Recently, US Treasury Department has put sanctions[1] on Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash, taken down their website[2], added all associated with the mixer addresses to the OFAC SDN list, and also, which is more important for this topic, compelled Microsoft to suspend Tornado Cash's Github account[3], all repositories and accounts of code maintainers[4]. It is important to emphasize that Tornado cash is not a company but a smart contract that no particular person controls; it is essentially as censorship-resistant and decentralized as the underlying blockchain upon which it is built. In other words, it cannot be "banned" easily.
So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin? What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos? What if they ban all contributors, maintainers, and lead developers? Is there a place where the bitcoin codebase can migrate to? Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence? Is it possible to build a decentralized and distributed code hosting platform that no one can censor or shut off?
[1]
https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-tools-places-sweeping-restrictions-on-all-americans/[2]
https://web.archive.org/web/20220808144431/https://tornado.cash/[3]
https://github.com/tornadocash[4]
https://nitter.net/semenov_roman_/status/1556717890308653059Well, git works in a decentralized manner. This is independent of github, which is just a website.
It's not like, say, subversion (SVN) where you have a server with all the story of the code and you just get a part of it locally. With git, every person that has cloned the source code has a full copy of the entire history of the source code. By the way, Bitcoin was first released via SVN in SourceForge. Times have changed, and now the main Bitcoin client is developed with git on github.
The important thing is that every developer has a full copy of the source code, so it would be simple to just port it to another website that is not github, like gitlab, or literally you could host it in any custom server you want. There's nothing magical about github, it's just very popular.