Quote from: Richy_T on Today at 04:17:45 AM

Now, mesh networks are definitely worthwhile. I was kinda hoping that Bitcoin would drive their development. The internet is far too vulnerable if the feds should decide to get nasty.

I have no illusions about Bitcoin’s ability to resist a full-scale, no-compromise absolute ban. (Those few of us who would successfully evade the ban would be economically marginal, and therefore unimportant.) I do think that popularizing ways to increase robustness against censorship deters such scenarios from ever happening, by raising the cost of enforcement. It is, in effect, a perfectly legal way to load in advance a “poison pill” for potential adverse legislation.

By a very rough analogy, compare how American 2A activists buy more guns and ammo every time restrictions on guns are increased. By another analogy, compare also how PGP was created deliberately to monkey-wrench then-Senator Joe Biden’s proposed ban of unrestricted strong cryptography. Accomplished facts and high costs of enforcement are some of the most powerful arguments in the world!

I believe that in the abstract, it is the same reason why decentralized Bitcoin survived its infancy, even though USG, et al. shut down previous centralized attempts at independent monetary systems. If the cost of a ban is too high, then they attempt subterfuge to corrupt it (why did CIA Gavin endorse Faketoshi!? let’s not mention Mike Hearn), and/or try to figure out a way to co-opt it for Wall Street financiers.

Quote from: Richy_T on Today at 04:17:45 AM

There are some improvements that could be made to the networking layer (and, indeed, I believe that the networking, along with the wallet, should not be part of "core" Bitcoin) that could get around some of the basic blocking actions but it really needs its own physical layer option too.

See below link for happiness—and generally, since Bitcoin has no “dev tax” or other self-funding mechanism, please feel free to help support Core’s efforts to improve Bitcoin.

Quote from: death_wish on June 01, 2022, 07:02:47 PM

...although the worst problems were fixed by Segwit and some other softfork cleanups, it is still ongoing to some degree. IMO, one of Satoshi’s worst decisions was to write the wallet and P2P network node as one monolithic unit, with no security separation. That’s a design flaw in the reference implementation. Core has been trying for years to separate these functions...

The libbitcoinkernel Project (bitcoin/bitcoin#24303) is at the top of my own wishlist. I salute Carl Dong for his elegant, practical, safe and clean approach. It is progressing beautifully; it will probably take a long time to ship. When it’s done, it will open a whole new world of Bitcoin possibilities—this is a Core cleanup, but it is useful far beyond Core; as a developer, I am eager to use this for other projects. It is one of those things that mere speculators neither know, nor understand, nor care about—no really, this is the kind of effort and talent that makes your Bitcoin valuable!