The pressure is coming to #Bitcoin to kill it’s censorship resistance.
If you haven’t been focusing on defending or building for that, the time is here. Everything is lost if Bitcoin can’t remain open & censorship resistant.
We knew this day was coming, so let’s get it.🔥
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I don't know, man. I'm pretty pessimistic about our ability to win this war. It seems like we haven't had any major wins since 9/11 and the patriot act. I've started to resign myself to the fact that I'll likely have to vote with my feet one day.
But until then, let's fight the good fight.
Voting with your feet is fighting. It’s a tactic of last resort for most of us, but it is still fighting. When the most productive leave a jurisdiction, it is damaging.
I used to be quite pessimistic about it. Not anymore. I'm now convinced we're more likely to win than lose.
We are many. There are billions of people who would and will side with us. And now, thanks to the internet, cryptography, bitcoin, nostr, and other technologies (including a common language!), we can coordinate and support our actions across the world.
What motivates us is the yearning for freedom and love for our families, communities and humanity. What motivates those fuckers is a salary paid in worthless paper.
While they are busy trying to keep people in their insolvent system, we're already building a new, parallel system whose foundations are the values shared by the People, and not one that's designed to benefit a small group of parasites and the expense of everyone else.
They will continue striking as long as there are people willing to sacrifice their energy to that system. But ultimately, the system is designed to collapse on its now. We don't need to do much, other than stay alive, be resilient and continue building a new future where billions of fiat slaves can opt into whenever they're ready.
Offensive action is also a possibility
nostr:note1l9vdzasxamftc0zxpq2hzj6ukg0swml53nngju7q0lgsu83e0yfs68rype
Never forget that they forced automobile owners to hire flag operators who walked in front of the car to want passersby of the dangers of the death machine that had been put on the road… and we don’t have that law today because it simply slammed into reality until it broke apart like the absurd contradiction it was.
Just like bittorrenting, if they are going to play this game, we can prove it an uninforcible, idiotic law. There will be casualties, but technology will win the war, imo.
Financial surveillance and taxes are not going away. Samourai "slammed into reality" a few day ago.
Regulation isn’t “reality,” it’s an artificial creation that can only be sustained to a certain degree based on the particular technological environment. What I’m saying is that the technological landscape will dictate the degree of cost effectiveness of certain legal structures. Very much like copyright issues and market structures for physical media fell apart during the early 2000s despite the many times that torrenters, websites, apps like Napster, and many others became victims of the govt and corporate resistance to the new reality, yet in the end they capitulated and the means and price by which they delivered media to the user changed completely.
We will likely get some weird amalgamation of the two conflicting forces, but it seems clear to me that the technology will severely increase the cost of regulating all of these services and applications as if they are giant payment institutions, and it won’t be sustainable in the long term.
There will likely be many “Samurai’s” along the way unfortunately.
Sure, regulations are an artificial creation. But we are still living by them and they are sanctions if we don't. They influence how we live our life. Every aspect of our life is regulated. So they are very much a reality.
PS: Don't forget to report your Bitcoin transactions to the IRS?
Legal structures are dictating the technological landscape. It would be very different without regulations.
Technology facilitate financial surveillance and reduces costs overtime. They are very smart people working on both.
As for the copyright issues: people have migrated from the physical media to streaming services. Napster didn't last long. Torrent, is it still a thing? Haven't heart about it in decades.
Most economical activities involve at least one register business. Businesses have no incentive to ignore regulations.
There will be casualties like Tornado Cash devs, Bitcoin Fog user and Samourai founders, and like with copyright, new technologies and businesses will emerge, and they will be regulated.
Samourai though regulations didn't apply to them and that they had insulated themselves from regulations but Samourai "slammed into reality" a few day ago.
🫡
Pressure is already here and #Bitcoin is losing sor far IMO, especially in certain countries in the West as it is getting captured through KYC & ETFs.
But we may be only 1 innovation away from evening the playing field.
If Bitcoin ever gets the privacy innovations that Monero has, it will become illegal. So you might as well switch to monero now and stop waiting. Bitcoin is only NOT illegal because it is super easy for govnts to control, trace transactions and taxes and (most importantly) takes the focus away from actual private permissionless cryptocurrency like monero.
Appreciate the thoughts, but if Bitcoin is so easy to control why haven’t they enforced their sanctions on BTC transactions and inflated the money supply? 🤔
Can you give a concrete example in which Bitcoin cannot do what it has been doing because the govt has stopped it? Careful to ensure you don’t reference a centralized service provider rather than bitcoin itself 👍🏻
The govnt can and does monitor all transactions via KYC and capital gains tax laws. Of course you can break the law, but Bitcoin isn't goign to help you do that easier than fiat cash does. The govnt has made laws that require Bitcoin transactions to be transparent, and its very very difficult (and also illegal) to prevent that transparency without risk of jail (at least in UK) or doing something radical like move to El Salvador. Max Keiser moved to El Salvador because he knows Bitcoin is not lawfully private in UK and US (he lived in both). He knew the writing was on the wall and got out with his fortune before the govnt comes for it. And it will.
None of what you explain here is about controlling Bitcoin, it's about controlling *people.* This is very well understood, but the point in the current system is that they can control people BY controlling the system (ie. censorship transactions, freezing bank accounts, confiscating unlimited resources through counterfeiting, unilaterally exerting control over anything and anyone's entire economic foundation).
In each of the scenarios you gave, you are indicating that they have to attack the people directly, because these options listed above specifically are not available to them. Obviously they can always break out a stick and a hammer and enforce their rule, but this doesn't scale very well, which is exactly why they work so hard to control the systems of transactions and the fundamental creation of money, its 1000x easier to appear as if you've done no harm, if you can swap direct violence, to indirect fraud. Bitcoin doesn't solve violence directly, but it does absolutely change the *economics* of violence and the ability to impose unjust and tyrannical laws on the people. It's very much like copyright and file sharing. Sure they can play a never ending game of whack-a-mole and make people not want to share files, but if they can't stop the technology itself, on a long enough timeline they've lost the war.
Your examples suggest that what I have explained is correct and that those limits absolutely remain in place, because you have only come up with things the govt can do *within* those limits - which is my point. Govt cannot inflate #Bitcoin, they cannot edit its history, they cannot freeze accounts, they cannot stop transactions, they cannot turn off the network... all they can do is *attack people,* which will mean the trillions in economic theft they they've had the luxury of doing as a massive, quiet, backdoor fraud; into one that can only stay afloat with guns and whips, and the people will slowly hate them all the more for it. This is exactly how revolutions get started. There is zero chance that they keep stealing the amount that they do if it has to be taxed directly from the people.
The govt spends ~60% of the total US working population's income. Good luck getting them to directly tax that.
It scales as well as and as easy as controlling transactions on your fiat bank account. Sure I can send anyone bitcoins without permission, but those bitcoins become worthless to the recipient if the govnt taints the bitcoin address. This is the problem. Coins get tainted and Bitcoin is not fungible. Cash is more fungible. Its hard to trace tainted notes, its easy to trace Bitcoin, software already does this very effectively.
It is not losing, even a little actually. If we were expecting there not to be stressors or changing dynamics in the market or in the regulatory environment is incredibly naive, imo. And the idea that the simple existence of an ETF that is popular meaning it’s been “taken over” I think only results from a profoundly shallow understanding of what Bitcoin is and how it works. It has literally done nothing at all to Bitcoin and the number of people who think it has lost in the barely few months since the existence of ETFs for essentially no reason just shows how defeatist most people are, imo.
Appreciate the input though. I, however, do not agree with the sentiment and find these recent developments to be both expected and necessary. Considering we’ve been discussing their high likelihood since 2011 and 2012, I’m surprised people are shocked by it all. 🤔🤷🏻♂️
LFG
”Dark and difficult times lay ahead. Soon we must all choose between what is right and what is easy.” - Albus Dumbledore
No, Monero will still exist. CEX delisting was a blessing.
Monero would already be dead by now if bitcoin wasn't the focus, a central bank can easily nuke monero back to the Genesis block.
Yea, Monero is being delisted from every major exchange because it is...*checks notes*... out of focus
Yeah it's totally not because the overhead is greater than the profits...
Your argument would make perfect sense...if they also removed all other crypto they have with much smaller profits, volume, and mcaps than Monero
But they didn't did they
They did indeed, it's routine. Very few coins listed on any large exchange have their own chain, the ones that do have far greater trading volumes than Monero.
But I will grant you the fact that regulatory risk/compliance is also overhead, and that's very high with Monero.
Yes, regulatory risk goes hand in hand with things that are harder for nation states to control and gives individuals more freedom (permissionless, private, anonymous, untraceable transaction are on the far end of that spectrum). You touch on this in your videos so I'm not sure why you're so incredulous about that when it comes to Monero.
https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Other-Means-Principle
https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Value-Proposition
Proof? Each Monero release comes with a blockchain checkpoint that if I understand correctly locks the chain in that state forever and the only damage that can be done only extends back to that most recent checkpoint. If i understand correctly all blocks before 3 million are set in stone.
If you think you can use checkpoints, you have failed to understand the problem that proof of work solves.
Right, proof of work obviously says that the chain with the most amount of computing power behind it is the valid chain. I understand that. But I don't see how you're going to overcome 3 million blocks worth of proofs and defeat the checkpoint system.
*Why* do we use proof of work to determine which set of ordered transactions is valid, instead of just trusting other participants (and their checkpoints)?
According to the 20,000 Monero nodes that exist, our current chain is the correct chain with the checkpoints and proofs. An adversary would have to redo the entire chain and convince the 20,000 legitimate nodes that their chain is the correct one in order to overcome
Haven't answered the question.
I was actually very interested in your question, so I asked it somewhere else and got an answer. The block hashes are hard-coded into the software at each checkpoint, which means that this software will reject any block hashes that do not match. So, not only would you have to do the Proof of work, but you would also have to convince a majority of node operators to switch to your fork of the software.
So the checkpoint overrides the proof of work consensus?
for anything before, yes apparently. for anything after, no.
It's a form of proof of stake, in this case it's basically just a proof of developer reputation. It takes one line of code to add a checkpoint to bitcoin, there's a reason why we rely on proof of energy instead.
Developers override proof of work consensus.
This is necessary because Monero doesn't have a security budget large enough to defend against even a very small state actor.
This is also one of the reasons why the developers keep changing the hash algorithm.
Monero is completely dependent on trusting the core developers every step of the way.
Monero proponents errornously believe it is an alternative to bitcoin because they have failed to understand the Bitcoin security model and what problem it solves:
💯
It's a voluntary network. That's what is important. Anyone is free to join or leave at any moment. Anyone is free to swap for another crypto or fork if they don't agree and the devs cant do a damn thing to stop them. That's exactly how Monero was created to begin with. Users decided they didn't like how previous devs were doing things and left them for Monero.
Bitcoin was also at one time vulnerable to a very small state actor. Speaking of security budgets, Bitcoins is rapidly shrinking.
The only way it is sustainable is if Bitcoin price continues climbing indefinitely (what a thing to base security on), and/or transaction fees make up for it. If adoption continues and transaction fees climb with it this will price out the vast majority of the world from using Bitcoin in any sovereign manner.
ASICs also have many flaws...
-ASICs can't match the ubiquity and accessibility of CPU mining which is more conducive to decentralization. No large capital investment required.
-Ostensibly harder to attack, but if successful, much harder to deploy new ASICs to fight back since they're in such short supply
-Large concentrated mining farms are easy to co-opt and regulate for governments.
-Heat, noise, and energy draw make ASIC mining very obvious
-Two major manufacturers chokepoint
-Everyone knows what you're doing with that ASIC miner you bought
-Centralized mining pools. StratumV2 helps but isn't sufficient. Large pool operators control payout.
-Over half the total hashpower now requires KYC.
-Targeted mining censorship possible.
Bitcoiners act as if they aren't centralized in any regard, when they are in several ways, including defacto relying on core developers. Bitcoin Core is 99%+ of your node software. Even BCH is more decentralized in that regard.
Monero is not an "alternative to Bitcoin. It's not even a fork of Bitcoin. It is doing something completely different. Maybe you should start thinking of each network having unique advantages of it's own rather than this very narrow maxi mentality
"Police raid a concealed #Bitcoin mining operation, initially mistaking it for an illegal marijuana farm due to the heat signature"
https://twitter.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1721359382745874489
https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html
Does this mean that if an attack occurs just before a checkpoint It gets locked in forever?
it would appear so, but no attack has hurt monero
No, the developers can roll back a checkpoint.
Well, if that's the state of the chain, at the time, I don't see how they can avoid putting it in, because if they roll it back, they have to roll back the chain and break the trust of their users in their system. Can you ever imagine if, like, Bitcoin did this and said, oh, the last 3000 blocks are invalid. Yeah, I can't either.
It's all part of the plan. We are entering phase 2.
Dude this is fantastic that is for sharing, you've enlightened me a little and given me a perspective I hadn't considered.
I think bitcoin has already lost. #Monero is the way forward.
What can we do, really?
Build better tools, fund more development, fund legal defenses, support anon devs, create more private services at smaller scale rather than public businesses, refocus tooling around service provision with as little friction as possible, and about a thousand other things.
The question is less “what can we do” and more “what can’t we do”? We have literally more tools at our disposal than we have ever had in the history of this entire battle. 🤷🏻♂️
I thought we had been doing this since always, no? Your words sound good but they don't invoke any need for change of any kind.
We have been funding developers and creating services that can be deployed at smaller scale for a while. For some reason the bigger and more centralized projects get more usage, so people gravitate towards these.
What reason do you have to believe that anything will change now?
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, in which case I'll ask you to give a concrete example.
I don’t mean to say we haven’t been doing this, but that giving up after the incredible progress we’ve had because a couple of things happened makes no sense. It’s a rally cry for getting people who have been sitting on the sidelines to get off their ass.
That’s a LOT of people who care about #Bitcoin but have done essentially nothing more than post on Twitter about how much they like it while expecting everyone else to do the work. It’s a call to get those people to step up and do something and drop their defeatist attitude. We have an enormous subset of tools and many aren’t utilizing them or learning what they need to learn because it’s been a *really* easy road so far.
There is and will always be a tendency to centralize, it’s literally the axiomatic nature of building things. This is just something that needs to be recognized and accepted, that this is the case and that when the next wave of centralization comes, our job is to find the elements that need to be created in a decentralized version in order to get across the next wave.
I can’t think of any time in history or any environment in which we’ve been able to respond to and solve those centralization problems as deeply and as quickly as we are right now.
Yet I still see people acting like all hope is lost. All I can think is how absurd (and also useless) that viewpoint is. 🤷🏻♂️
Don't you see the only real way to win is through mass adoption and perfect privacy on a Zcash drivechain?
No, there are tons of different concerns, aspects to protect, and also ways to achieve the things we want. There isn't a monolithic solution, and a zcash drivechain is actually a narrowly useful tool that comes with its own trade offs.
Sure, something like a zcash drivechain would likely aid (depending on where those trade offs concentrate), specifically in the case for privacy, but it obviously wouldn't be a total or perfect solution and is dependent on many other elements.
