[silk] Bitcoin

lodewijk andré de la porte lodewijkadlp at gmail.com
Tue May 17 15:12:14 PDT 2011


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 <eugen at leitl.org>

> ----- Forwarded message from Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric at snell-pym.org.uk>
> -----
>
> From: Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric at snell-pym.org.uk>
> Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 17:25:22 +0100
> To: silklist at 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 at lists.hserus.net
>
> On 05/17/11 17:01, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:
> > On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Alaric Snell-Pym
> > <alaric at snell-pym.org.uk> 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





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