Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
TPTB_need_war
on 01/07/2015, 03:12:41 UTC
Here are some attacks which are affected by the number of nodes and/or miners and/or hashrate:

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Double spending. A miner can spend bitcoins on a product or service, then produce a block which invalidates the spend
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

The actual severity can be much greater. There can be a run on the coin affecting all HODLers.

You apparently fail to grasp the wealth effect (i.e. that the mcap != amount of capital invested) is mostly built on CONFIDENCE.

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Denial of service. A miner can engage in selective censorship of transactions
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: % success rate of censor identifying transactions they wish to block * value of the blocked transactions

Again you fail to account for out-of-band entropy. The ability to censor key transactions (even if a minute, undetectable %) could lead to immense power-structures, i.e. you threaten to censor the wealth of someone you need to coerce on major political outcome, e.g. a speaker of the house.

Attacker: Nodes
Attack: Double spending. An attacker can defraud a target who is using an SPV wallet by providing them with invalid block headers which allow the attacker to pay the target with a transaction which references non-existant inputs
Probability of success: 0% unless the attacker can prevent the target from communicating with any honest nodes
Severity:  Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

Yes Sybil attacks are another vector and there are lot more cases of attacks that you have not enumerated.