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171 sats \ 2 replies \ @Artilektt 26 Nov \ parent \ on: The part of Bitcoin you *have* to trust bitcoin
I mean...there is kind of some real evidence right, as Satoshi pointed out. They've basically given up on doing anything about torrenting and despite many attacks the Pirate Bay remains active to this day. Every once in awhile some big outfit gets busted but it doesn't affect anything.
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169 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 26 Nov
TOR and Pirate Bay have a track record of not being shut down, but it is also possible that states have never really perceived them as worth shutting down. I realize that I can make this argument about anything, so it's kinda a cheap shot, but our evidence that a p2p network can resist state control has never really been tested, as far as I can tell.
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365 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 27 Nov
Tor and Pirate Bay have a track record of not being shut down
Yesterday I thought "that's correct", but I slept on it and now I think "that's incorrect."
Why: Both TPB1 and Tor have in the past been shut down partially, and they fight back. Bitcoin wasn't attacked like that fully, and the surefire way to get around this under oppressive regimes is use a VPN - or lift off Tor's work.
it is also possible that states have never really perceived them as worth shutting down.
They have definitely been targeted:
Tor:
TPB:
Bittorrent generic:
  • US & EU, 2007-2008 - no longer in place, largely killed by net neutrality laws in EU but potentially to be activated again in the US due to y'alls newfound love for oppression (#847717).
our evidence that a p2p network can resist state control has never really been tested, as far as I can tell.
It has been tested on tor AND bittorrent and with active countermeasures, it can be beaten. It's a cat and mouse game, but you want to be the mouse, not the cat. The same category of methods an orditard would use to get around fIlTeRs are available to us all to get around state attacks.
If we want to win, we will win. It could be costly though.

Footnotes

  1. TPB is a centralized database of torrent files / magnet links, basically a centralized entrypoint. It's a service, like a single instance among Bitcoin's DNS seeds. The best thing about TPB is that if it ultimately gets censored and its operators jailed, someone else can just start "The Pirate Cove" and run their own discovery service; it's fully replaceable. So apples-to-apples would be comparing bittorrent to Bitcoin, not TPB. As a protocol, Bitcoin has more centralization pressure than bittorrent, because you need to sync up with a global state, whereas torrents can be ran by anyone, anywhere, no initial peers required. You can paste your torrent on pastebin and get leechers. This is also why using Bitcoin as a file sharing system is kind of retarded as there are multiple superior protocols for this. ↩
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