Quote from: Foxpup on June 06, 2014, 03:20:17 AM

Quote from: jctech on June 05, 2014, 11:11:26 PM

3. Use the mined profits and/or more taxpayer's money to purchase more mining hardware.
4. Repeating steps 2 and 3 until you get 99% of the hashing power under your control.

5. Realise that the other 75% of miners are already doing exactly that so you're not getting anywhere.
6. Give up.

This rebuttal is pretty good! I like it Cheesy

However, remember that you are THE BIG BAD GOVERNMENT. You can do pretty much anything.

(I don't believe a good government would wish to destroy such a wonderful thing as Bitcoin, this is why you are a BAD government)

So:

5. Seize the factory(ies) of the company(ies) making the ASICs ("We suspect you have hashish here, we are closing down this factory until further notice").
6. Keep the factory running (you don't want all the good people working in it to lose their jobs because you know there is no hashish) and deploy the resulting mining hardware as soon as possible while you are searching for the (nonexistent) hashish. Make sure you are building that mining megarig somewhere out of the way so nobody sees you (especially keep reporters away). The other 75% of miners is struggling as they are looking for another factory(ies) to support their growth while you are growing by leaps and bounds.
7. Continue doing 6 until you capture 75% of the total network hashrate or even more.
8. Returrn the seized ("borrowed") factories back to the owners along with a huge pile of Bitcoins ("we apologize for our mistake, we thought you had some hashish hidden here, took us 5+ years to search it all, please accept this pile of BTC and goodbye"). This helps to cover the tracks of your real intents with the seizure. Everyone will think this is the end of the story except you.
9. Continue growing the covertly established mining megarig as outlined in the scenario.

Additionally the seizure (pardon, "borrowing") would very likely send the cryptocurrency exchange rates into sky very quickly as somebody pointed out, making the step 8 here much easier to do. Especially if big press releases would be made at or around the event ("Government seized the factories of the largest SHA256 ASIC ")

And don't forget to also make big press releases when doing the step 8 to support more exchange rate rise Grin

Well, as I already said in a previous post, this is bound to fail because of the flexibility of the Bitcoin core developers so the end of the attack is going to look like this:

10. Once you got 99% of the hashrate and you put all your order so you won't get hit by the resulting chaos in Bitcoin economy.
11. Pull the plug.
12. Realize that the chaos dissipates in 2 days because the Bitcoin core developers issued a "critical update" killing your bloated hashrate.
13. Fix your megarig to accept the new rules and then push the plug back.
14. After a while try again by going to 11.
15. After several loops between 11 and 14 realize that the Bitcoin core developers will always fix that damn thing in 3 days or less so you're not getting anywhere.
16. Give up.

Or:

15. After several loops between 11 and 14 realize that the Bitcoin core developers implemented proof of stake and other nasty countermeasures in the Bitcoin protocol so you are hopelessly screwed.
16. Give up.

Ok, BIG BAD GOVERNMENT. Case closed. Maybe it is time to build a nice global Bitcoin address ownership register and require people to register their addresses there. You futile effort already produced that huge mining megarig so financing this should not be problem this time. The only problem is that you still want the Bitcoin network destruction and that is NOT going to happen so you won't get what you want ... Grin