waynerad

I use WeChat, so, nothing, I guess ;) But I use it to talk to a friend in China, and most Americans (most people outside China, actually) probably don't have a Chinese friend asking them to install an app.

Weakness from the standpoint of the ability of a network operator to block the protocol? GPG could be blocked quite easily. Email encrypted with GPG declares itself so

I feel upset about being modded down -- I feel I asked a fair question. Governments gain their power from being able to tax and dilute currency. Bitcoin, if it gains traction, will be a direct threat to both. It does not seem realistic to think governments will not fight back, and hard. If I'm right, it means simple tricks like changing ports and changing IP's won't work. You say "The government can't register/block every possible domain name that will be generated." -- maybe they can if they know the algorithm that is being used to generate the domain names? Or maybe they can examine the contents of the packets, so there is no need to block every domain name (or IP in the case of Fast flux). For every change to the protocol to thward getting blocked, the blockers and respond to the change because the protocol is open.

I suppose the "worst case scenario" is that Bitcoin has to be used over a generic VPN protocol, similar to what people do now to get around the Great Firewall Of China. As I understand it, the Chinese government has not blocked the VPN protocols, mostly because few enough of the Chinese people use them -- but if a large percentage of Chinese people started using VPN's, wouldn't the Chinese government start blocking VPN protocols?

Perhaps the Great Firewall Of China is the best example of the capability a government has to control its internet within its physical territory?

Blocking every VPN is something that should eventually fail because large enterprises (Fortune 500 Co) won't stand for it. So I can understand the argument that governments _ultimately_ can't stop Bitcoin or something like it. But it seems to me like they won't give up without a fight.

I see I've been modded down. Why? What do you people know that I don't?

It seems to me like I'm asking a simple, obvious question: what is stopping governments from simply shutting down Bitcoin within their physical borders? You think they will not be smart enough to handle a simple port number change?

Regarding the comparison with Bittorrent, my ISP (Comcast) did in fact block and throttle Bittorrent, successfully, until someone sued them. It seem to me Bittorrent is an example of how ISP's can block an application, not an example of them being unable to do so.

"The client could probably just check periodically for a signed message from a central server (or a broadcast on the network itself) with instructions to currently operate on the network." -- why could the ISP not block this, also?

Especially if the software is open source, as Bitcoin is, all the knowledge of the inner workings of the protocol is public knowledge, which makes it impossible to stick in something like "just check periodically for a signed message from a central server (or a broadcast on the network itself) " secretly without governments wanting to block the system knowing about it.

So, every x days, every user of the currency in the country has to upgrade their software, because the government has blocked the protocol, so they need new software that in essence uses a different protocol???

If using this currency is that inconvenient, people will just go back to using credit cards and Paypal.

Someone tell my why the US government can't just demand ISP's block the protocol that Bitcoin uses?

Wow, that is my experience exactly.

Actually, you are exactly right to be worried. I know because I spent 4 months researching small arms violence (for the Boulder future salon). The Small Arms Survey is an extensive series of research publications from a UN-funded research group in Geneva. And according to them, the single strongest predictor of small arms violence is wealth inequality. The #2 factor is poverty, in absolute terms. My take on this is that inequality creates resentment, and poverty in absolute terms (going hungry) creates desperation. Desperation+resentment is a deadly combination. After that, social attitudes about violence play a big role (For example, Japan since WWII has developed cultural attitudes that inhibit violence, but Latin America hasn't.) Another predictive factor is males ages 15 to 30 who are "unemployed and not in school." Drug trafficking is also a strong correlate with small arms violence. In some parts of Mexico today (cities like Juárez that directly border the US) you can see all these factors at work: higher inequality than the US, higher poverty in absolute terms, weaker cultural attitudes inhibiting violence, and serious drug trafficking, with young unemployed male sicarios.

This article misrepresent's Samuel Gosling's research. It says that Gosling's experiments show that people can make "surprisingly accurate" assessments of strangers by looking at their personal space. In fact Gosling's research shows that people can form a more accurate assessment from a first impression (even a still photo) than they can from looking at someone's personal space (such as a bedroom or cubicle), and in fact people get many things wrong by looking at someone's personal space. If you want to know exactly what you can and can't tell about someone's personality from looking at their personal space, get his book.