> If someone pulls the rug out on BitCoin- might never happen, but who knows- then no one is responsible.
How might someone go about doing this?
How might someone go about doing this?
1. Government shutdown
2. BitCoins P2P network is very vulnerable to denial of service attacks; ones that actually cost money!
3. Public Node can be tracked; no more anonymity.
4. Technical merits of the crypto implementation have not been fully tested; is there a possible flaw?
5. Social engineering and one-time inflation.
6. Unreliable and opaque banking organizations; no one is backing it.
There are many more, and they could all be fixed if bit coin was a centralized currency system, but it is not. It is too soon to say "BitCoin is ridiculous and will never work", but someone with a motive and means can definitely make a miners life hell.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=69178
Here are some things BC has going for it though!
1. Distributed with no single point of failure.
2. No "mint"; could be a bad thing.
3. No individual company can be arrested and shut down.
4. "Anonymity"
The guys developing Bitcoin should take a look at the Phantom protocol then, which is supposedly very resilient agaisnt DDoS attacks.
No, the collapse is more likely to happen on its own. At some point the massive increase in value must draw to a close. What happens then? Big bitcoin holders no longer have an incentive to hold onto their millions of dollars' worth of bitcoins "Hmm, time to sell some of these bitcoins". Millions of bitcoins hit the market and find no buyers at the quoted price. All of a sudden the price is a lot lower, folks panic, drives prices even lower.
In an asset where the only incentive to hold the asset is the massive increase in value, panic selling happens as soon as it looks like the massive increase has gone flat. The steeper the increase, the steeper the decrease. That makes bitcoin unlike gold.
Worse yet, laundering money on this basis will almost certainly come with an increased cost to trade through another currency, especially if there is legal risk to the parties doing the laundering.
It's not like laws will stop financial trading or traders, but if you're declaring your taxes as you're legally obligated, presumably there's still a paper trail indicating irregularities if you're funneling your bitcoins through dongs.