[tablespoon]

> So prosecutors really are powerless. I think. Am I wrong?

Yes, you're wrong.

> Sure you could shut down some nodes, but not all of them. And even then new nodes would pop up vastly more quickly than you can kill them.

Your error is here. If prosecutors actually decide to start shutting down nodes because of CP and make successful prosecutions, it will deter people from running new nodes in that jurisdiction. If hosting a copy of the Etherium blockchain had a high chance of landing you in jail for CP possession, would you start up a new node to replace one that was shut down? Instead of "new nodes ... pop[ping] up vastly more quickly than you can kill them," most operators would get scared and quickly shut down their nodes and wipe their HDs, and the rest would get prosecuted. Maybe you'd have a few stragglers hiding out on Tor, but at that point the network is unusable for any legitimate use.

Don't believe me? There's even been a recent example of something like that. China banned Bitcoin mining, and the miners there shut down or GTFO of China:

https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/china-bitcoin-mining-ban-cryp...

> Available data shows that crypto mining no longer exists in China and that China's crypto mining ban completely upended the global Bitcoin mining industry. China went from controlling up to two-thirds of all Bitcoin mining in the world in April to not contributing to the industry at all as of July 2021, according to data compiled by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the vast majority of Chinese Bitcoin miners relocated their operations to places like Kazakhstan, the U.S., and Canada or simply sold off their equipment at discounted prices and left the industry.

[soco]

And I really hope that there wouldn't be that many with such a vested interest in CP to fight against those shutdowns.

[notch656a]

Bitcoin survival isn't predicated on mass mining farms of the sort that are easily shutdown in china and elsewhere. Running nodes yields more revenue the higher proportion of the hash rate you have. Making it illegal just makes it that much more profitable to run nodes in difficult to shut down ways, such as a cell phone powered by a solar array running tor and a miner.

The market will provide.

[tablespoon]

You're missing the point. It's not about Bitcoin mining per se, it's about people's willingness to run illegal services.

> The market will provide.

Nope, sorry. The market doesn't guarantee whatever random distributed thing you like will be resilient.

[notch656a]

>it's about people's willingness to run illegal services.

Which looks to be quite high.

>Nope, sorry. The market doesn't guarantee whatever random distributed thing you like will be resilient.

While I'm sure 'nope, sorry' felt gratifying for you to type, the market cares very little about your individual opinion. Even illegal drugs, tangible items that a drug dog might sniff out, can't be choked off.

>whatever random distributed thing you like

The 'whatever random distributed thing I like' is something with a market cap of 2.21 Trillion dollars, which is like 1/10th the GDP of the united states. You make it sound like it's my random pet individual project.

[tablespoon]

> While I'm sure 'nope, sorry' felt gratifying for you to type, the market cares very little about your individual opinion. Even illegal drugs, tangible items that a drug dog might sniff out, can't be choked off.

Lol. Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies aren't illegal drugs, and thinking they would be as resilient as them is missing many important differences. For one, networks are far easier to surveil than physical spaces. For another, about the only thing cryptocurrencies are actually good for is speculation, so there'd be few incentives to keep them going in the face of severe penalties. That quite unlike drugs, which get you high and in some cases can get you addicted, so there's some natural demand.

> The 'whatever random distributed thing I like' is something with a market cap of 2.21 Trillion dollars, which is like 1/10th the GDP of the united states. You make it sound like it's my random pet individual project.

Speculators driving up the price is not proof of resilience. Bitcoin is a technology in search of a real problem to solve, not an actual good solution to anything.

[notch656a]

Bitcoin/crypto as you say are not illegal drugs. There's no inherent moral outrage like there would be for murder/rape/theft/selling crack to an addict slowly poisoning himself and visibly robbing his neighbors. Convincing the populace to wage the kind of war-on-drugs style attack that would be necessary to snuff it out will be even more difficult to sell to populace than it was to sell the need to imprison drug dealers.

All I can say about stopping crypto-currency, is good luck. The Crypto Stasi or whatever oppressive mechanism that would be needed to actually snuff it out will have to shoot me in the head to make me stop. I'd happily keep trading and mining crypto from cellphone smuggled up someone's ass into the prison or whatever else is needed to keep the system going.

[tablespoon]

> All I can say about stopping crypto-currency, is good luck. The Crypto Stasi or whatever oppressive mechanism that would be needed to actually snuff it out will have to shoot me in the head to make me stop. I'd happily keep trading and mining crypto from cellphone smuggled up someone's ass into the prison or whatever else is needed to keep the system going.

What an utterly bizarre attitude.

Also, you do realize if what you describe is what it takes to keep cryptocurrency going; it would be actually, really dead-dead, despite you and a few hold outs trading it from prison ass-phones forever and keeping the technical infrastructure barely alive? To put it in crypto-terms: at that point Bitcoin will be a Shitcoin.

[acdha]

> Making it illegal just makes it that much more profitable to run nodes in difficult to shut down ways, such as a cell phone powered by a solar array running tor and a miner. … The market will provide.

This is wishful thinking: Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it. If it becomes risky, your options for converting Bitcoin into local currency will shrink correspondingly. Similarly, if you're in a climate where you need to worry about this I would not want to use a cellular node which is so trivially linked to your account and physical location.

[notch656a]

>Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it.

A little under a trillion for BTC alone, all in.

>If it becomes risky, your options for converting Bitcoin into local currency will shrink correspondingly.

So it will basically shrink to fit black market demand. Bad for speculators, good for crims.

>Similarly, if you're in a climate where you need to worry about this I would not want to use a cellular node which is so trivially linked to your account and physical location.

Then someone smarter than me wins the mining rewards.

[acdha]

> >Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it.

> A little under a trillion for BTC alone, all in.

That’s not what we’re talking about, but it shows where your misunderstanding lies. The current value of a Bitcoin is what you can sell it for — there’s no intrinsic value and while Bitcoin is a fiat currency it’s much weaker than anything else because there isn’t any sort of guaranteed demand created by things like the need to pay taxes or handle government contracts. If 1 BTC is $10,000 today, it could be $5,000 or $50,000 tomorrow based solely on how much someone is willing to give you at that time. That’s why it’s so volatile historically and one of two reasons why it’s not widely used other than for speculation — no business wants unpredictable spikes in the difference between what they paid for their inputs and what they receive from their customers.

This is important to understand because what you’re doing is tossing out a big number by multiplying all of the coins by the recent hard currency exchange rate. That’s not accurate, however, unless you know that there are buyers collectively sitting on $1T USD willing to buy all of those Bitcoins. If I buy one Bitcoin for $1M that does not mean that the value of everyone else’s Bitcoins suddenly changed because nobody else is crazy enough to overpay by that much. Similarly, if I think the bubble is popping and start selling, I may not find a buyer if many people decide to wait and see — and since very few people need Bitcoin, there isn’t any pressure to push them off of the fence like there is with a fiat currency backed by a sovereign state.

> So it will basically shrink to fit black market demand. Bad for speculators, good for crims.

Not good for them if they can’t convert into the things they want to buy, and it’s especially risky to leave a signed transaction log for the police when there’s little legal traffic to hide in.

[notch656a]

So short bitcoin, if you think it's worth nothing. Good luck, acdha. We're both saying it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it, I'm just acknowledging that happens to be quite a lot.

>but it shows where your misunderstanding lies

I understand market cap is different than the current volume buyers will buy at this moment. You've basically just provided an essay on what market cap is. There's no misunderstanding. Is this supposed to disprove the gigantic valuation assigned to bitcoin?

>Not good for them if they can’t convert into the things they want to buy, and it’s especially risky to leave a signed transaction log for the police when there’s little legal traffic to hide in.

This is why most black markets now use Monero or similar privacy coins. If a currency will buy drugs, then it will always be able to buy money since drugs are worth money.

[dataangel]

You don’t need nodes hosted in your jurisdiction to use the network though, so preventing running nodes in one jurisdiction accomplishes very little.

[kragen]

Funny thing is, I've done Bitcoin transactions since then, and the transaction fees and confirmation times (which are the fees charged by and service provided by the miners) were pretty normal. So the Bitcoin network seems to have totally avoided the "unusable for any legitimate use" fate you predict, even though half the hashrate went offline over the course of a few weeks.