No. You’re not getting it. This is about information, not your vague issues of ‘I feel this is a large enough danger to worry about or I can come up with some vague ways to limit the fallout’. The question was: does learning the government did Bitcoin change our beliefs about anything else at all? The answer remains, for all you’ve said: yes, it does.
a) Future abuses via Satoshi having too many Bitcoin or from a Bitcoin elite can be countered right here and right now by supporting alt-cryptocurrencies.
These tactics are not guaranteed to work, therefore on learning the government did Bitcoin you will be more worried about abuse then before; Satoshi as technoidealist is far less likely to abuse or use the mined coins than Satoshi as calculated government project and public manipulation.
b) Backdoors should be assumed to be in Bitcoin already.
No, they shouldn’t. Only some software is ever backdoored, which means you should make no ‘assumptions’. If we learn Bitcoin was done by the government, do any of our beliefs change at all? Yes, the odds of backdooring go up since the US government has, as a matter of historical record, advocated backdoors and sought to build in backdoors (eg. the Clipper chip), and the possibility of NSA involvement that much higher.
c) The government crackdown possibility is real but the best way to defend...
Is completely irrelevant, because you’re not getting the point, and actually getting it backwards: if we learned the government did Bitcoin, would this affect our predictions about future crackdowns at all? Yes, it would: we would worry less about a crackdown, because that would render developing & releasing Bitcoin a complete waste of effort and accomplish no apparent goal which was not already accomplished by actions like crushing e-gold. The obvious continuing example of this is Tor, developed by the US government and still supported and not cracked down upon, because cracking down would defeat the point of making it, which was to enable its servants to browse anonymously and also help out its enemies’ critics & foes.
d) Even if the government designed Bitcoin it does not control it,
Something which you cannot know, and which flies in the face of points #1 and #2.
but I’m sure many governments are involved at the clandestine level.
No doubt you are as sure of this as anyone can be sure of something in the complete absence of any evidence.
The obvious continuing example of this is Tor, developed by the US government and still supported and not cracked down upon, because cracking down would defeat the point of making it, which was to enable its servants to browse anonymously and also help out its enemies’ critics & foes.
The US government made Tor? Awesome. I wonder which part of the government did it. The intelligence agencies could be expect to oppose it because they effectively lose power.
No. You’re not getting it. This is about information, not your vague issues of ‘I feel this is a large enough danger to worry about or I can come up with some vague ways to limit the fallout’. The question was: does learning the government did Bitcoin change our beliefs about anything else at all? The answer remains, for all you’ve said: yes, it does.
These tactics are not guaranteed to work, therefore on learning the government did Bitcoin you will be more worried about abuse then before; Satoshi as technoidealist is far less likely to abuse or use the mined coins than Satoshi as calculated government project and public manipulation.
No, they shouldn’t. Only some software is ever backdoored, which means you should make no ‘assumptions’. If we learn Bitcoin was done by the government, do any of our beliefs change at all? Yes, the odds of backdooring go up since the US government has, as a matter of historical record, advocated backdoors and sought to build in backdoors (eg. the Clipper chip), and the possibility of NSA involvement that much higher.
Is completely irrelevant, because you’re not getting the point, and actually getting it backwards: if we learned the government did Bitcoin, would this affect our predictions about future crackdowns at all? Yes, it would: we would worry less about a crackdown, because that would render developing & releasing Bitcoin a complete waste of effort and accomplish no apparent goal which was not already accomplished by actions like crushing e-gold. The obvious continuing example of this is Tor, developed by the US government and still supported and not cracked down upon, because cracking down would defeat the point of making it, which was to enable its servants to browse anonymously and also help out its enemies’ critics & foes.
Something which you cannot know, and which flies in the face of points #1 and #2.
No doubt you are as sure of this as anyone can be sure of something in the complete absence of any evidence.
The US government made Tor? Awesome. I wonder which part of the government did it. The intelligence agencies could be expect to oppose it because they effectively lose power.
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Only 90s kids will remember Triangle Boy.