It is possible for any current governmental agency to hijack the entire system, due to their access to supercomputer infrastructures and/or immense budgets. This will however become less and less possible while bitcoin continues to grow and is already a massive and technological challenge which I do not see any governmental institutions execute proper. It is also strange to say these transactions are "untraceable". Nothing is less true. Governments have complete transcripts of all sent data (USA, GB and AUS have a neat little system for this set up, catch all emails too), and every transaction is signed by the money's owner, it needs to be processed. Sure one could create many different unique signatures (bitcoin adresses) but those could all be traced moving out of the house. It's just immensely more tedious to do than tracking, say, bank transactions and so many agencies will just not be technical enough to do this. Funny enough the same internet security things will help as with all internet things Tor on your neighbors network with IPSEC and SSL "behind 7 proxy's". (even then the network will need to process your transactions and agencies can just follow along with that, they just can't really trace the transactions back to you; if you use different bitcoin adresses) So kids; go crazy, be paranoid and have fun, Best regards, Lodewijk Andre de la Porte 2011/5/17 Eugen Leitl

----- Forwarded message from Alaric Snell-Pym -----

From: Alaric Snell-Pym Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 17:25:22 +0100 To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Bitcoin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; NetBSD amd64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100520 Lightning/1.0b2pre Shredder/3.0.4 Reply-To: silklist@lists.hserus.net

On 05/17/11 17:01, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:

...

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:

...

Currently, the bitcoin network produces about 1.5 trillion hashes per second, total. So somebody managing a billion a second, in a mining pool, earns about a 1500th of the total "income" of new bitcoin - 50 every ten minutes...

Wait, it doesn't work like this?

http://xkcd.com/538/

Alas no! The design of the system is all about global consensus - more than 50% of the hashing capacity needs to agree for stuff to happen. There's nobody to whack with a wrench - it'd cost more to go and whack each pimply nerd with a basement full of computers than to just buy more computers ;-)

ABS

-- Alaric Snell-Pym http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/

----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE