The "you cant kill Bitcoin argument"

[frankenmint]

It may be a newbie question but ...
I mean Bitcoin is P2P ? Right ? can't ISP just block ports ? just like for torrent  

This forum would put a note in the News section at the top there:  Change your BTC port to: VWXYZ OR upgrade to version X.YZ

The 'you cant kill bitcoin' argument comes from the fact that all these newer successor digital currencies and assets use bitcoin as the primary means of acquisition.

[worle1bm]

Bitcoin could be defeated by making it illiquid. If people can't get it, they can't use it.

[NewLiberty]

Only a better Bitcoin can kill Bitcoin.

The corollary is that making Bitcoin worse can also kill it.

[kimchi64]

Only a better Bitcoin can kill Bitcoin.

The corollary is that making Bitcoin worse can also kill it.

Very true, but in this case, what would be the "better" bitcoin?
Guess we gotta wait.

[kodtycoon]

I was having an argument in the speculation sub-forum when someone said "the only way to stop Bitcoin would be to ban the entire internet"... see I often hear that, but being in IT as a profession that statement give me a real hard time, so I thought it is time to discuss it, maybe there is something I am not aware off !!

So if Bitcoin becomes a real threat to governments, and if they agree on banning it and killing it, one way to go would be just changing regulation (FCC) for internet service providers and force them to ban the port that Bitcoin uses (8333 now), this would mean certain death to Bitcoin.


I want to hear your opinion, and how do you think this could be prevented ?

there are a few ways bitcoin could be destroyed.. i posted one example on a past thread..

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=766406.msg9084503#msg9084503

not saying this is happening or will happen but its very possible..

quote from above link -

perhaps they think if bitcoin is dumped into oblivion all the way down to the point that even the biggest of miners cant afford to mine it would essentially break bitcoin.. image if all the small guys drop out on the way down leaving say 5 mega miners, then btc sees the biggest dump off all collapsing from the hundreds to double or single digits forcing all the last 5 to shut up shop... difficulty would be left way to high for anyone to mine preventing any conformations (im guessing) for days?

this would leave behind only the "unknown entity" with complete control over the network. one entity that could turn on and off raising the difficulty and then crashing it again. while also keeping the price of bitcoin so unprofitable that no one in their right mind would try to mine or buy it.

a malicious entity does not need to buy enough mining power to get 51%. they only need enough to continuously suppress the price and push it down gradually forcing out other miners, getting back some of the money invested and also raising their percentage of hashing power as other miners drop out. it would be a slow process and costly but not even close to impossible.

 for someone with millions with a seriously high vested interest in the old money status quo it would probably be the best way to go about destroying bitcoin. if you fight a decentralized network you may harm it but it will come back stronger in one form or another. but if you crush it with out revealing yourself as a malicious entity and crush every little hope of the people they will not be so keen to fight back a second time. and once an idea fails the first time it is much harder for it to catch on a second time thus also suppressing the hopes of a reincarnation in another form.

not only that.. but with some(wouldnt take much) of the bitcoins they mine they could slowly acquire massive amounts of all the coins they cant do that to (PoS) and then just royal fuck with their respective markets for years to come as their little play toy. no investor in their right mind would buy crypto ever again. isnt it strange how many altcoins are actually not crashing (against bitcoin) while bitcoin plummets... not the norm right? i say fuck with their markets because it would be far cheaper than acquiring 50% in a PoS system - not impossible - but way too expensive an option when all you want to do is prevent adoption.

im not saying this is whats happening.. but it is certainly a possibility. dont underestimate the ones pulling the strings behind the current financial system. governments learnt their lesson about decentralised networks when file sharing effectively took down the music and film industry. why would they let a threat grow to the point that it could actually challenge them. if i were them i would invest the "pennies" to protect the pounds. and it would take fewer pennies now than in 5 years time.

[Daanie]

i do think that if 90% of all countries worldwide will ban bitcoin, it will die. The value will never go back to $0 though.

[inBitweTrust]

a malicious entity does not need to buy enough mining power to get 51%. they only need enough to continuously suppress the price and push it down gradually forcing out other miners, getting back some of the money invested and also raising their percentage of hashing power as other miners drop out. it would be a slow process and costly but not even close to impossible.

If this attack happened than we would just switch the Bitcoin algo to an Asic resistant algo https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm/  or a Hybrind PoW /PoS algo.

governments learnt their lesson about decentralised networks when file sharing effectively took down the music and film industry. why would they let a threat grow to the point that it could actually challenge them. if i were them i would invest the "pennies" to protect the pounds. and it would take fewer pennies now than in 5 years time.

Well they have never waited this long in the past. What is taking them so long? Bitcoin reached almost a 14 billion dollar market cap and is now valued over 5 billion. Liberty dollar was raided when a little over 7 million was backing up the currency. At its peak Liberty reserve processed 1.4 billion annually in transactions and Bitcoin has volume traded at an average of 60 million usd daily or 22-30 Billion projected annually.

Perhaps those that do understand the threat also understand that attacking a decentralized network is futile as it will just grow more resistant. How are the most powerful countries/corporations worldwide handling bit-torrent thus far? Do you think that they will ever succeed in preventing these transactions or are you suggesting they aren't interested in shutting down thepiratebay and other torrent trackers?

Those "pennies" invested by governments would only slow Bitcoin and evolve it into something much stronger and resistant.

[ENikS]

If government goes for core dev team it will kill it easily. You don't need to attack the application, get people who works on it and you are done.
You don't even need to kill it. Just install enough hooks and backdoors and whole purpose is defeated. No one really checks what is running except few developers, there are no audits or checks and balances to insure code integrity.

[inBitweTrust]

If government goes for core dev team it will kill it easily. You don't need to attack the application, get people who works on it and you are done.
You don't even need to kill it. Just install enough hooks and backdoors and whole purpose is defeated. No one really checks what is running except few developers, there are no audits or checks and balances to insure code integrity.

Well its convenient that out of most of the open source projects, Bitcoin has enough highly skeptical libertarian and anarchist leaning developers to have a higher possibility of checking for such backdoors. Additionally , multiple developers are actively promoting multiple implementations to insure Bitcoin is safe against bugs or backdoors becoming a showstopper.

This being said, as with any open source project, Bitcoin needs more developers and testers.

[ENikS]

I wouldn't be so sure. There are holes which were there from day one and no one bothered to check for them.
To give you just one example of such hole look at this: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4955

I wasn't looking for security issues, just trying to build it on MSBuild, but still found more that dozen of boundary check errors (these are similar to Open SSL bug that caused so much publicity few month back). I am sure if someone would look specifically for vulnerabilities they will find more...

I guess my point is: these were found by accident. If core team adds backdoor into the code it will not be detected until something breaks or someone discover it by accident. So it could be another 5 years...

[NewLiberty]

If government goes for core dev team it will kill it easily. You don't need to attack the application, get people who works on it and you are done.
You don't even need to kill it. Just install enough hooks and backdoors and whole purpose is defeated. No one really checks what is running except few developers, there are no audits or checks and balances to insure code integrity.

It remains the only implementation with a miner, yes?
So, also a single point of failure.

[seoincorporation]

I was having an argument in the speculation sub-forum when someone said "the only way to stop Bitcoin would be to ban the entire internet"... see I often hear that, but being in IT as a profession that statement give me a real hard time, so I thought it is time to discuss it, maybe there is something I am not aware off !!

So if Bitcoin becomes a real threat to governments, and if they agree on banning it and killing it, one way to go would be just changing regulation (FCC) for internet service providers and force them to ban the port that Bitcoin uses (8333 now), this would mean certain death to Bitcoin.


I want to hear your opinion, and how do you think this could be prevented ?

First of all, great thread, it make me think a lot.  

You cant stop bitcoin only banning the port, because the port can be redirected, changed or you can make "tunnelling" to that port.

I think there is not way to stop bitcoin, the countries can make it ilegal, but cant ban it. We have the example of Rusia. They make ilegal the bitcoin and the best they can do is giving you a mulct for it. but that will not make all the country stop using it.

I think the only true way to stop bitcoin, is giving it the value of zero. if it lost the value people will lost the interest on it, and that will be the end. But if it has a value, always will be people interested on it, and they will not care what the country think about it.

Going back to the technical discussion, close the port is not a option to stop it, as i say at start, the port can be redirected, changed or tunnelled for example.

Code:

netcat -L 127.0.0.1:666 -p 8333 -vvv

[btchris]

If government goes for core dev team it will kill it easily. You don't need to attack the application, get people who works on it and you are done.
You don't even need to kill it. Just install enough hooks and backdoors and whole purpose is defeated. No one really checks what is running except few developers, there are no audits or checks and balances to insure code integrity.

When you say "the government", you're implying that the US, the Netherlands, and Belgium will join forces to extort all of the core devs (to say nothing of other eyes on the project) to insert a back door? If that's likely to happen (it's not), I doubt any additional audits (which could also be influenced in the same way) would be of any help. (I agree you're correct in principle though.)

It remains the only implementation with a miner, yes?
So, also a single point of failure.

Putting aside the unlikelihood that all versions, forks, and clones of Bitcoin Core have been backdoored (in a way that apparently can't be reversed), btcd is at least one full-node alternative, re-implemented from the ground up, which supports getblocktemplate: https://github.com/conformal/btcd/wiki#Mining. It's quite an ambitious project, you should take a look.

[ENikS]

When you say "the government", you're implying that the US, the Netherlands, and Belgium will join forces to extort all of the core devs (to say nothing of other eyes on the project) to insert a back door? If that's likely to happen (it's not), I doubt any additional audits (which could also be influenced in the same way) would be of any help. (I agree you're correct in principle though.)

As cases of wikileaks, Snowden, and etc. shows it is relatively easy to obtain cooperation from European counties. Most of the time it wouldn't even be required.
It doesn't take much to put pressure on regular people. Few phone calls from authorities with promise to ruin your life will do it.  

Given importance of BTC to whole world economy it would be negligence on part of these special agencies not to put hooks and backdoors into the code and I don't think they are negligent.
After all, motto of BTC: Thrust no one...

[cbeast]

I think governments trying to kill bitcoin would make grow even faster. Then Bitcoiners could buy politicians.

[Micky Ron]

I think governments trying to kill bitcoin would make grow even faster. Then Bitcoiners could buy politicians.

Any publicity/controversy is good publicity

[AlexSm]

I was having an argument in the speculation sub-forum when someone said "the only way to stop Bitcoin would be to ban the entire internet"... see I often hear that, but being in IT as a profession that statement give me a real hard time, so I thought it is time to discuss it, maybe there is something I am not aware off !!

So if Bitcoin becomes a real threat to governments, and if they agree on banning it and killing it, one way to go would be just changing regulation (FCC) for internet service providers and force them to ban the port that Bitcoin uses (8333 now), this would mean certain death to Bitcoin.


I want to hear your opinion, and how do you think this could be prevented ?

Governments don't only work based on brute force, they could just as easily inflitrate the foundation and make USlolcatGavin hardfork Bitcoin to introduce fresh new vulnerabilities (oops! *caugh caugh*)

[TheDragonSlayer]

The government just need to force some of the giant miner in US to group up for 51% attack and its done..

[amaclin]

The government just need to force some of the giant miner in US to group up for 51% attack and its done..

Why do you think that only government can do it?

[inBitweTrust]

The government just need to force some of the giant miner in US to group up for 51% attack and its done..

What exactly would happen if they did this? 1-3 double spends? The ability to prevent a few transactions from being propagated, temporarily?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWTQgmCuiCw