stopping-bitcoin

[Author: garyrowe https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89772.msg988857#msg988857]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to stopping Bitcoin. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from country to country due to their own legal systems:

( ) Scammers can easily use it to bilk unsuspecting consumers/merchants
( ) Merchants and other legitimate businesses would be adversely affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against the combined Bitcoin community co-operating to undermine it
( ) It will stop Bitcoin for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with something broken
( ) Users of other payment services will not put up with it
( ) Google/Apple/Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) It requires too much cooperation from miners and/or Bitcoin user base
( ) It requires immediate total cooperation from everyone outside of Bitcoin at once
( ) Many people cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Criminals will use anything that is convenient/presents an opportunity
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting this kind of meddling
( ) Lack of a centrally controlling authority for Bitcoin
( ) Open Bitcoin nodes in foreign countries
( ) Difficulty of searching enormous alphanumeric address space of all Bitcoin addresses
( ) Difficulty of beating the 51% mining power threshold
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept other people's problems as their own
( ) Huge existing software investment in web infrastructure
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than Bitcoin to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Armies of offline, strongly protected Linux boxes
( ) Ad-hoc mesh networks not dependent on telecommunications companies
( ) Off-grid power generation (solar, wind, biomass etc)
( ) Offline or out-of-band Bitcoin transactions (physical coins, private key exchange)
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering or censorship approaches
( ) Extreme efficiency of Bitcoin in comparison to other payment systems
( ) Chargebacks
( ) Inflation or quantitative easing
( ) Difficulty and cost of storing physical assets securely
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme intelligence, charm and good looks of the people who do business with Bitcoin
( ) Honesty on the part of the majority of the Bitcoin community
( ) M of N signatures in Bitcoin (escrow, web of trust etc)
( ) General script capability of Bitcoin
( ) Increasing the number of decimal places beyond the current value
( ) Self-adjusting difficulty value of the Bitcoin block solution
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) TOR
( ) Strong peer-reviewed cryptography
( ) Mathematics
( ) Economics
( ) Physics

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Not everyone will opt-in
( ) Bitcoin protocol considerations should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to conduct business without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Fees should be reasonable and transparent
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Fixed Bitcoin addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government running my currency
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Have you considered an alternative career?