Everyone in the crypto currency space presumes that Bitcoin and other P2P protocols create a censorship resistant finanical platform.
Most idealists are naive. Bitcoin and any protocol running on civilian hardware can be interfered with by cyber operations. It's more that at this time the Bitcoin protocol and it's users do not represent a threat which requires that certain capabilities be used.
I don't think Tor, Linux, or any software is "censorship resistant" because based on my knowledge of security I don't think any hardware or software can be fully trusted. I do think that it's more expensive, more difficult, and probably effective against certain specific governments but not against the technologically sophisticated governments capable of advanced persistent attacks.
It is my opinion, that any PUBLIC P2P network can easily be censored by ISPs. If you can join the network, then you can discover the IP and PORT of every publicly accessible node and then block all packets to/from those nodes on those ports.
This isn't the case. ISPs don't have the ability to detect the traffic if it's masked. I would say most people don't know how to mask their traffic though, and currently Bitcoin isn't anywhere near anonymous or masked. The idea that Bitcoin or any of these coins are anonymous is giving people a false sense of security in my opinion.
That isn't to say that you couldn't upgrade it or use it in a way so that it is anonymous but it takes a level of expertise that most people don't have which means relatively few people would be capable of doing it, and the government could simply monitor the few people they know who would be capable or the people who they believe have the desire to do so, which would probably include people searching for anonymous currencies on Google.
Browsers can be tagged so when people use their browser their surfing habits are known. So unless a person really knows what they are doing they wont even be able to download these sorts of apps without the government and law enforcement knowing they went to the site and this is assuming there aren't any bugs or zero day exploits like the recent one which effects 99% of Android users or the one which effects all versions of Windows.
Furthermore, every website that hosts content (binaries, source, and seed node IPs) can be shut down in a similar manner.
Worse than that, they can be honeypot traps set up by the government to sneak a bug into the binaries. Silk Road was shut down but it was reborn and most likely that was an example of a honeypot. Any website and a lot of altcoins claiming to offer methods which could easily help people commit crimes, at least one or some of them could be a virus. Malware hidden inside the binaries would probably be something a government would do, or the hidden rootkit.
If governments wanted to attack the industry they would simply put the rootkits in the binaries. Since most people install binaries and don't compile source code it would mean most people are vulnerable. Even the most paranoid individuals who want to compile their own code could fall for the backdoor which could be hidden in popular Linux compilers.
Even MaidSafe and Tor are not able to prevent this kind of censorship.
They aren't and I told the Maidsafe team that there will be some difficulties but at this point in time they are confident they'll be able to overcome it. But in general I would say while Maidsafe is much more secure than Dropbox, it's not something I would bet my life on or commit crimes with.
Now clearly, it would be difficult to engage in this kind of censorship on a global scale. The end result would be for people to move to VPN systems, which would in turn come under attack because they are "publicly known".
VPNs are actually one of the most secure ways for a person to defend themselves and some VPNs accept Bitcoin. I would say go the VPN route as a counter-measure against ISP surveillance but that doesn't stop people from tracking your IP address around the web with or without VPN, or from tracking your GPU.
At the end of the day, the great Firewall of China can be applied to any country at any time.
True but the only thing we can do is make it more expensive to apply it. If it costs a lot it means less countries can do it. So I suppose the idea of making it expensive so that only perhaps the rich nations can do it, because the alternative would be worse.
If that were to happen then consensus would have to move to dark networks, on an invite-only basis and the utility of crypto-currencies in general would be dramatically undercut.
In other words, crypto-currencies currently depend upon free speech.
They don't depend on it but they assume it. I would say crypto-currencies is better than the world without it though because the pros outweigh the cons, but I don't think that crypto-currencies are anonymous. This is why I'm focused more on promoting adoption than anonymity because you attract different people when you promote anonymity than when you promote mainstream adoption.
I think anonymity is a lot harder, but I do think we need some of it because privacy is necessary. It might not be impossible to track people, it might require the NSA and military capabilities, but that is in my opinion probably necessary or you could have political abuses which outweigh whatever benefit that law enforcement claims you gain from being able to see every transaction all the time.
If a person is a terrorist suspect then there are intelligence agencies with authority to use the equipment and resources necessary to track them. So for example that teenager who tried to help ISIS get into using Bitcoin? That kid was likely under surveillance but that is a different thing from putting every transaction in the public for everyone to see. If it's only to stop terrorism then it has to be expensive to see it.
We live in a world where despite the government's best efforts illegal music, movies, and other content manages to survive. What does this tell us? How can centralized services provide us magnet links to torrents with public IPs and those hosts are not shut down?
Illegal content, illegal activities, is a different concern from terrorism and national security. When lives are at stake then it isn't politically controversial to use everything we have to protect life. "Crime" in the vague open ended flexible since of the word could mean anything they say it means, and law enforcers enforce the law, which can be interpreted in different ways at different times. Considering the United States has way too many prisoners I don't have as much sympathy for the "crime" argument as I do for the terrorism argument.
For crime, if the crime involves a threat to people's lives then I would say it rises in importance to be worth spending the necessary resources to de-anonymize whomever is behind it. Also if it's a huge scam with billions of dollars stolen then also I would say you might be able to make a case to spend many millions to recover billions. On the other hand it doesn't make much economic sense to arrest file sharers, drug users, or people who do victimless crimes to make ends meet.
That is where the political controversy is. It's in whether or not law enforcement needs the power to have all transactions under surveillance all the time to enforce all types of laws instead of just a very narrow set of laws.
Topic: Looking for well stated arguments for why the government cannot censor crypto (Read 9435 times)
