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As a crypto purist, comments like this make me shake my head.
One of the core tenets of crypto is that it can't be regulated out of existence. To stop the transfer of bitcoin between parties, you'd have to shutdown the internet. And I don't mean firewalls or clever ways to knock down VPNs. I mean ripping up the sea cables and shooting down the satellites.
Permissionlessness is a feature, not a bug.
The threat that regulation poses is that it will dissuade people from using crypto which would then, perhaps, reduce the size of the network. Ultimately, if no one is using BitCoin for anything, it has no value (that's not a universally agreed upon point, but whatever). More to the point, however, I think that rubicon was passed once Bitcoin hit about $1000. Call it $10,000 to be safe. Millions of people are seriously using BitCoin and other crypto assets for real reasons all over the world and they won't stop.
Are you shaking your head at my comment or the parent comment? I agree BTC cannot and was not at risk of being regulated-away. I was making a rhetorical point that it was unlikely.
Parent comment. Didn't disagree with what you wrote.
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Doesn't Bitcoin suffer from the same sort of limits here that other decentralized protocols do, though? I'm not particularly aware of the link layer details, but mining requires a relatively consistent link (not high bandwidth, but minimal latency) to discover blocks mined by others. And issuing a transaction requires getting that data to enough of the miners to get it into a block. Offhand I'm not sure if both of these operations are generally "decentralized" today like DHT torrent links, and how robust those are --- it's been a while since I looked, but I think "absolutely distributed" is still an open research topic.
I will concede that's probably hard to block absolutely, but a sufficiently advanced adversary could at least make using it more painful.
One of the nice things of the technology is that if things get too crowded or expensive on the base chain, you can settle multiple transactions on another smaller and less expensive blockchain and only use the base chain to settle the start and end state of those transactions. From what I understand that's how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin (I'm more familiar with the Ethereum ecosystem).
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Providing you don't release goods or services until the payment transaction is confirmed, Bitcoin itself retains its core security properties even if transmission of messages is unreliable. You just wait longer for transactions to confirm. Bitcoin at rest are even safe in the event of a 51% attack (though transactions are not).
The Lightning network becomes insecure if the network is unreliable - if the owner of Bitcoins in a payment channel can't reliably broadcast a slashing transaction to the blockchain then their counterparty can steal them. And in the event of a 51% attack this can be engineered maliciously.
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