Virtually everyone involved in Bitcoin's development is also well-known and presumably "coerceable." The company makes no difference as far as I can see.
When someone has a legitimate claim to be an owner, that person will have sway to do crazy things like make it closed-source or change the critical constants. Not saying it's a deal-breaker, but it's more risk than if no one can claim to own it (if bitcoiners are angry about the excessive power of the people with admin permissions to the github repo, just imagine how difficult it would be to wrench control from a company that invented the product and has copyright claims to it). I guess what I'm saying is you don't get much leverage if you convert a bitcoin dev but if you convert the owners of this company you'll get a lot of leverage.
Couldn't reply to your child comment, so I'll put it here.
You don't seem to realize how easy it is to discredit someone that the general public doesn't recognize.
The cryptographers are one false planting of child porn away from no influential majority of people believing a word they say. You won't defend them, because you'll question the authenticity of the child porn claims and you'll have no evidence to the contrary.
Overnight these kinds of people can be taken down and made into nothing.
Who is going to detect a government agency when they forcefully steal your hardware and claim it has child porn on it? They don't even have to put the child porn on the machine, nor do they need to get a conviction for child porn. It will be all over the media for as long as it needs to be in order to cause these peoples ideas to fail.
Obviously, I don't know which stories are bogus and which ones are real, but you can do a quick google search and find all kinds of cases of people claiming government cover up.
You obviously don't entertain the idea that those could be legitimate. What makes you think you'll entertain the idea if it were to happen to a lead cryptographer that you've never met before in your life?
and how are you determining what is probable? Just because you believe the government doesn't make last ditch efforts to cover up with lies, doesn't mean that is necessarily the truth. How many coups need to happen before you consider me a rather typical cynic rather than a paranoid extremist?
I very much agree with you that it's not worth focusing on, but you were acting like it was never a possibility simply because the people being attacked would be well educated.
> You obviously don't entertain the idea that those could be legitimate.
Not when proposed by apparently paranoid HN users, I don't.
> What makes you think you'll entertain the idea if it were to happen to a lead cryptographer that you've never met before in your life?
I happen to be involved with cryptography. I'm very familiar with three of the people on the Zcash team, one of whom I call "friend".
Instead of worrying about stopping every logically possible attack, I find it more productive to focus on stopping the 99.9999% of plausible attacks. If the government manages to pull off something theoretically possible but unbelievably improbable, they simply deserve to win that round.
> I happen to be involved with cryptography. I'm very familiar with three of the people on the Zcash team, one of whom I call "friend".
Maybe this is where your potential bias stems from. I mean, what's the point of name dropping here if it's not stemming from a bit of ego, maybe strong enough ego to believe you're out of reach for a three letter agency? You know three of them, great, but you don't know all of them and you may not know the most major contributor and it's possible there exists a key member that has an already shady past.
The hypothetical in question isn't even intended for you. It's intended for the general public. Most of whom would gladly eat up whatever story they are sold.
> The hypothetical in question isn't even intended for you. It's intended for the general public. Most of whom would gladly eat up whatever story they are sold.
When you frame the conversation that way, it makes more sense.
Pulling off a massive, international, targeted attack on several individuals of varying degrees of stubbornness to coerce them to do something unspecified and malicious to the code base of an open source software project and not get detected isn't exactly a practical goal for even intelligence agencies.
How about they just ask three payment networks (VISA/MC/Paypal) to cut off their payments then watch them wither and die? That's how Wikileaks was destroyed by Bank of America and Co when they threatened to leak on the big banks. All that OPSEC can't help without money to support it. Worked like a charm and not a single shot fired.
They can be coerced into actions based on threats to themselves or relatives.