[shuckles]

> It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. Nobody can stop it.

About as rare as email spam? Or SEO content farms? There's a lot of phenomenon that are hard to control in a distributed network; Internet Protocol was designed for exactly this.

[jMyles]

> About as rare as email spam?

This strikes me as a defective comparison: are there people who are trying to receive email spam, but are unable to do so due to international borders?

The health of the internet in resisting censorship is well-documented, as you point out - and it has ramifications both desirable and otherwise. The innovation of blockchain tech is that it adds a mechanism for transmitting value in this censorship-resistant environment.

[shuckles]

People circumvent currency controls and financial regulation over the internet with gift cards, airline miles, WoW gold farms, and more. Bitcoin's notable quality is not technology; it's the social psychology which drew enough speculation that it covered for laundering black market financial transactions at unprecedented scale. Some of that illegal volume might be sympathetic oppressed citizens; my guess is the vast majority is old fashioned crime and terrorism.

Notably, there is nothing technically notable about Bitcoin's censorship resistance. It's no more resistant than the internet itself. What's notable is the scale and efficiency at which it attracts clean money to wash dirty money, and none of that is about Proof of Work or Merkle DAGs.

The argument I was responding to falls apart when you notice that The Pirate Bay, Libgen, and Scihub are all extremely resilient despite lacking all the Game Theory gobbledygook which BTC adds.

[nailer]

Oddly enough if email had adopted proof of work (spam was the original incentive for PoW, originally called ‘hashcash’) spam would be less of a problem

[tromp]

The notion of PoW predates hashcash. Hashcash is just the simplest PoW algorithm. There are PoW that work entirely differently from Hashcash, such as finding fixed length cycles in random bipartite graphs.