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A comment on What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters. Parent comment

Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by jasonkolb on Wednesday May 25, 2011 @11:27PM (#2586484)
Wow. Yet another reason why I think governments will attempt to squash it, DNS is the only way to even marginally effectively shut down a site right now.
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Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by wmf on Wednesday May 25, 2011 @11:38PM (#2586509)
Has route blackholing been tried yet? It seems like it would be pretty effective.
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Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by wladimir on Thursday May 26, 2011 @02:07AM (#2586790)
Yes, it has been tried. But it is impractical, because of collateral damage:

- Many sites are hosted on massively shared hosts. Blocking those IPs will cause a lot of services to be unreachable, not just the one to be blocked.

- People find you with your domain name, not your IP, so a service could avoid filtering by switching subnets every day and just keep updating the DNS entry. After a certain time, the govt will be blackholing a large part of the internet.

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Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by getsat on Thursday May 26, 2011 @07:50AM (#2587378)
It is. Remember when Pakistan blocked half the world from being able to access Youtube in 2008?[1]

(Though that was more incompetence by network engineers than legitimacy of the method)

[1] http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/news/industry-deve...

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