Bitcoin Forum

Could a powerful enough entity with huge resources develop enough hashpower privately to build the difficulty rate so high that if they removed their hashpower from the network suddenly, it would crash Bitcoin economy due to new blocks taking hours (or days) to confirm?

Plausible? Possible? Impossible?

Explain.
Thank you

Very possible. Likelihood? Extremely unlikely as it would take massive capital to make/buy the hardware in the first place and would make no economic sense to not have it mining. Eventually the network would heal itself back to appropriate diffs but it would take a long time, depending on just how much they raised the diff in the first place. We're dealing with a 1 exahash network now so this is no trivial task...

A malicious government could totally make a 100mW data center, fill it with hardware and "attack" the network. I don't see how they could not. Now if a government is going to want to sign off on such a expensive, open attack.. i very much doubt.

Doing this would piss of a lot of people.

There's probably more covert ways to go about this.

Is it generally certain that all current hashrate is more or less accounted for, and not, in fact, a malicious government running some operations covertly right now?

How would a government building a big data center be some malicious operation, if its pointing its hashrate at a legit mining pool? You're wondering if they just plan on mining a ton of BTC and then dumping it to hurt the value?

Or they're just mining to cut their losses while they spool up some their 1 exabyte datacenter? Well they're better hurry up, because soon, that won't be enough.

It would be much profitable for them to just earn through mining instead of dumping to hurt bitcoin. They can't win this battle anyway so they might just wanna join with us. This a is much better option for them to which they should think about.

They definitively, easily can "win this battle". Its not hard to crash the price of Bitcoin if you have billions of dollars alloted to doing this. The feasibility is not the problem. Its the inclination and the international impact.

There is no point to do this if you're some lone country that goes against all other countries and attack Bitcoin. And if all the countries want to get rid of Bitcoin, then they can just consensus to outlaw it at that point. Something that does not do much when you're a lone country that decide to outlaw it. It would make more sense than spend a shit ton of money.

they can  buy at a premium price.

then sell low on a second exchange to their own shill.

so price would move to 750 then drop to 180 all in about a week.

They would have to go through all the other people offering Bitcoin in between. Buying out all Bitcoins is possible, but it would be pretty expensive. Though it might more sense as kind of brute attack than attacking the hashrate.

I'm not just sure what would happen when they control most of the Bitcoin since they will just have created rarity.

Its possible but would make no economic sense being that a nation could collect taxes on mining profit and capital gains on traders.

They would have to build up multiple facilities to hammer the network with mining power at once then go offline after readjustment to cause blocks to go unsolved.  Continue this operation until btc become so unstable and unusable that people forget about btc and dump what ever coin they have crashing the network.

I would expect a emergency protocol would come into place that would possibly create a rolling on demand difficulty until things stabilize or a way to ban that hashrate from the market.

there is no gain in harming the network of bitcoin in any way, so no one will do it, otherwise why you think chinese are not doing it?

they could already do what you described, they hold 60% of the network...

I doubt they hold 60% of the network. Even if they hold 60% of the network its distributed over multiple people.

They would all have to agree to conduct such an attack which is highly unlikely.

Wow so its really possible to bring down bitcoin if all those countries that do not want bitcoin join together. That's a lot of work for them though. I

I'm just not sure if they can do that forever since there are a lot of altcoins that would also rise after they bring down btc, certainly other altcoin can also replace bitcoin and they have to also bring those down?

Once someone told me that Satoshi has designed this in such a way that even if all the miners stop mining, this won't be stopped completely and will run, slowly but will run for sure...

Satoshi wasn't a stupid person, he must be familiar with the scenario and who knows that among those Chinese only, someone might be Satoshi himself, and if he's still alive and watching Bitcoins, he won't let his extremely stupendous concept get ruined this easy...

yeah i know, and yes last time i've checked it was 60%, and i doubt that now it's less, probably more, since they always expand their farm

but it's not so impossible for them to reach an agreement for that, the point is that it would kill their profit, so only an idiot would do it

It is not impossible but to make the difficulty as hard as possible requires lots of hardware equipment which are not cheap

Not just it takes the hardware and equipment, but it also takes a lot of electricity in order to run those hardware to be able to mine Bitcoins...
So, there is possibility some day network may get weaker, but it won't get down in any means...

This is scare speculation.  There is nothing to support this other then saying it could happen.  I mean most goverments would have no interest in doing this, as what's in it for them?  Unless they have a crap fiat not much.

Largest we know of is US goverment with Silk Road.  And they did it as a auction on BTC, was fair and did not hurt BTC that I saw.   So if goverments do like one of the few examples we have it really is not that scary.  They want USD or fiat not BTC.