I’m a Former Green Beret and Here’s How I Would Bring Down Bitcoin
bitcoinmagazine.com
bitcoinmagazine.com
It's also completely generic. If someone important had died, the advice would include 'murder the key people and make it look like an accident'. If there had been a crippling bug, it'd be 'introduce critical bugs into the software'.
Then again, the authoritarian dictator has to play up the credibility of the foreign agitators so they seem more real. I must be a member of the regime trying to consolidate power.
It's bots and sock puppets all the way down.
A friend of mine had the worst ex-girlfriend in the world, and she would use sockpuppet accounts on social media to humiliate him, as well as make it look like she was surrounded by loving and supportive friends. I nicknamed them "options", after the Gradius phantom ships, and left a link on each of their pages to the Gradius's Option card from Yu-Gi-Oh to show I was wise to her game, after which she dropped the ruse.
It turns out that each of the "options" was based on someone -- a friend or boyfriend -- she had offended to the point of no return, and she was also using them to create a fantasy world in which those people still loved her.
And she only got more messed up from there.
I find it interesting that the strategy outlined here is pretty standard fare for a psycho ex-girlfriend from hell (and a stupid one at that).
The first hint to me that something was off was the fact that she, and all of the options, typed exactly alike in a sort of moronic mix of Spanglish, weeaboo, and lolcat speak. The particular phrases, abbreviations, emoticons, and choice of word misspellings were very easy to pick out with enough careful observation. She didn't even attempt to disguise her style. By the time I caught on, my friend was already run roughshod by the abuse, and only stayed with her because he was in deep denial, lacked the courage to leave, or both. Thankfully he did leave before actually meeting her in person, which experience would have been absolutely harrowing.
That would be bad enough by itself, but how they've handled disagreement is worse. There have been several attempts to fork the primary implementation, producing alternative implementations which support a higher block size. Official bitcoin forums have now banned discussion of these forks, leading to an acrimonious community split.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118
Bitcoin doesn't need an outside infiltration to bring it down. Its own leadership are sealing its fate.
Isn't this kind of thing just natural? Don't reporters do this on their own for everything? The author's entire paper seems geared into convincing us there's some dark forces at work. A conspiracy maybe?? To someone that doesn't care about cryptocurrency it just comes off as... silly.
It feels to me that people who love bitcoins make their whole world into some binary existence about the currency either moving forward or why it's being held back because of XYZ.
I'd attribute to Hanlon's Razor until the incompetence of natural human actions can be falsified.
(how do you know I'm not one of the conspirators...?)
Social, strategic, and unconventional attacks can and do work against a technical or online community, but they need to be modified to account for the countermeasures the community will put in place.
Lastly, while the author has interesting experience, that doesn't make it relevant to bitcoin. A former employer of mine once hired a former secret services person to run and manage a red team. He was great with physical security, but didn't understand the technical layer and so a lot of his efforts went no where.