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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

«that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time»

Yes, "permission" is the right vocabulary to use in this instance. In fact, the opposite, being "permissionless", is exactly one of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc. This is why cryptocurrencies should be seen as competing with cash, and not with permissioned systems (credit cards, Paypal). This is also why, IMHO, countries moving toward a cashless society will inevitably lead to more people—the underbanked and the unbanked—slowly using cryptocurrencies more and more over time, not by choice but by necessity.

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The term I like to use is "censorship resistant." Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies have this property.

The idea is that no central authority can censor your right to spend money.

On the other hand, all the major central authorities have asserted that they do have the right to censor how the residents of their jurisdiction spend money, so they consider that any payment system that's truly censorship resistant and anonymous must be prevented from interacting with the wider economy unless it surrenders these properties.

I.e. the requirement to report all large cash transactions and prevent anonymity in such deals; the 'know your customer' requirement for cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. Even if your "money" is censorship resistant, transacting with a legitimate business can't be, since all legitimate businesses can be (and are) required to censor certain transactions; and if a particular "kind of money" makes it impossible to distinguish them, then it may well be that these businesses will (or will have to) simply censor the whole "kind of money".

The article says clearly that they are trying to figure out a stored value card. If they do, the only chilling part is if the means of exchanging it was somehow unobtainable.

It's worth remembering that cash is no clear panacea. Germany's inflation made it unworkable. Some countries have arbitrarily changed currency. Its value is based on agreement.

A true e-currency would have different problems. It would not necessarily be bad.

The article doesn't even mention privacy or permissions. I see no reason to think either of those are being considered at all here. I mean, how would a state-issued stored-value card function without being traceable and revokable?

Unless big brother cuts off your connection to the wider web

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You don't necessarily need a connection. It can work just as well with a QR code signature that the recipient uses later to broadcast the transaction.

Without the network, another recipient wouldn't know about that transaction and thus be susceptible to a double-spend, right?

You'd have to transmit it before the client can double-spend, yes, but my point is that it's not necessary for the owner of the coins to have an internet connection.

Time-locked transactions can kind of help here.

You can receive incoming blocks on the Bitcoin network via satellite, radio etc. I doubt a government would be able to keep up the whack-a-mole game against many activists who can set up mobile block relays.

You can also send transactions over any communication, even SMS. A good example from Andreas Antonopoulos is that emoticons are a 128 character set, so you could send a 250 byte bitcoin transaction as a sequence of 15 emoticons.

Good luck stopping that.

>> main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc.

Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys, and those guys are probably controlled (or can be easily coerced into cooperation) by Chinese totalitarian government.

«Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys»

It's false. You are repeating a sadly misunderstood aspect of pooled mining. Articles writing such sensationalist claims are written by people who don't understand that a mining pool representing x% of the hash rate doesn't mean they "control" x% of the hash rate. Their end-users, who are distributed around the world, are the ones who control the hashrate, who own the mining hardware, and who choose which pool to use. That is, if a pool were to use the hashrate maliciously, users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.

>> users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.

This is not as easy as you try to paint it, because mining requires hardware, and you can't just move it around the world at will - most of it is physically located in China, and that's not gonna change.

Another misconception. Changing mining pool is done by changing a single parameter in the mining software. It is as easy as it sounds. There is no need to "move hardware".

It is not true that "most" mining hardware is located in China. There is a good portion of it over there for sure, but because of the secrecy around most miners, we don't know how much exactly. It's certainly not ">90%".

Every single article that makes similar claims mistakenly assumes that for example it the AntPool Chinese pool represents 20% of the hashrate, then it means this hardware is located in China. This is patently false. AntPool is one of the most popular pools for various reasons (reliability, availability, flexibility, branding), so they are used by many users worldwide. They even have stratum endpoints in the US for their North American users. Only a fraction of the AntPool hashrate comes from hardware physically located in China.

Do you have statistics for Bitcoin mining hardware by country?

And yet nobody has ever censored my bitcoin transactions.

Banks, on the other hand, censor transactions all the time.

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