Dunno if that would work. Adobe (unlike Amazon) would require your credit card billing address to be in the US. Not sure if it has changed now, but a few years back i tried buying Adobe Lightroom from the US site and was unable to do so.
My workaround was to buy the retail box from Amazon, ship it to a friend in the US and have them email the license key to me.
Tell Chinese government how impossible it is to control the internet. The Great Firewall of China (GFC) is advancing very fast. Just a few years ago even an unencrypted proxy abroad would do the trick, and yet most people did not know how to set it up and did not care enough to find out. Nowadays even VPNs and SSH tunnels are commonly blocked. It is not trivial to bypass the GFC and it is only getting harder by the time.
Well, let them get their way, and the whole internet will crumble and become useless for everyone (see Directive 10-289).
I personally, am prepared to walk away. I grew up with BBSs and 2400bps dialup, only one user at a time connecting. It was not horrible. I remeber downloading .gl video files over dialup, too. This level of communication is completely feasible today without relying on any corporate or government owned network.
We can start anew and create a network controlled by the citizens of the world. We may not have HD video at first, but we can have Twitter and a Lynx resurgence....
...or live together in a secluded valley in Colorado, protected by an air-wave reflection device.
I am writing this from China and unfortunately it is the other way round. Tor is beaten by the Great Firewall of China.
Since the list of nodes is available to anyone who connects to the Tor network, blocking them is trivial. So most of the time it is not possible to connect. And when you do manage to connect the speed will make 14.4 kbit/s modem feel fast.
Tor has a way to work around this - bridge nodes. They're hidden and their IPs are distributed in various non-batch forms (e-mail, social networks, http://bridges.torproject.org).
What would a scenario of such financial attack look like?
Suppose I had $100M - twice the bitcoin market cap.
What would I be able to do to destroy the bitcoin?
I can think of ways to manipulate bitcoin market with large sums of money, but nothing that would make bitcoin unusable.
You'd buy as many BTC as you can (probably slowly over time), then sell them all at once for a very low price. Momentum traders would help you by also selling their BTC when the price starts dropping.
This is the strategy of cornering the market and according to wikipedia [1] "very few attempts to corner the market have ever succeeded; instead, most of these attempted corners have tended to break themselves spontaneously"
In fact, I think such attack would only create a short term volatility spike but make bitcoin market sturdier in a long term.
In first phase of the attack you would pour in huge amounts of liquidity which would attract more people to bitcoin market.
In the selling phase of the attack you would cause a temporary market panic but only for as long as you sell. And if bitcoin market players managed to find out about what you are doing, they would profit from it.
Finally, when you are out of money, the market would return to its normal course.
No... bitcoin's greater weakness is the vulnerability of its 'bullion'
Simply buy it up and delete the wallet.dat ... bitcoins go poof with no way to recreate (the total number of created will max out with no regard to losses, intentional or otherwise)
Not even that much.
On my old laptop I get a little more than 1000 hash. Assuming that average computer is twice as fast as mine we get 2 khash/s. Inserting it in the calculator [1] shows that it would take 6068212 days on average to calculate one block of 50 bitcoins. That is 332.5 years per bitcoin. At current rate it means $0.02 per year.
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