Quote from: bcearl on July 01, 2011, 09:52:16 AM

Quote from: em3rgentOrdr on July 01, 2011, 09:38:07 AM

Quote from: Gabi on July 01, 2011, 09:30:13 AM

Quote from: kerogre256 on July 01, 2011, 09:11:53 AM

How realistic(practical) this attack is ?

Very doable if you can afford to spend 10/15 millions of $

Any rich guy could happily do it without problems...

But due to Sathoshi's genius clever design, would-be-attackers are instead incentivised to use their resources as legit miners instead, thus increasing the strength of the main block chain.

Yes, private attackers could be persuaded by the reward for honest mining. But banks and governments who are willing to invest to just shut down bitcoin are still a danger we should be aware of. I don't see any chance for them to get sabotage done, and it will get harder as bitcoin gets more users and miners. But we should always have the possibility of attackers in mind, who don't care about money but about hurting bitcoin.

I don't know. I tend to be a firm believer in Emergent Order. I usually assume that everyone is a self-interested bastard by default. But Cooperation is more preferable to Sabotage in most cases, especially with bitcoin. If the governments and banks cooperate with us, then they can profit from mining legitimately. That's a positive sum game. But spending billions of dollars on a ton of AMD GPUs simply so that you can destroy the bitcoin network is a negative sum game.

There is a reason why successful governments like US & China don't tax %100 percent of your income, but rather realize that after about %50 then your people aren't incentivized. And there are reasons why most Nations and Businesses are not engaging in constant battle sabotage against their competing Nations and Businesses (sure, there is some of this going on, but it is not the major component of expenditure).

I suspect that eventually the US government, PayPal, and banks will reluctantly embrace bitcoin.

Governments will still be able to tax, even if they can't arbitrarily inflate. Sure they will have to tighten their fiscal responsibility belt, but they will be benefited by a robust bitcoin economy, and will simply tax visible transactions. And I suspect they will be using the resources from government supercomputing labs to mine bitcoins by default when they aren't running more valuable experiments.

PayPal will start accepting payments with bitcoin as just one of many accepted international currencies the moment they realize that they can make more profit by embracing bitcoin instead of attacking it. PayPal would rather offer secure online storage of your wallet and insurance against loss from scammer transactions as eBay currently does. I can image some clever paypal employee submitting a bitcoin proposal which eventually reaches the CEO, who then sells it to the rest of the board and shareholders, and then someone might get a raise.

Banks wouldn't completely disappear, but would rather have to refocus on being investment vehicles which facilitate people with long term monetary preferences to loan out their bitcoins to borrowers with short term monetary preferences. Sure they won't be able to artificially create bitcoins at whim out of thin air, but they would instead form clearing houses with competing banks and try to keep their liabilities as closely matched to their available assets as possible. The banking sector will be stabilized and return to sanity, not destroyed.

Quote from: Gabi on July 01, 2011, 09:40:27 AM

You forget the "do it for the lulz" factor

Hmm... Yes I forgot about the lulz factor. The lulz factor totally throws off anyone's refined security analysis model. Serious, it's true. Just look at everyone they hacked. Totally not expecting it. Totally were prepared for anything but a lulz attack. (I'm only being 25% sarcastic those last 3 sentences, since it is true that the lulz factor will definitely screw up anyone who's not prepared for a lulz response. Maybe it will become standard operating procedure for major internet companies to develop a "lulz response protocol" soon

.) But I do suspect that deep down, lulz security was motivated by something more than just the lulz...