why cant Governments kill Bitcoin..realistically ?
Bitcoin is the only network in the world, that keeps running non-stop with uptime of 100% over the last 15 years , nothing comes close , not big tech, not your favourite bank every other tech platform goes down, but not Bitcoin.
This level of resilience breaks human mind .. how a can piece of software that runs on a bunch of computers never go down ?
why can’t hackers / DDOS / Armies/ governments/ Intelligence agencies etc disrupt a simple software ?
The mighty Indian government that banned 69 chinese apps with a stroke of pen during the Border-clashes remains powerless in disrupting Bitcoin.
The power hungry US govt which prompty brought down e-gold and Liberty reserve in a heartbeat remains powerless in disrupting Bitcoin despite Bitcoin moving million times more money (100s of Billions in a day more than all the money transferred by Liberty reserve in its lifetime).
So the big million / trillion / gazillion dollar question to ask is simple
why are the mighty of mightiest governments so powerless in disrupting / stopping / censoring/manipulating Bitcoin ?
The answer is “Incentives” or lack there-of.
Every government action is made by people and those people are driven by incentives not vague moral or ethical questions.
Incentives are what drive human nature and the decisions of power without strong incentives ( a result of risk vs reward) nothing goes ahead.
Coming to Bitcoin, its technically possible for governments in the world to stop Bitcoin per se, but doing so creates massive blow back and costs in Billions to do it and doesnt give them any immediate benefit.
Shutting down a centralised entity like e-gold or liberty reserve is a simple thursday afternoon job for US govt, send in a bunch of FBI agents and arrest the main server operator and seize those computers , this is the bread and butter of law enforcement which they can do in their sleep.
Shutting down Bitcoin , completely different matter.
brining down the core Bitcoin blockchain costs billions and billions in computing power which no government can positively allocate budgets into realistically speaking without enduring huge political backlash.
The interesting thing about Bitcoin is as more and more people invest in Bitcoin the price goes up , this price growth fuels more hash power which rises the cost of attacking Bitcoin even higher.
So by delaying the attack the governments across the world are losing their opportunity to attack when its some what feasible.
Why cant governmetns simply cut off access to Bitcoin network ?
Its fairly easy for Indian govt to disrupt access to chinese apps so why cant they do it for Bitcoin network ?
Believe us when we say this , its not that they dont want to do it, its beacuse there is no practical way of doing it without effecting entire internet landscape.
Bitcoin doesn’t run from a single node or computer, it runs on Millions of servers all sync perfectly thanks to the beauty of proof-of-work which don’t need any other metric to sync, the moment a new block is found faster than the competitors thanks to their superior computing power, this block is added to the chain..So a single node with longer chain representing higher proof of work can become the truth giver to all the other nodes.
So the headache for governmetns is a million times harder, you not only need to disrupt traffic for known bitcoin nodes , but even the unknown ones. Finding the unknown ones is nearly impossible even with using the best of networking sniffing techniques.
Even if a particular region experiences internet black-out , Bitcoin nodes can be brought up-to-date with simple data insertions with simple USB sticks ( and much more ).
For this reason , governments have largely given up on technical censoring of Bitcoin
The only thing they are trying to do is legal attacks which are far weaker than technical attacks.
Its like trying to arrest people in pakistan while sitting in India.
All law gets its power only through enforcement, if you cant enforce properly the legal attacks eventually become irrelevant.
There are now thriving cash-based non-kyc bitcoin exchanges springing up across the world.
Anyone with a $1000 capital can start a Bitcoin-to-cash exchage and serve customers without much effort coz even if police arrest them the capital they lose isn’t much. So the situation is now become a game-of-whack a mole and an impossible one coz there are lot of poor people looking to eek a living out of this.
Lightning nodes are even hard to shut down
Large lightning nodes routing millions of dollars of values across users looks like an easy target for governments to go after, but the reality is lightning node owners have direct economic incentive in offering connectivity to as many users as possible.
So they will simply bribe officials who think of disrupting traffic to them
Even if the bribes don’t work, they will have various data couriers ( every thing from VPNs, USBs, Lora atennnas ) bypass even the harshest censors.
At the end of the day, getting caught with data smuggling has no real negative incentives unlike getting caught with cash or drugs because data can be copied infinitely at zero cost which means there is no effective censoring of your connectivity to Bitcoin nodes or lightning nodes.
Bitcoin at the end of day is just data transferring from one node to another but ensures the bitcoin blockchain remains trustworthy even to the nation states thanks to the historical invention of ‘proof-of-work’
why cant Governments kill Bitcoin..realistically ? was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.