Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 26, 2014, 04:38:14 PM

Quote from: coinrevo on January 25, 2014, 08:26:37 PM

Here is a scenario. In a small country with a brutal dictator inflation is rampant. People switch to cryptocurrencies to avoid confiscation of their wealth.

I must admit, I don't worry too much about this scenario because I don't see any way for Bitcoin to have any real impact in a country where using it is illegal.

Man, I couldn't dis-agree more. To my way of thinking Bitcoin won't have any real impact in a country where using it is LEGAL. This because there are plenty of solutions for the 'tards-n-trinkets' sphere (cash, visa, paypal, gold, etc) and they work fine. Who needs yet one more? And Bitcoin with its half-baked stabs at privacy, p2p function, security paradigmn, etc, starts out with a disadvantage to competition operating in the 'fat tail' region of the exchange economy.

Bitcoin might be a good way to obtain high quality beacon data to target users for marketing campaigns (or worse), but that only benefits a small sub-set of society. And nobody who I personally give a shit about (any more...)

Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 26, 2014, 04:38:14 PM

There are about a million ways a government can round up Bitcoin users beyond strange mathematical games - most obviously, find anyone advertising a price in Bitcoins and punish them. For people to use Bitcoin they have to be able to spend it, and to be able to spend it you need to find merchants willing to accept it, and for a merchant to accept it requires advertising that fact.

If you think brute forcing salted passport hashes is the easiest way to crack down on Bitcoin, then that implies you believe the government has no ability to just go into the marketplace and use undercover agents to ask around. Seems unlikely. Also remember you could just not run nodes in that country, or run them but without providing passport proofs (you could provide a sacrifice proof instead, or no anti-sybil data at all).

All very valid and good points. For that reason it is also the area that Bitcoin (or some project) should be working on. It's not like totalitarian regimes are especially rare or impact only a small group of unfortunates today. Nor is it like totalitarian regimes are not a legitimate threat for a larger group of people tomorrow.

A reliable and transferable value solution is very possible (as evidenced by Bitcoin's performance up till now) and I strongly disagree that it could not be useful to individuals and groups working under totalitarian regimes where it would, of course, be 'illegal'. I use 'useful', and your 'have a real impact' interchangeably..

Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 26, 2014, 04:38:14 PM

Also - maybe this isn't obvious, but I write my talks to be interesting, not as a cast-iron manifesto of things that are guaranteed to happen. Using zk-SNARKS to prove ownership of a passport for anti-sybil purposes is an interesting idea, but that doesn't mean it'll actually ever be implemented. We can't even prototype it today!

FYI I agree that Satoshi was probably not a hard core crypto anarchist. He started to back away from the project around the time people were suggesting WikiLeaks should accept donations with it (what he called "kicking the hornets nest"). I doubt he would have been happy about the Silk Road, which opened just two months after he stopped posting publicly.

In my brief looking, it seemed to me that 'Satoshi' was amazingly mum on almost any political issues. I remember running across the text you reference. It could easily be explained by his understanding of the state of the project at that time and the risks to it without inferring anything one way or another about his politics. I'll defer to your judgement on the rest of his attitudes because you seem to be one of the people who had the most contact with him.

I'll note that I myself became aware and interested in Bitcoin as a direct result of the Wikileaks thing, and it's a good bet that a lot of other people from a lot of other walks of life and affiliations did as well. Surely 'Satoshi' would have recognized this and contemplated it's ramifications.