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Comment by lambda_obrien | Hacker News Reader

The USG could kill it by using a 51 percent attack; the NSA must have rows upon rows of servers that could be repurposed for a week or two to destroy the market. Split the blockchain every couple of hours into several different versions, eventually there would be little chance to reconcile things.

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>the NSA must have rows upon rows of servers that could be repurposed for a week or two to destroy the market

Their general purpose servers are nearly useless for mining bitcoin because their hashrates are orders of magnitude lower than the ASICs that professional miners use. If you want to 51% attack bitcoin you either need an absurd number of general purpose computers (possibly more than all CPUs/GPUs that exist on earth) or pour billions into making hardware that can only be used to mine.

$1B would be more than enough to design and manufacture all the necessary ASICs to cripple the network. They wouldn't even need to do a 51% attack to do so, e.g. selling coins at a complete loss would bleed the other miners white.

>$1B would be more than enough to design and manufacture all the necessary ASICs to cripple the network

Source? Some napkin math using the current bitcoin network hash rate[1] and the price/performance ratio of a yet-to-be-released bitcoin mining ASIC[2] suggests that you'd need $9.5B to take over the network.

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate

[1] https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021022419553...

The NSA/CIA/etc. is precisely why this won't happen, for the same reason the same are launching no wide-scale attacks to take down Tor - the guys in suits doing questionable government things need anonymity too.

Hell, Satoshi Nakamoto probably is the NSA.

I don't think NSA would include a video poker game in the source code

https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src...

Bingo. I’ve always thought it was the NSA, CIA, or maybe UK or Israel but I doubt the latter two. Especially since Satoshi’s wallet is so large and hasn’t moved.

Bitcoin has to make it much easier for 3 letter type agencies to follow money.

Unfortunately it's almost definitely a smart nerd (using this as a compliment here) who passed away.

Most darknet stuff uses monero and that is... tricky to follow.

I theorized back in 2009 that this is exactly what would happen, but instead of having NSA use it's server farms, it would be the central banks using third party cutouts to buy up chunks get to a collective 51 percent. Why I didn't predict that the obvious result would be a runaway market I still kick myself for, because at the time I rejected bitcoin for it's lack of privacy and just moved on...

My current guess is that they are going to pressure all the other coins, and come to some collective agreement after some farcicle fact finding mission ala 1907 to agree there should be some sort of central bank controlled digital coin... which of course they will control, but will lack anonymity. BTC will crash then. (but again, maybe I'm not the best person to listen to on this topic!)

I think specialized chips work too well for repurposing other computing capacity to work.

I expect the most effective attacks would go after control of mining capacity, either directly seizing it or taking it offline.

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