If national firewalls go up

[tvbcof]

In a scenario where the USA puts up a national firewall preventing miners/clients in the USA connecting with miners/clients elsewhere,

The US government would have to go through a considerable legal fight to put such thing in place.

 <snip - other interesting observations that I hope people pay attention to.>

The US government would have to go through a considerable legal fight to run a gulag system in which they (or lamentably, 'we') maim various people...including ones who are completely innocent of anything remotely threatening.

Similarly, it would be quite a legal stretch for the US government to have legal justification kill US citizens anywhere on the face of the earth (including within our boarders) and without oversight from the justice department.

Similarly, trolling through vast seas of personal data would be completely antithetical to the fundamentals of our founding principles.

Or, on the other hand, are these things such a stretch after all???

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FWIW and on a tangent, I hypothesis that a fair part of the Bill of Rights has actually been nullified by an order which is a state secret about a decade ago and that the action itself is a state secret.  This hypothesis can explain a lot of mysterious actions and behaviors and I've yet to be able to invalidate it.  Admittedly invalidation is kind of a game/trick like thing due to the 'state secret' aspect, but I assure the reader that this was unintentional in formation of the hypothesis.

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[Doug Rudd]

Wait a minute.
The original question was if the network outside the US was cut off would the blockchain inside the US be forked.

And all the posts have been of the opinion that as long as someone has a 300 baud modem connection to the outside world everything would be fine.

If the government was able to cut off only 80% of bandwidth from outside that means the miners in the US would be mostly communicating to the network within the US. They would be getting blockchain information mostly among themselves. Wouldn't that fork the blockchain?

Isn't that what a 51% attack is all about?

Does this make any sense?

[Vladimir]

Whatever firewalls "they" being up, the miners will sneak in that elusive next block, just add some fees and they will find a way for sure.

[tvbcof]

Whatever firewalls "they" being up, the miners will sneak in that elusive next block, just add some fees and they will find a way for sure.

For sure (really!)  I actually believe and have believed from day one that Bitcoin (or something) should be a 'guerilla currency' and that there would be a high value (non-monetarily speaking, so forgive the pun) in the existence such a thing.  Simply having it, and having it be credible, may be enough to ensure that it never really need be deployed in anger.

I must point out though that a crypto-currency for widespread use by the masses will have plenty of thorny technical issues to overcome (chiefly simple scaling) and that needing to also fit though the cracks of a police state security scheme could be quite unwelcome.  The two goals may be to complex an engineering challenge to really be workable.  At least for the mid-term future.

If (and it's a fairly big 'if') Bitcoin is attacked on a multi-national level I don't expect that it will die but rather simply freeze for a time while the 'good guys' get their bearings...which could take some time depending on the level of preperation.  That would suck mostly 1/2 of a handful of people who had active transactions underway.

[mc_lovin]

Well if they can't stop bittorrent, just release the blockchain updates on torrent

[MatthewLM]

Tor would work if the governments were not trying to censor Tor traffic. If they were, you'd need to connect to a secret Tor entry node and use obfsproxy (which is separated from Tor).

[ydenys]

Pigeon blockchain-carriers, neeuwee… [awesome sound they make flying]. I like it.

Although it may seem that most of you, guys, grossly overestimate the current ‘governments’ and hype up your ‘opponents’ out of fun it is not all just harmless out-of-barrel theorising, unfortunately.

Let’s say this unease is based on a questionable notion that as the population increases and commonly available resources run out, personal liberties would inevitably be cut down.

(What would certainly be cut down is only man-hour waste - less people would be writing tosh on the forums for example . )

The opinion is that while new technology advances constantly make administration more effective we had now reached limits of such advancement due to the very democracy and personal freedoms we so value, putting ‘government’ group of people in a rather interesting moral position. Now they may wriggle for a bit, even put up a show of high morals (aren’t you tired of hearing every day about how mind-blowingly kind they are to those poor one-eyed Pirates and troubled hisPanic women) but when push comes to shove…

Don’t want to state the obvious, but aren’t we all by then supposed to be either long dead of decadently wasting our new fortunes or [cunningly] prematurely frozen in hope to be defrosted by some Chinese alien relic collector?

[tvbcof]

...
Let’s say this unease is based on a questionable notion that as the population increases and commonly available resources run out, personal liberties would inevitably be cut down.

Ya, questionable.  I've not been able to feel compfortable with any particular measure of this.

The opinion is that while new technology advances constantly make administration more effective we had now reached limits of such advancement due to the very democracy and personal freedoms we so value, putting ‘government’ group of people in a rather interesting moral position.

This! ...captures my attention.  Very interesting in-and-of itself, and also because I don't know what the 'right' answer might be, and also what on earth I would do if I were king no matter what the 'right' answer may be...which makes me damn glad I'll never be king.  I'm pretty sure I could come up with a legitimate argument to go an any number of directions.