Long (long!) time lurker on this list, and Bitcoin early adopter here.
I'll try to give a quick summary for Freenet folk:
Assuming no cryptographic flaw is found, I believe (FWIW) that Bitcoin
will soon be safe, because all functions are decentralized, including
transfer and generation. With some simple steps such as running over
Tor, Bitcoin can also be anonymous for spending, receiving, and generating.
The one known attack against Bitcoin, and this is an intentional part of
the design, is to have more computing power than the rest of the network
combined: When a double-spend occurs, the network as a whole decides
which spend occurred first; raw computation power decides this. Some
back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the network right now is
the equivalent of about 2000 ATI 5970 graphics cards, so that might be
$3M or so in hardware costs, which of course is trivial for the government.
But if Bitcoin grows 1000x bigger, or more specifically, the amount of
computing power on the P2P network grows 1000-fold, I think it would be
safe from government attacks. Here's a graph of computing power
("difficulty") vs time:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/
Teppy
> What is the danger that BitCoin will have the same fate as the
> "Liberty Dollar"?
>
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Liberty_Dollar#FBI_.2F_Secret_Service_raid
>
> Does this create any risk for Freenet if we are using it?
>
> Ian.
>
> --
> Ian Clarke
> Founder, The Freenet Project
> Email: ian at freenetproject.org <mailto:ian at freenetproject.org>
>
>
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