In this
video around 4:05 Gavin Andresen says that he does care deeply about privacy.
His name is public, he has a wife and at least one kid. His whereabouts is known. I can imagine it would not be too difficult to influence him one way or another.
Threat from US government:
- Cooperate with us, or we will put you away indefinitely for being a threat to national security (patriot act). If faced with the choice of either cooperating without telling anyone and maintaining his current life or being thrown in jail for life, what would most men chose, what would Gavin chose? The cooperation would not be visible to anyone in particular, the only difference would be that Gavin would simply not push features that would make Bitcoin more anonymous and private, but all his arguments would've been made such that he could not really be accused of anything. Or, he has great integrity and says bluntly he would not accept this, and rather be jailed than being coerced. Then the 3-letter agency ups their game and tells him stories about what has happened to the families of those not wanting to cooperate. Showing him some messed up pics of car wrecks and staring him deeply in the eyes. What would he chose? Go to jail and see his family wiped out?
Risk for the US Govt: Close to none, who should punish them? And they would of course deny all allegations, and there's always the convenient car accidents. Don't believe me? How do you think
Michael Hastings died?
Seeing that snowden revelations showed that there were backdoors in numerous hardware devices, what is there from imagining that the NSA has software engineers planted with big car-manufactures, or cooperate with big car-manufactures to install back doors, or kill-switches in their electronics? So, want some noisy person eliminated? Send a black op truck in range of radio transmission, and in the most convenient moment, mess up the electronics in the car, so the car crashes with a truck in an intersection or drives off a cliff. Who's to prove it was not just an accident?
Or it could be a mugging go wrong, so even the family would think it was just a freak accident. The list goes on and on. Basically, if they really want you, there's no escape unless you do not fear torture and possibly death and the loss of your dear ones.
So most people would cooperate. Because they had no choice. Many people would gladly sacrifice themselves for a cause, but very few people would sacrifice their family, esp. not someone that's really a family man.
Threat from a criminal organization:
Gavin would most likely tell the authorities, and he would receive protection and be moved to a safe place along with his family. Huge risk for the people threatening him, as they would have law enforcement after them. Would still be effective enough to maybe scare him away from Bitcoin permanently.
Also take in account that he's paid by the Bitcoin Foundation, and although the Bitcoin Foundation claim that their mission is to protect, educate and promote bitcoin, history has shown that large business interests is their primary concern. So, if it does not fit with the agenda of the Bitcoin Foundation, I'm sure they've got some leverage on him. Hi, Gavin, could you just wait a little bit with that privacy patch ? *wink wink* Perhaps he would say no, and leave the foundation, or perhaps he would convince it is the best to keep the steady paycheck and listen to his employer, after all that particular path that made the system slightly more anonymous is not THAT important after all..
Although it's likely that he does actually have freedom to work on whatever the heck he wants in regards to bitcoin with minimal intervention from the Foundation, let's not be naive and not see the connection there. If he wanted to be truly independent, he'd remove himself from any such associations, and work independently, I'm sure the community would tip him handsomely, and there could even be a vote system where the community could vote for what features they think should be prioritized, which could be used as a guideline for work assignment.
He will probably frown on this suggestion and tell us just to trust him.
As the bitcoin network grows, it is likely some attention will be directed towards the developers who control the code. Although any new update needs consensus from the community - the devs does in fact
control the whole system make the source code. If they were compromised the system could be forked, and new devs taking over. Or we could simply refuse to update the nodes, until the situation was solved. I don't know if there exist a warning system for such cases. Yes, we do trust the devs, but even trustworthy people should be watched.
So - if there's some connections between Gavin and some 3-letter agency making him into acting a certain way, he would of course deny it. No agent would ever admit to being an agent.
But if he wasan agent it would be straightforward to claim that he's very much concerned about users privacy, and then almost always pointing to some other work having a higher prio each time someone asks, and then if there's enough pressure, maybe just implement some small privacy enhancing feature to silence the critics.
