Quote from: bpd on September 16, 2013, 02:49:10 AM

Quote from: NewLiberty on September 15, 2013, 05:09:22 PM

Not all regions see competitive business advantage as a sufficient incentive to permit transaction freedom. Some may not be convinced by the merits of Bitcoin even with a complete understanding of it and the technology. If some near-totalitarian state were to decree Bitcoin outlawed, and assign capital punishment to users transacting in its jurisdiction unless using a government sanctioned escrow for the private keys of all its citizens, (which law, were it to exist, might even be enforceable to some degree).

Faced with such, how would you as a Bitcoin Foundation board member address this?
Citizens there may not be able to send TBF member fees nor get any representation in TBF without foreign help, would you advocate such help through the Foundation and how?

I'm insufficiently vain to imagine that any of the Board hopefuls will read this or answer it, but had to put it out there for the rest of us to contemplate because I am old enough to remember when "munitions grade" PGP was illegal to export from the USA.

Ben Davenport here (I'm a candidate).

I think the capital punishment scenario is probably a little far out there, so I won't address it, but the outlawing of making Bitcoin transactions in a jurisdiction is certainly a realistic possibility. The appropriate response from TBF depends a lot on the specifics here (I doubt we'd be able to do much if we're talking about North Korea, for instance). At minimum, I would certainly do anything reasonable to prevent loss of representation of BF members from that jurisdiction, such as suspending membership dues, accepting alternate payment forms, etc.

Following that, I think there are a number of possible approaches, depending on the jurisdiction and the particular law. My bias would be towards finding or constructing a test case with ideal attributes that allows us the best chance of overturning such a law, likely in conjunction with a grass roots campaign to sway public opinion.

It's interesting that you bring up the PGP crypto wars, because I think some similar tactics could apply. Ultimately, PGP was exported by printing it in book form, protected by freedom of speech/press, and OCR'd back into machine-readable form in Europe. And similarly, there were T-shirts made which implemented RSA in a few lines of Perl, with the statement "This shirt is a munition." Because making a bitcoin transaction simply consists of making a public utterance, i.e. speech, I think similar tactics could be used. For instance: build a tool which translates a bitcoin transaction into English or other natural language, and posts it to a public internet forum, where another tool scans and translates back to binary form and relays to the bitcoin network.

Ben,

thanx for taking a shot at a difficult question. it say alot and there are good ideas in there.

good job the other nite too despite the voice handicap. of the 3 ppl i'd consider for the position (Trace, Joerg, yourself) you would be my dark horse. while the other 2 are more vocal and "flamboyant", you are "just" a good solid candidate from the good 'ol US of A. coding background with a Facebook stamp; how much more boring does it get? Wink

the big plus i see for you though, seriously, is a thoughtful maturity and patience that could bring alot to the table.

best of luck.