Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Large-blocks and censorship

From: Daniel Lidstrom <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2013 14:31:10 -0700

My views on censorship resistance in the face of scaling:

1) I expect if I'm not careful about preserving my privacy with the way I
use Bitcoin, then I will always run the risk of being censored by miners.
This means connecting to the network anonymously, not reusing addresses,
and perhaps even mixing my coins.  The onus is on me here to avoid
censorship, but I'm optimistic that this privacy preservation can be made
pretty automatic.

2) I expect anonymity systems to scale to accommodate Bitcoin full nodes,
not Bitcoin to stay small to avoid putting pressure on anonymity systems to
scale.

3) If 2 is too tall an order, then mining in a pool is always an option.
There should always be some countries in the world free enough to allow
mining pools to operate, and miners in countries that ban Bitcoin can
simply connect to these anonymously.  If not, then Bitcoin is toast anyway,
is it not?  If these miners are really interested in avoiding censoring
transactions, then they will do their due diligence and choose a pool that
doesn't do this.  But even if they don't, censorship can be personally
avoided by following 1.

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Mike Hearn <[email-masked]> wrote:

> As an aside, there's a paper coming out in perhaps a few months that
> describes a new way to provide Chaum-style privacy integrated with
> Bitcoin, but without the use of blinding and without any need for
> banks. It's quite smart, I was reviewing the paper this week.
> Unfortunately the technique is too slow and too complicated to
> actually integrate, but you'd probably get a kick out of it. It's
> based on zero knowledge proofs. You can talk to Ian Miers if you like,
> perhaps he'll send you a copy for review.
>
> Back on topic.
>
> This idea is not new. I proposed the idea of regulating miners to
> freeze certain outputs two years ago:
>
>    https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=printpage;topic=5979.0
>
> I concluded that it was not a real risk because both mining and
> transactions can be done anonymously.
>
> Your argument rests on the assumption that you can't mine large blocks
> anonymously because Tor doesn't scale. Even if we go along with the
> idea that Tor is the only way to escape regulation (it's not), you
> should maybe take up its inability to move data sufficiently fast with
> the developers. Given that they routinely push two gigabits/second
> today, with an entirely volunteer run network, I think they'll be
> surprised to learn that their project is doomed to never be usable by
> miners.
>
>
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