JSZZHlmumeUE's comments

That's certainly an interesting perspective but it makes certain assumptions about what bitcoin will be used for that I'm not sure I agree with.

Governments printing ASICs to spam the network... That's the most expensive way to attack Bitcoin.

Not really, somebody estimated that getting ASICs to control 51% of the network would cost only a few hundred million dollars, which isn't much at all from a governmental point of view.

Also, as far semiconductor manufacturing goes - pretty much all of it is the non-recurring engineering cost of designing the IC. The actual cost of printing it on Si is a very small fraction for large volume chips.

Governments would love to extract that BTC for their spendings instead of killing it.

Governments than can print fiat currency don't really have a problem financing their spending. They do have a problem with currencies that undermine fiat currencies.

Let's work this out though. What do we know about the NSA programs?

1. They collect metadata on packets originating from computers connected to pretty much all the US ISPs and many other countries' ISPs.

2. The list of Tor entry and exit nodes is public and you can bet your ass the NSA knows what this list is at all points in their logging history.

3. Most websites are based in the US, and so it's highly likely that the paths from the Tor exit nodes to these websites have some intermediate point on which traffic is logged by the NSA.

4. The NSA has access to a large training dataset of how traffic entering and leaving the Tor network looks because a whole bunch of federal authorities use Tor.

Given 1-4, I think it's likely trivial for the NSA to train a learning algorithm that will correlate packets leaving a Tor exit node with those entering an entry node.

They probably can't do this all the time because it is more expensive than just a database lookup like in the unencrypted case, but it seems me to that if they had the motivation to get you, it wouldn't be too hard for them.

These centers actually exist even today. I personally know places where you can buy dollars using the local currency for something like a 10% discount on the market rate. They are obviously very shady and aren't used by anyone close to being respectable. If you use them and are big enough to matter, expect to be screwed over by law enforcement pretty much the instant they feel like getting you.

governments will be much more limited in power when they can't print their money at will

I believe printing money is actually a good thing. But let's not get into an economics argument here.

And governments can easily take over the bitcoin network tomorrow if they wanted to, simply because the ability of Intel, IBM, AMD/GF, NVIDIA and the big semiconductor manufacturers to build really efficient mining ASICs vastly outstrips that of everyone else. And companies like Intel have nothing to lose and everything to gain by keeping the US government happy if they requests come in from the top.

Again the analogy with cash is relevant. There is really very little technically difficult about printing counterfeit cash. I mean there's not even cryptography involved - it's just security by obscurity! The reason people don't do it is because governments clamp down on this activity very hard through law-enforcement mechanisms. Similarly, if the governments thought bitcoin was important enough to regulate, they'd be able to do it in an instant simply they have guns and we don't.

I'd imagine that if Bitcon becomes prevalent, governments would ask you to "voluntarily" declare your "salary" wallet. And then if they spotted any sort of suspicious laundering-like activity happening from that wallet, they would very quickly obtain warrants and show up at your door asking for an explanation.

I believe a global passive adversary can easily use timing attacks to deanonymize tor.

I'm very happy with Gmail and it's way better than all the other e-mail services that various entities force me to use, but the point I was making is that I could move out of Gmail with all my data if I wanted to.

> so there is no way you can ever take it anywhere else

The standard solution is to setup a google apps on your domain.

without deleting my entire G+ account and profile

I don't use G+/FB but even if I did, I have a hard time understanding this mentality. I wouldn't think twice about deleting any of social media profiles and even in places like HN where it's not possible to delete profiles, I just throwaway old profiles and start from scratch. Maybe I'm just paranoid but the last thing I want are my random musings being psychoanalyzed by nutters on the internet.

And as far as Gmail goes, you should be backing it up offline so that you can take your data and leave any time you want. This literally takes only 3 minutes to setup if you already use Thunderbird.

I suggest you reflect on this. It seems to me that you've convinced yourself that you are good at certain things but there isn't really any evidence supporting your beliefs.

When I was younger, I actually used to think like you - that perf evaluation is easy and a good engineer (e.g. me) would be able to evaluate others easily. Over time, I've realized this is an incredibly complex and nuanced issue because everyone's strengths and weaknesses are so very multifaceted. I am more or less convinced that people who think they have all the right answers simply have a lot of blindspots.

And coming back to trucks, we do require trucks to be registered, drivers to have identification that can be checked by police officers and the ability for border police to examine your cargo when you cross an international border.

IMHO it's queries like that make google so much better than the rest.