> trying to make math illegal
This is a non-sensical but very common expression from crypto-bros. It's like saying that gun control is to "make steel illegal".
This is a non-sensical but very common expression from crypto-bros. It's like saying that gun control is to "make steel illegal".
This is because you can ban people from buying guns. But you certainly won't be able to stop people from creating their own weapons. Obviously too little people have the capability, but yes, then can.
With bitcoin is more complicated, because trying to control self-custody is basically trying to ban maths. All you need is an internet connection and some google to find software capable of self-custody. Hell, you can do that with excel if you really want to.
So, as hard as trying to ban math.
That would be a shame if the software you downloaded stole the coins from you wouldn't it? Or if your ECDSA implementation in Excel contained a typo and you lost everything.
The only reason cryptography ban in the 90s failed was because everybody in the business world needed to have access to strong crypto for to use security reasons. If people had to roll their own crypto, the NSA cryptanalysts would have had a really fun time because almost all of them would have been utterly broken.
You wouldn’t really need to roll your own crypto to post transactions to the Bitcoin network, a Bitcoin hash is basically sha256 done twice.
Bitcoin uses much the same cryptography that most banks, ssl certs and other internet cryptography use. Unless you plan to memory hole the entire topic of sha256 and bitcoin hash algorithms, it seems unlikely that any government operating on the premise of a citizenry with the right to free speech, could prevent it.
Looks like the parent was talking about rolling its own crypto, isn't it?
Crypto isn’t just math, and it’s subject to law just like everything else.
Where? Not in the USA. And jstark, the guy who made the FGC-9, was rather conspicuously a resident of Germany [0], so it's not like making self-manufacture of firearms illegal made it impossible for him to do so.
0: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/10/12/jstark-passes...
In the USA it is legal to make your own guns.
> The Legal Framework for Individuals: Making a firearm for personal use is legal. Making a firearm for personal use without a federal manufacturing license is legal. This has always been the case, even after the enactment of the Gun Control Act of 1968 ("GCA"). http://freedomblog.skylarklaw.com/2014/10/is-making-firearm-...
Interesting that this came up in a thread about Bitcoin.
Well, that’s precisely my point. You typically don’t ban anything by physically preventing people from doing it.
The crypto(currency) wars of 20s ARE doomed to failure. Restrictions on cryptocurrency were ultimately about controlling algorithms with certain inputs. Its trying to make some math illegal.
There is no good faith outcome that can continue from this, it shuts down the argument.
Good day.
You don't have to drive something to zero to restrict it successfully.
Let's say Bitcoin was strongly regulated globally. Anyone caught running mining software or transacting in Bitcoin has their hands cut off. Ouch.
I can still download mining software and run it on my computer, and connect through the network through Tor. Blocks are 1 MB every 15 minutes, it's noise. I don't need to know anyone or have anyone's identities. It's really really hard to catch me. Like, wayyyyy harder than the child pornography example.
Well, ok but what's the incentive then for me to use Bitcoin in such a world? Not sure there, like what's the "USD price" per Bitcoin. Ya this part seems tough. If all countries strongly ban Bitcoin with harsh penalties, that seems like it would put a kabosh on my ability to turn it into real world currency. But still could be used for digital goods.
You're forgetting black markets. Drug dealers and gun runners and human traffickers are already breaking serious laws. They don't care about breaking other laws. If they get caught they're already going to jail whether they use illegal math or not.
The lack of utility also assumes that all countries would ban it, which seems unlikely, if only because some countries have the incentive to do anything they can to stick it to other countries they don't like. Then it still retains value globally because it can be turned into real stuff in those countries.
The real issue is this: You can't ban it for the "bad stuff" that gets used as the excuse to ban it, because those guys will just break the law, as they already do. You can ban it for innocent people using it for innocent things, but that's just stupid.
Or corrupt, because incumbents don't like the competition, which is the strongest driving force for such laws.
It's not all that long when you think about it.
You don’t outlaw the maths. You outlaw people holding assets in wallets. Courts will have no trouble distinguishing that from a ban in maths.
Your reasoning that it's "the maths" that makes crypto unassailable shows a lack of understanding of how governments exercise power and control. The law does not care about your worldview and geeky conception of the abstract mathematical nature of cryptography—and guess what—they don't have to: it's purely a question of enforceability.
The different between encryption and cryptocurrency is that the former cannot be targeted, but the latter can. Consider the purpose of encryption: to make communication between 2 or more individuals private. This can happen in many different ways, from whispering in ones ear, to using postcards w/ one-time pads. It can't be regulated because there's no stable target, any group of people that needs privacy can rig up their own scheme independent of all others and change it as necessary. The value they derive is directly from the privacy and depends unqiuely on each situation. The only way for a government to defeat this is through oppressive totalitarianism with direct threat of violence and imprisonment.
Cryptocurrency on the other hand has no direct utility other than its monetary value, and that monetary value is a direct function of the global belief in that value. It would be exceedingly easy for a government to make a specific cryptocurrency illegal because the mechanisms are concrete and public—you can't just swap out the maths for a new implementation. In other words governments can outlaw and devalue cryptocurrencies faster than you can establish and build trust in them.
Not that I think this will happen in practice because governments are already taxing cryptocurrency and riding that gravy train as well. But the fact that they are able to tax it is clear evidence that cryptocurrency is not in fact above the law.
Also, unlike drugs and alcohol, Bitcoin is a digital good with no physical footprint, making enforcement much more difficult. With an open-source protocol running on some 12k nodes as well as thousands of miners, most running on Tor - it seems unlikely that a gov could take the network down or even prevent their citizens from participating in the network.
At best, governments could block fiat on/off ramps, pushing bitcoin trading to decentralized exchanges or p2p transactions for trading to/from fiat. There would also be black markets for Bitcoin just as there are black markets for many other things banned by governments.
Ultimately governments banning fiat on/off ramps for Bitcoin could help achieve a goal shared by Bitcoiners of a native Bitcoin currency-based economy. Governments banning bitcoin may even be good for Bitcoin adoption, though it would negatively impact price in the short term.
(Btw, the enormous majority of bitcoin usage already goes through exchanges, just because it's almost the only practical way to use it so I don't really think this law is gonna change anything in itself)
Sending Transactions over SMS is a thing. This may exist today, but I assume in the future bots on WhatsApp will broadcast raw hex/base64 encoded transactions to the network for peers in restricted countries. Policing WhatsApp content is extremely difficult, we have seen in the recent years.
One can restrict the centralized exchanges. One cannot control every communication channel, or prevent every ECDSA signature from being signed.
And it assume you can get this whatsapp proxy from a reliable source because it would be a pity if it was in fact a honeypot run by the government to find you (EncroChat-like).
If someone trusts a WhatsApp bot with their bitcoins, they brought it upon themselves.
1. Not forward the transaction (I can tell relatively quickly by checking the mempool)
2. Doxx me/report me/etc by observing my IP, Whatsapp account name, and what wallet it is connected to.
Besides that, I can put my transactions up on a billboard for all I care.
You mixing things up here, the mempool won't help you since your whatsapp proxy could tamper it. The only reliable thing is the chain itself once your transaction has been inserted in a mined block.
> 2. Doxx me/report me/etc by observing my IP, Whatsapp account name, and what wallet it is connected to.
But when doing direct crypto transaction is a crime in your country, this is a more serious threat than “tampering the transaction” or anything. Going to jail, or being tortured by some gang who want your private key, or both depending how corrupt the police is in that country.
But as I said, this is not what matters: the doxxing part is the deadly threat.
You can tell within about 15 seconds or so if a transaction hasn't hit the memepool. Just look up you wallet on blockchain.com/etherscan etc. It's a standard step that nearly every send/receive UI offers a link after submitting a transaction. These services mark mempool transactions as "pending" before they are inserted into a block.
For example, here's a wallet for Gemini, you can see pending transactions under the "Age" column as they hit the mempool [0]. They are "pending" while in the mempool and then are labeled with a time as they are added to blocks.
I'm continually impressed with how resilient the system is, even more-so after our thread about a hypothetical adversary.
(Again you can run your own mempool service on your own node, and publish transactions to it, but in our hypothetical situation you need to instead issue it out through a Whatsapp channel manually.)
[0] https://etherscan.io/address/0x056fd409e1d7a124bd7017459dfea...
In the case of bitcoin should the public don't use it anymore, the price would collapse, making the current mining unsustainable, and as the mining difficulty declines the robustness of the protocol reduces sharply, especially if state actors start buying the unused mining devices…
BTW, the sneakernet is unsuited for most uses of bitcoin transactions: you don't just want to be able to transfer the token from one address to another. Most of the time a transaction is an interactive process: you send the money and I give you something in return after I've checked that I actually received the funds. This usage simply doesn't work well on the sneakernet, because of the very high latency.
It is sensible.
Properly designed cryptosystems produce ciphertext that is indistinguishable from a random number.
So, at the very end of it all, the possession of random numbers would need to be regulated.
This is unenforceable (of course) and absurd.
The analogy you make to (physical goods) is a poor one. Regardless of how you feel about restrictions on physical items or how difficult they might be to enforce, it is at least plausible that these restrictions could be enforced.
Not so with a prohibition on random numbers.
It's also impossible to tell from a 100 dollar bill if it has been taxed or not, yet taxes are enforceable.
Almost no law enforcement relies on physically preventing something from existing, especially in any kind of automated manner.
So yes, they can't stop people from possessing private keys that correspond to wallets, or whatever, but they can stop banks from working with crypto related business, force google to block results, force ISPs to take down crypto sites, block any kind of crypto app from both app stores, etc etc. Even block foreign sites. Not to mention, jail people who touch crypto.
Not saying they will or that they should, but "crypto is math" is not a relevant argument.
Governments will successfully ban Bitcoin, just like they successfully banned piracy.
Things like https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=category:401 are long gone now, successfully banned.
If it isn't, I'd point out there are still numerous Pirate Bay mirrors I can access.
Either way, I wish it were generally easier to discern which comments on this page are intended literally and which are sarcastic.
Think about it - all of the legitimate institutional money would have to divest, all of the loosely interested Coinbase users would sell because they don't want fines/jail, the only way to buy the coin would be with cash because your bank and credit card would report any BTC purchases to the feds...
It would be a much smaller and less liquid market. Bitcoin isn't going away obviously, but that doesn't mean it's worth $50k a coin in the event it's banned.
In a world where CNC machines were in every house, the same thing would apply re: gun control. People could just make their own guns.
I'm not saying it's a super effective point, but just making sure you get the framing.