Craig Wright: Bitcoin was never designed to be censorship-resistant

In his latest blog post, “Bitcoin was never designed to be censorship-resistant,” Dr. Wright creates what could be considered a response paper to an article originally published in BTC Magazine about BIP 324.

Dr. Wright explains that Bitcoin was not designed to be censorship-resistant, why that is the case, as well as why the nodes in a network have a hierarchical structure.

What appeared to initially trigger Dr. Wright’s response was a statement in the magazine that said, 

In the ideal configuration, P2P networks shouldn’t have any hierarchy (all nodes are equal), and nodes should share the network load uniformly. This basic layer of a mesh of interconnected nodes is what helps Bitcoin to be censorship-resistant.

To which Dr. Wright says, 

“The problem with such an argument is that Bitcoin is not a mesh, and Bitcoin is not designed to be censorship-resistant. More critically, Bitcoin was never designed to be a flat network, without hierarchy. Bitcoin was intentionally designed such that nodes compete, and hence nodes are not equal.”

Subsequently, Dr. Wright takes a deep dive into how nodes on the network are connected to each other and goes on to say why at its very core, or rather, in its original state, Bitcoin is extremely durable.

“[T]he core protocol of Bitcoin is remarkably resilient. No matter how actively developer groups have sought to alter the copied Bitcoin protocol, they have not managed to remove the primary functionality of Bitcoin. As a result, BTC Core will remain hierarchical in its structure, and the nodes of the system will always be subject to legal enforcement.”

At the end of the day, and as Dr. Wright says in his blog post, “Nodes are not designed to be private in Bitcoin.” If it comes down to it, law enforcement officials will insert themselves into a situation involving a node on the Bitcoin network and will take action against content that originated from the dishonest node if it goes against existing law.

To learn more about why Bitcoin was not designed to be censorship-resistant as well as how nodes on the network are connected and why Bitcoin was designed to scale, you can learn more by reading Dr. Craig S. Wright’s latest blog post, “Bitcoin was never designed to be censorship-resistant.”

See also: Dr. Craig Wright’s presentation at CoinGeek Live, How One World Blockchain Powers a New Future for Computing & Cloud System

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36MRO2izj6I&feature=youtu.be