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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

As for Ethereum itself:

It is basically a distributed computing platform designed to handle money, idea is you make a program that handles money, and it runs in a decentralized manner, this way noone can interfere with it, for example you could make a program that tells the users the password to login on a dissident newspaper if they donate something, since it is decentralized the government would have a harder time taking it down. (that is just a simple example, people doing all sorts of stuff with this)

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I read a lot of difficult words that I can't relate to.

What does this mean for the average citizen in America or Europe?

Also, I read this:

> Ethereum clients use a listener (TCP) port and a discovery (UDP) port, both on 30303 by default. > If you need to run JSON-RPC, you'll also need TCP port 8545. Note that JSON-RPC port should not be opened to the outside world, because from there you can do admin operations.

Sounds like quite easy to block by any government.

Or just cut off internet access at all.

"Just cut off internet" indeed would work... but it would work for a lot of things.

But saying that is same saying that a normal bank is useless because the government can just "just cut off the power" and thus the bank servers would be down.

And indeed in some siege situations, that would be possible, but Ethereum never promised to be siege-proof.

As for what it means to the average citizen in America or Europe? Well, one of the popular uses of Ethereum is gambling, that in some places is legal, in some others is not. Another use is create business that can't operate in some jurisdictions for whatever reason (for example because sanctions, or just plain old outdated laws that were forgotten).

> Well, one of the popular uses of Ethereum is gambling,

You are really selling this to me...

A government can do a lot of things, and if you have Mao in command.

However, if you want to have a somewhat modern society taking away basic things like internet and power is very difficult. You can maybe to that for some individuals, but doing it for all is very tricky.

The argument that, its not 100% possible to prevent all ways for a government to do something, then you should do it at all, is a terrible argument.

Now route your Ethereum node through the Tor network

Why not just engage in this conversation in good faith? It's very unbecoming to act as if you're a neutral party who can't understand tech jargon, then drop a dense paragraph about TCP/UDP to back up your point.

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