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[znort987]

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[hugolp]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

(see gcc vs. egcs for example).
 

I just wanna point out that gcc kicks ass, good reference point 

[hugolp]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

You've either completely missed my point or never actually
worked on an open source project before (or both).

Assuming it's the latter, you need to realize that opensource
isn't the same as democracy:

Which is very good in my book. Democracy, facism, etc... all kind of authoritarian systems, apart from being inmoral are not efficient.

opensource projects are very
often in practice controlled by a tiny group of trusted individuals.

When large disagreements about the code occur, there is either
a unilateral decision taken by those folks, or the project is forked
(see gcc vs. egcs for example).

These don't occur that often for open source stuff because there
is rarely an incentive large enough to maintain a fork for very long.
But in the case of bitcoin, the incentive may get arbitrarily large.

Also, for bitcoin, neither of these scenarios (fork or control by
a small group) are particularly pleasant.

Consider the following scenario: at some point in the future,
it may very well become a good idea to augment the precision
of the BTC (that is, allow for more than 8 digit after the decimal
dot).

How will approval for such a change get "voted" ?

If by voted you mean that the community would choose which client to use, then thats how you "vote".

[EricJ2190]

If the code were changed in some incompatible way, it would be noticed and publicly announced online by the community. If the change is disapproved of by the community, nodes (in particular, the mining pools) will refuse to upgrade to this new version.

[hugolp]

If by voted you mean that the community would choose which client to use, then thats how you "vote".

In other words ... democracy, a system which, as you just mentioned,
is rather flawed, especially when the non-techie crowd moves in, one
that can rather easily be manipulated.

BTW, I am not clamoring doom for bitcoin. I am just trying to point out
that however well designed and solid the system is from a technical pov,
I am not yet convinced of its robustness from a social engineering pov.

But here is the catch: the incentives are resversed in respect to a (government) democracy. If you are a user of bitcoins and have some amount of bitcoins and spect to earn more bitcoins in the future, and you are faced with the option of choosing between two clients: one that devaluates your money over time and the other that does not, which one would you choose?

Also, it would not be a disaster that the bitcoin chain even forks in two (or more) option. Let the community that offerst the best money win.

Ah !

Now there's an interesting answer: the bigger the pools the more
sway they'll have on bitcoin's future.

And this is the main reason anarchism unfortunately fails: there is
no mechanism/feedback loop to prevent the accumulation and concentration
of power and influence.

First, the pools hold as much power as their users want. If a pool does something that the miners participating in that pool dont like, they will leave and the pool will loose importance.

More in general, anarchy has a mechanism to avoid concentration: not having a government, that is what allows a few to gain excesive power over the rest.

[BillX]

If the code were changed in some incompatible way, it would be noticed and publicly announced online by the community. If the change is disapproved of by the community, nodes (in particular, the mining pools) will refuse to upgrade to this new version.

Ah !

Now there's an interesting answer: the bigger the pools the more
sway they'll have on bitcoin's future.

And this is the main reason anarchism unfortunately fails: there is
no mechanism/feedback loop to prevent the accumulation and concentration
of power and influence.

"It's good to be the King!"

[fitty]

Much of bitcoin safety relies on its distributed nature, and in particular
on the fact that the same code runs everywhere, implementing the
same pre-agreed-upon protocol to reaches a distributed agreement
on the state of the blockchain and what constitutes a valid block.

What this means is that to significantly change bitcoin (for example
changing how many BTC get created by each new block, or removing
the 21M limit, etc ...), all you have to do is change the bitcoin code
and wait a while until it percolates out to all the clients (or actually,
to more than 50% of them).

How hard would that be in practice, I wonder ?

In my opinion, if you are a government, not that hard. The code is in
fact "controlled" by a rather small-ish group of individuals. Influencing
this small group (especially once the incentives get large enough) to get
them to change the code of the official client in a certain way is likely
going to be a walk in the park for someone the size of a government.

Once the source code of the official client has  been changed in a
significant and potentially incompatible way, how long will it take
for the new implementation to "win" out there ?

Another way to think about this: how will bitcoin manage "forks" in the
client code ? What if someone successfully manages to fragment the
bitcoin community into multiple implementations ?

Yet another way to think about this: how does one enforces the "integrity"
of the source code and the folks who have sway over it ?

Thoughts ?

If there is truly a need and desire for a virtual peer to peer currency, one will always exist in some form.

The code is out there, the methods are out there, anyone can now create their own currency. It's like saying that if you shut down the pirate bay after their first year it would have stopped all the torrent sites. Maybe you could kill Bitcoin. What about Namecoin? Smartcoin? The next 10 currencies that try to fill the place of Bitcoin?

Virtual peer to peer currency is here, and it's unlikely to go away.

And what government? All of them? *lol* Good luck with that. Has the US govt ever shut something down? I still have friends playing poker. Buying drugs. Downloading torrents. Browsing wikileaks. Is there something out there on the internet the govt has actually stopped people from doing?

Relax dude, we're fine.

[EricJ2190]

Since Bitcoin is often viewed as a democracy, it seems pools change this from a direct to a representative democracy. Pools are the representatives which we elect by mining for them.

[wareen]

Messing with the source code or the pools is probably not an option - far too risky to raise suspicion and once it's detected you'd most likely have lost the fight due to public awareness of secret unlawful intervention against Bitcoin.

The best way IMHO would be to declare Bitcoin as _the_ currency used by all the bad guys on the Internet - maybe even orchestrate one or two fake cases with some highly despicable activity (eg. cp) beforehand. With minimal effort you'd have pretty much the whole public against Bitcoin and no-one would like to be associated with it anymore. The next easy step for you would be to forbid merchants to accept Bitcoin and banks to process transactions to the exchanges. Nobody would dare to oppose due to the bad public image of Bitcoin you created.

Remember that governments usually are bad when it comes to fight with technology - they are much better at fighting with politics.

I think that's one of the reasons why we should care about the public image of Bitcoin at least as much as about the technical security of the network.

[willphase]

OP has a good point - governments could equally also mess with the Linux source, or the Windows source or the chipset microcode running on my computer and then when people install bitcoin on their systems just go and STEAL ALL THEIR BITCOIN!!1111one

Tin foil hat!

Will

[tvbcof]

One possibility would be for the powers that be to adopt Bitcoin as legitimate.

Those who have a lionshare of the wealth now could transfer to having a lionshare of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin, like gold, is probably a better tool so subjugate the plebs with than is fiat currency.  Can be hoarded more effectively and it's release can have a bigger impact.

Then the question becomes, what are the plebs to do?

My suggestion would be at that point to vote to switch en-mass to abandon BTC and switch to BTC-II or whatever.  In that way, I consider BTC to be preferable to gold.

(Actually I've got a different idea which I am working on, but it's not mature yet.)

[Piper67]

One possibility would be for the powers that be to adopt Bitcoin as legitimate.

Those who have a lionshare of the wealth now could transfer to having a lionshare of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin, like gold, is probably a better tool so subjugate the plebs with than is fiat currency.  Can be hoarded more effectively and it's release can have a bigger impact.

Then the question becomes, what are the plebs to do?

My suggestion would be at that point to vote to switch en-mass to abandon BTC and switch to BTC-II or whatever.  In that way, I consider BTC to be preferable to gold.

(Actually I've got a different idea which I am working on, but it's not mature yet.)

Yup, I wrote something to that effect here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=14163.msg192458#msg192458

[bitrebel]

There's only one way the government can ever destroy bitcoin and I hesitate to speak about that here.

All they would have to do is one simple thing and the most diehards would run for cover.

One simple solution to destroy bitcoin for good.

But they never will....

Embrace it!

If they did, I would sell mine in a a heartbeat and never look back.

Good thing I know they never will.

The main problem for us is the fact that the central banking debt based currency is printed out of thin air. All Rothschilds has to do, is print 10 Billion, buy all the bitcoins in existence and they will own 1/3 right off the bat. Then wait 5 years, and buy another 1/3.

"Give me Control over a nation's currency, and I care not who programs the algorithm."

[Valhalla1]

they could wait until the majority of clients on the network are on devices they control, like smartphones.   If bitcoin takes off, could we see >50% of the nodes being android or similar devices being used at points of sale by consumers?    If so, could they not silently inject a bad client?  Assuming the US government can remotely inject code to your phone, which many people believe they have been able to control mobile phones for years

[bitrebel]

they could wait until the majority of clients on the network are on devices they control, like smartphones.   If bitcoin takes off, could we see >50% of the nodes being android or similar devices being used at points of sale by consumers?    If so, could they not silently inject a bad client?  Assuming the US government can remotely inject code to your phone, which many people believe they have been able to control mobile phones for years

A very far reach, IMO. Nobody with half a brain does things that obviously. Any direct attack would imply bitcoin was something to be reckoned with. That is against all rules of direct engagement. The first rule of direct engagement is not to engage directly.

[JoelKatz]

In my opinion, if you are a government, not that hard. The code is in
fact "controlled" by a rather small-ish group of individuals. Influencing
this small group (especially once the incentives get large enough) to get
them to change the code of the official client in a certain way is likely
going to be a walk in the park for someone the size of a government.

That smallish group of individuals only has control because nobody has a reason to wrest it from them. If that group refused to accept needed improvements, added changes that defeat the spirit of bitgoin, or even just fail to keep up with competing technologies, others would simply switch to a competing project and/or nodes would just refuse to upgrade. To prevent that mechanism from working would require an almost totalitarian restriction on people's ability to communicate.

[JoelKatz]

they could wait until the majority of clients on the network are on devices they control, like smartphones.   If bitcoin takes off, could we see >50% of the nodes being android or similar devices being used at points of sale by consumers?    If so, could they not silently inject a bad client?  Assuming the US government can remotely inject code to your phone, which many people believe they have been able to control mobile phones for years

The could make a client they could corrupt say whatever they want, but they can't make non-corrupt clients honor it.

[Gabi]

What a fail system to destroy bitcoin... seriously, are you joking?

A government would simply spend 15 millions $, get enuff GPUs, do a 51% attack and ta-dah, done. And 15 millions $ is nothing for a government

[Stephen Gornick]

In my opinion, if you are a government, not that hard.
[...]
to get them to change the code of the official client in a certain way is likely
going to be a walk in the park for someone the size of a government.

About a year ago some of the cypherpunks were on a panel and one of the discussions was about how, at the time when the export of most encryption was not allowed, the big question was how long before the U.S. government would stop them with their plans to spread civilian use of cryptography globally?:
- http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/6136537609

Nearly two decades later, Philip R. Zimmerman concludes -- didn't happen, and the government never made contact with the group even.