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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @fourrules 6h \ parent \ on: Gmax's theocratic populist sex prohibition analogy for filters bitcoin
Bitcoin is built incentives, not the homo economics rational actor hypothesis. You try to fuck the network you get fucked. People will do what they will do. Some will passively relay. Others will make evaluative judgements. Bitcoin is censorship resistant as a monetary network due to orthogonality and the fact that if everyone together is trying to influence values on the network the aggregate result is that monetary transactions will always get through, but content will incur a cost (even if that cost is direct to miner fees, because the miner takes a risk that nodes won't relay the block fast enough for the longest chain to work in their favour). Bitcoin is not censorship resistant as a distributed database for so structured content.
If this is not true then bitcoin is vulnerable to sybil attack and monetary censorship as it is today, whether knots exists or not, because while governments don't have to resources for an effective 51% attack, they do have the resources to spin up millions of relaying nodes.
But this is new, a novel line of argumentation. Has this been a vulnerability all along, held in secret by an elite group of bitcoin insiders?
I'm calling bullshit.
it's not really novel, there are ways of dealing with a Sybil attack on nodes. basically web of trust.
there's a primitive version of that already baked in with the bootstrapping, everybody trusts Bitcoin core basically
if the Sybil attack gets really aggressive we may need to do better than that.
but it's not like no one ever thought of this. they thought about it... a lot.
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Obviously they did. So why now is Greg freaking out about censorship and "theocratic authoritarianism"? Its ridiculous to suggest that filters for non-monetary transactions are a slippery slope towards censorship.
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