Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Can operating a Bitcoin node make you a target?
by
Ayers
on 05/12/2016, 17:07:43 UTC
yes

lets imagine using bitcoin was made illegal, its not. so this is just hypothetical to appease Sir Alpha's thoughts


alot of people think "use proxies". but that only protects the end user from knowing the source user..
ISP's will still know because they are packet sniffing the source user not the destination

a government could via united nations/interpol set up a sudden international tactical strike

this can be done by
https://bitnodes.21.co/
getting all the IP's and finding out which ISP that ip belongs to.
EG in the UK its under 230..in the U.S its under 1500 [nodes]

so imagine tomorrow under 230 homes out of 20 million [UK]households have their internet disconnected
at the same time
in america under 1500 homes out of 100mill [US]households have their internet disconnected
and so on
even things like proxies are useless because the landline has been literally cut off for upto 6000 locations
think its impossible? its not. ISP's have millions of customers and regularly turn the internet off on 10's of thousands of users every week due to breach of contract/non payment of bill.

they would also take bitnodes and other DNS seeding locations offline to further cause drama of new node locations not being able to link up, though smart people will just join an IRC channel and request a list of working ip addresses to manually add node connections [once they sort out their land line disconnection barrier]

as for the network
what would happen is that the countries with no "partnerships" to whatever agency is organising this tactical strike will continue on. and people who are affected would need to either move house or go to court to get their internet ban lifted or change ISP which can take upto 10 days in some cases.

again it wont require an all out "ban the internet" of 1.5billion people. but instead disconnecting the land lines of under 6000 people to cause alot of drama and issues.

the solution is to get more diverse. instead of bitcoin nodes running in just 91 countries it needs to be running in all 200 countries. and also needs to be running via satalite and other non landline/ISP reliant methods

what if the end user and source user have the same owner, that is using another of is pc in a different location or many pc in different part of the world to keep his activity secret? i would you know where he is really located?