From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id A434D15C2 for ; Sun, 20 Sep 2015 22:02:36 +0000 (UTC) X-Greylist: from auto-whitelisted by SQLgrey-1.7.6 Received: from mail.help.org (mail.help.org [70.90.2.18]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 1172D25C for ; Sun, 20 Sep 2015 22:02:35 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [10.1.10.25] (B [10.1.10.25]) by mail.help.org with ESMTPA ; Sun, 20 Sep 2015 18:02:28 -0400 To: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org References: From: Milly Bitcoin Message-ID: <55FF2CF8.2010408@bitcoins.info> Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 18:02:32 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.2.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham version=3.3.1 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.1 (2010-03-16) on smtp1.linux-foundation.org Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Bitcoin conference micro-report X-BeenThere: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.12 Precedence: list List-Id: Bitcoin Development Discussion List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 22:02:36 -0000 > Larger user base won't necessarily protect against governments if we > still have chokepoints they can go after. Bitcoin will always have chokepoints governments can go after. Hackers already targeted routers to divert mining traffic awhile back. Bitcoin traffic is easily seen and blocked by ISP's. It has already been pointed out that laws against merchants and exchanges cannot be defended against any other way than to have many people use the system. (As a developer you, of course, did not mention the threat of having a tiny number of developers who have significant influence over Bitcoin. It always amazes me the endless discussion over miners centralization and almost zero discussion of developer decentralization.) Increasing the nodes by a factor of 2 or 3 or keeping the block size small to increase the diversity of miners by a few percent will have zero effect if those other government threats were to actually happen. Russ