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Double spends are an inefficient way to profit from an attack, they're merely the advertising/marketing angle.

The real profit will come from shorting the currency and capitalizing on the subsequent crash due to the crisis in confidence.

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If you can short such an obscure coin and if there's a crash. Sometimes these attacks are already priced in.

I think the point they were making is that you keep double spending until it does. You profit or you profit very very big. It doesn't seem like news of a double spend would ever cause a pop.

I would expect the probability of a crash to go down with each attack. The first attack is novel but the nth is not.

But how do you go about shorting these coins? There's not an obvious way to short them, like traditional stocks.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are pretty involved nowadays, iirc they offer short on most

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