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Comment by hnolable | Hacker News Reader

NSA, China, Russia, most governments really, and possibly a lot of banks, could do a 51% attack and shut down transaction processing... or do double spends, but shutting down all transaction processing seems more damaging. This won't ever change, unless Bitcoin really causes governments to lose most of their power and money.

Edit: gavin has a plan (http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2012/05/neutralizing-51-attack...) but my guess is if they did the work to start an attack in the first place they'd have planned for gavin's plan and acquired enough older coins to foil it. It'd be nice if more thought went into other ways to thwart a possible attack but I'm not sure there really are any. Most people seem to discount and completely avoid the issue.

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A direct attack by a state actor (especially one like the US, which likes to be seen as following the rule of law) isn't too likely. China might attack bitcons, but why would they - they can just block them.

The people who do black ops don't generally do so to help the financial sector. They do so for national security. While the economy (and monetary system) is arguably a national security issue, I can't see them all being on the same page. The guys in treasury would probably rather talk to regulators than intelligence.

Simply banning them, and enforcing that ban would work though.

Folk might want to print out Bitcoin wallets or store devices in a Faraday cage... in the unlikely event Kim Jong-Un pulls a wild card! :-)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/19/north-korea-...

They'd be useless without a hard-copy block chain to back them up.

Forgive me if this is a joke that I'm not getting, but they wouldn't be useless at all:

1) Bitcoin is a p2p distributed network with nodes all over the world. Even if a nuclear attack took out the entire US, the network would continue to work as long as segments of the Internet did (and recall that the Internet was originally designed to protect US data networks from nuclear attack).

2) It's quite simple to spend Bitcoins as long as you have access to a Bitcoin node (see above) and a copy of the 32-byte private key string corresponding to the public Bitcoin address the coins were sent to. This short string of characters can be written on paper, etched into stone, whatever.

The receiver can't be sure that the Bitcoin hasn't been double-spent without waiting on changes in the block chain to propogate; that's not easy in the middle of a nuclear wasteland.

Right, or even be sure that its a legal bitcoin at all, and not just a forgery.

It'd be nice if more thought went into other ways to thwart a possible attack

Given that the BitCoin community/industry has been getting hacked lots and there is widespread ignorance of security ("unsalted md5s for passwords!"), I don't have faith this'll change.

Maybe they're in the process of gathering their coins!

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