCard, etc. due to scalability issues. THEY just do not worry.

[tvbcof]

Bitcoin makes _two_ fundamental security assumptions, one of them people talk about all the time: that conspiring badguys don't get control of a near-majority hashpower; the other is that "information [is] easy to spread but hard to stifle": If nodes can't communicate without partitioning they can't come to a consensus, or any consensus they think they have may be false and erased once communication is restored.  So in one sense Bitcoin is potentially very vulnerable to censorship.
... <snip - worth the read> ...

Seeing some of the devs thinking seriously about such things goes a long way toward maintaining my confidence in the Bitcoin solution.

The decisions about how to balance the defenses against potential threats and the very real problems associated with growth are tough ones, particularly since a lot of the threats are hypothetical and it thus seems rational to de-prioritize them.  A further complexity is that many of the design decisions are 'one way' meaning that it would be effectively impossible to back them out.  I think that these features conspire to create a fairly complex set of problems that not very many people fully comprehend.

[phillipsjk]

That might be a choice if you live in one of those fancy first-world countries. Here, we have only one DSL provider and it blocks BT traffic. You can either bend over and take it or find a way around the restriction.

Here the incumbent phone companies are required to lease out their lines to resellers. The Cable companies also provide some competition (but apparently don't have to lease out their lines). Wireless is also an option (but don't have line-of sight).

I suppose most Satellite providers will block BT traffic as well.

Please enlighten me on how to differentiate when a US resident use America (or american) to speak about his country rather than the continent. English is not my first language.

US is short for "United States of America" a person living in the USA is called an "American" instead of a U.S.A'ian.

So when you see "America" or "American" by itself, it almost always refers to the USA. To talk about the continent, that would typically be specified to avoid confusion. For example: by saying "North America", "American continent (not to be confused with continental US)", or "Americas".

[jdbtracker]

What about Namecoin? The .bit domain may be censorship resistant, would the ISPs be able to block transactions by refusing connections if you already have the addresses?

I just recently found out about Namecoin and am quite intreagued by the possibilities of a distributed DNS system.

[redtwitz]

I guess it's hard to tell when most american also use the word America to talk about USA.

That's the part that pisses me of. I get it when U.S. citizens call their country America or refer to themselves as Americans since they consider their country the only one of the continent that's worth mentioning. I even get it when people from other continents refer to the USA as America since it's the only country of the continent they can spell. But other Americans?

Please enlighten me on how to differentiate when a US resident use America (or american) to speak about his country rather than the continent. English is not my first language.

I know they misuse the word and 99.9 % percent of the time they'll be talking about their country, but saying "American" to imply "not Canadian" is just wrong in my opinion.

As you might have guessed by now, I'm American as well. Paraguayan, to be exact. One of those countries nobody knows how to spell (and, from personal experience, most Europeans believe to be somewhere in Asia).

My ISP blocks BitTorrent traffic, and I can assure you that there wasn't a single legal complaint. (Pirated movies are openly sold on the street here, so downloading them is no biggie.)

It's almost as if someone powerful might have an actual business incentive to keep the DVD street selling going...

Good thinking.

Here the incumbent phone companies are required to lease out their lines to resellers. The Cable companies also provide some competition (but apparently don't have to lease out their lines). Wireless is also an option (but don't have line-of sight).

I suppose most Satellite providers will block BT traffic as well.

There's only one phone company here, so DSL cannot have any competition. Cable is available only in a handful of cities (mine not included), wireless antennas usually won't work because of interference and mobile internet makes you pay big bucks after the first 1 GB / month.

[Carlton Banks]

What about Namecoin? The .bit domain may be censorship resistant, would the ISPs be able to block transactions by refusing connections if you already have the addresses?

I just recently found out about Namecoin and am quite intreagued by the possibilities of a distributed DNS system.

Well, this only prevents the fleshbags at the Top Level Domain authority (ICANN) from making arbitrary decisions (enforcing trademark and copyright ownership decisions, politically expediency of when to allow and award certain suffixes, etc). Don't get me wrong about Namecoin, I like it, but it solves a narrow problem to have a whole alt coin based around it, it is after all a protocol layer below/depending on a protocol layer (http). Bitcoin functions entirely independently of http, so Namecoin doesn't solve anything for the Bitcoin network in that respect. I expect/hope Namcoin will expand to encompass other transmission protocols which require DNS resolution of a type, so maybe the protocols that drive meshnets could benefit from their distributed model, although I'm not at all versed in their mechanics just yet.