Quote from: greyhawk on June 06, 2013, 10:50:55 AM

Quote from: oakpacific on June 06, 2013, 10:38:47 AM

Had Bitcoin not being designed this way, it would have been killed by a different kind of 51% attack in its early days, Bitcoin doesn't only need to face threats of governments, but also that from botnet operators, random script kiddles etc. In fact, that we are dealing with government pressure itself is evidence enough that the system worked. Also, 51% attackers can follow you wherever you go, however many times have hard-fork.

So you have 2, 3, maybe 4 hard-forks which brought the attackers exactly nothing. How many more times would they then try after that? "Dude, stop trying to hit that ghost with your sword. It went clean through doing nothing the last 5 times!" - "Maybe if I swing extra hard next time."

With the current design, the only entities that are powerful enough to do a 51% attack are determined groups with vested interest in the old system(govs/banks, etc), so it's possible they will keep trying despite the cost. But again, the more important point is-what would have happened had it not being designed this way? Some script kiddles in control of several thousand zombie machines could have subdued the whole network.