Re: Is there an institution that protects the circulation of Bitcoin?
But what if that group of full verifying nodes "gets into the hands" of some institution that aims to enforce the rules? In that case that institution would effectively have said powers. Whether this is an official institution or a non-official group of people, I believe this has happened already in the crypto space before, right?
They still can't trick legitimate nodes into accepting bogus transactions, so no. This is called a Sybil Attack. I have no idea if altcoins have been attacked this way, but it has never happened to Bitcoin as far as I know. The only way to really attack it is a 51% attack, which would be incredibly difficult to pull off.
A 51% attack is not entirely impossible lately, with a lot of the total hashing power being in the hands of the Chinese. They are currently more interested in making money, than using that hashing power to sabotage the cow that gives them milk.
The Chinese government can use this as a weapon if they seize control of that hashing power, but I see no reason to do that, if this is generating foreign income on a large scale for them.
Well yeah I did say incredibly difficult lol.
I don't buy the theory that China can take control of Bitcoin's hashpower. They would have to take over multiple big companies for no reason, and while I know that their government can get away with pretty much anything, I'd like to believe that even they have their limits. It's a risky power move which can potentially cause a lot of backlash that wouldn't even be beneficial for them. Chinese miners are also starting to distribute their hashpower, so there may come a time when this would be a complete non-issue anymore.