Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

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Outlawing bitcoin means legally preventing people from participating in the network by running full nodes, and it means legally barring exchanges from operating.

It's easy to scoff at the idea of censoring bitcoin, but I'd love to hear someone defend the censorship-resistance of bitcoin, because I really don't see it.

It's trivial to make it illegal to operate a full node, and it's not like the government doesn't have the dragnet surveillance infrastructure to enforce it. You can't transfer bitcoin without access to the network (ie: you can't physically transfer bitcoin between two untrusting parties) and if the government bars exchanges from operating legally, how do you actually trade bitcoin for anything?

If you think this sounds draconian and far-fetched, you might be right, but remember: the government once tried to ban gold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 ).

> It's trivial to make it illegal to operate a full node

Right, making something illegal is trivial. But how would you effectively stop someone from doing it? You can tunnel the traffic as with anything. They'd have to go full China to stop it.

And you don't need to run a full node if you're willing to trust a consensus of miners about the current state. (You can see how much work a block (probably) took to mine, so if someone shows you a block with the wrong proof-of-work target you know they're lying, meaning that even this forgery to show to an offline user is 51%-attack level hard.)

> if the government bars exchanges from operating legally, how do you actually trade bitcoin for anything?

Have you ever travelled and bought currency privately? Either just because you ran out, or the listed exchange rate is fixed. You meet someone in a bar and hand them an envelope of cash.

If you used something like the OpenDime offline wallet then it would be easier. They'd transfer to the offline wallet which you would verify, and then you'd do a regular handover of physical items, cash for hardware wallet.

Sure, it's a bit shady, and maybe horribly illegal, but if you were trying to get out of the country with your family's wealth all of a sudden it'd seem pretty easy compared to the alternatives.

sure, if you think the US government is united against bitcoin and willing to step on the civil liberties afforded the ~30 million US citizens who own it.

but.... I really don't think either of those things is true. You should talk to people in the state dept or DoD and pay less attention to FED/Treasury. The current USD global reserve status quo isn't always great for the US gov.

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