Ask HN: Could ISPs Stop Bitcoin?

[threeaccents]

So I love Bitcoin and what it stands for; unfortunately, I don't believe it will be humanities savior as some of us hope. I was having a discussion with a buddy of mine about Bitcoin of why it could or could not succeed. One his major arguing points was that governments couldn't do anything about it since its a decentralized service. In my opinion governments could still shut it down if they truly wanted to. Couldn't governments just fingerprint all the Bitcoin nodes and just go to ISPs and tell them to block any traffic coming from such IPs. So even though they can't tell Bitcoin itself to stop they could stop underlying technologies Bitcoin uses. I just want to fact check my self to see if that is something that could actually happen and I'm not just spilling none-sense.

[ghosts_]

ISP's could easily stop Bitcoin, I don't really think anyone claims they can't? Bitcoin isn't mean to be an impossible to kill hydra of economic power, but a decentralized, peer-to-peer, trustworthy ledger of transactions.

ISP's could block the common ports Bitcoin uses (but that would likely break a lot of other applications), they could potentially blacklist certain IP's, but because of the decentralized nature of Bitcoin this would likely only affect discovery in a minimal manner. ISP's could also inspect packets to determine if the traffic is Bitcoin related, but potentially something like TOR could prevent that inspection, if enough ISP's inspect & block Bitcoin TOR would likely not be of help (as it simply protects the transit of data, not the entry/exit).

BGP is also a pretty serious vector for a bad actor ISP to utilize, check out the following article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/evil_isps_could_dis...

Definitely a lot of ways BTC could be affected. Governments could also outright ban it and that would destroy the network as it would lose a huge amount of value as a serious asset.

[ghosts_]

Adding to this - ISPs likely would never try any of the above, simply because it would hurt their public perception, isn't worth the time, and is potentially illegal depending on the area.

[buboard]

in which countries?

[octosphere]

> So even though they can't tell Bitcoin itself to stop they could stop underlying technologies Bitcoin uses.

It's not as simple as that. Due to things like carrier grade NAT, thousands if not millions of users and services use the same IPV4 address, so shutting down a specific IP would be equivalent to an authoritarian dictator censoring innocent users.

[PaulHoule]

Practically not. ISPs would have banned BitTorrent if they could but the best they can do is usage based billing.

[sp527]

You're thinking too hard. They'll never have to use the ISPs to stop Bitcoin. It will stop itself. It arguably already has. Its central economic argument, that people want or need a currency backed entirely by sentiment, is inherently flawed. Being backed by a government (and, in fact, at all) is a currency feature, not a bug.

[buboard]

yeah they could and they will if people start using it in the rogue. But the wallets will (hopefully) be intact even if inaccessible. people will find workarounds like proxies ,other types of connections etc.

[whb07]

Couldn't the government and ISPs stop file sharing?

[babygoat]

What does bitcoin stand for?