https://twitter.com/BrittPettibone/status/1161981659731902464
The #Bitcoin network does not have the capacity to engage in censorship.
— Bitcoin (@Bitcoin) January 15, 2020
No banking blockades. No Operation Chokepoints. No arbitrary freezes or confiscations.
Just you and your free speech money. 😀 https://t.co/2FmdgHbDfy
https://twitter.com/BrittPettibone/status/1217583299440398336
Look at how Iran punishes political dissidents!
— Scott Greer 6’2” IQ 187 (@ScottMGreer) January 15, 2020
Just kidding, this is Austria https://t.co/jUm0sg9xSY
Bitcoin is a permissionless (and trustless) network. Permission is not needed to send or receive. You don’t need to trust someone.
A government could interfere if they gained 51% of the hashrate (mining bitcoins), and then conduct what is called a 51% attack, and to do that I believe they would needed to spend about $800,000 dollars per hour (at the moment) in electricity.
They’d need to do it for a lot longer than an hour though (weeks, months?). Probably until most other miners were certain that they could not ever win (they need to pay for their electricity too, although some big miners are using hydropower). The government could reorganize the blockchain (examples: essentially reverse transactions, refuse to mine certain transactions or ignore transactions from certain address and essentially freeze bitcoins in certain addresses).
Most likely this still wouldn’t stop bitcoin. Mostly likely miners would abandon that chain and start mining the chain at an earlier block (the chain is a chain of blocks, miners can start mining again at an earlier block), the block before the government started reorganizing the chain. (The government would need to then attack this other chain that miners have started mining.) The same thing (minus a government) already happened a long time ago with Ethereum. The attacked chain is now called ‘Ethereum Classic’ (worth about $8 dollars per coin today) and the forked chain is known as ‘Ethereum’ (even though it’s the fork) (and is worth about $160 dollar per coin today).
Aside from the referenced amount of electricity it would cost they’d also first need to acquire the mining hardware itself. ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) hardware, not cheap.
I guess another option for 51% attack would be a quantum computer. I’m not an expert (or anything else aside from maybe a nothing) in the area but from what I read there are no real quantum computers and no one knows how to build one. Even if they did the technology would probably be reproduced by others who would use it to mine bitcoin. Bitcoin started with CPU mining, then GPU mining and now (for some time now) ASIC mining. Who knows what’s next.
As for the Bitcoin Core software itself, implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, it does appear that a government has been interfering, or influencing, those who develop new code for Bitcoin Core. Not directly, but rather through funding from companies (maybe a company called Blockstream). (Remember that Bitcoin is not a company, there’s no payroll or anything else (e.g., no office, no phone number, no CEO)). That being said, it’s not possible to force anyone to upgrade to new versions of Bitcoin Core. Many are running older versions. Anyone can also fork the software (it’s open source) and create their own version of Bitcoin (or an earlier version of Bitcoin and from there, if or when needed, add/remove code for improvements) which would create a new chain that could be mined.
@ InspectorSmith:
GREAT info on BTC! Thanks!
I have been following the below-linked website that concentrates on TECHNICAL ANALYSIS of cryptocurrency price charts:
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTCUSD/
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTCUSD/technicals/ — (one month view)
The TradingView website currently appears to be giving BTC/USD a reasonably bullish price opinion.
Regarding my personal longer term opinion: I REALLY LIKE the current UPWARD BREAKOUT from the downward TREND LINE for BTC/USD which starts at about the end of June 2019 and ends shortly after the start of this year, 2020.
As you may recall, I don’t own any BTC itself, but I have retained for several years a fairly large quantity of the Over-the-Counter Security ‘GBTC’ (Grayscale Bitcoin Trust) which closely follows the price movements of BTC.