Bitcoin Forum

If massive amounts of computational power, cryptography, and distributed networks are the only things backing the Bitcoin economy, would it be possible for distributed attacks to bring it down? Virii, DDOS, EMP's, network outages. What's the worst case scenario that Bitcoin can withstand?

the worst case: the us govenment declare bitcoin to a terroristic instrument and plan to arrest every user in Guantanamo -> game over

I read that Deepbit had over 50% of Bitcoin's computational power (which poses another problem besides the obvious). What if it were attacked? Now Bitcoin doesn't seem quite as distributed to me. Such an attack would slow transactions down tremendously?

Where did you read that?  I'm pretty sure they're nowhere close anymore.

Everything you read is the truth on the internetz...  Here bookmark this please:  http://bitcoinchain.com/ (http://bitcoinchain.com/)

And here is another good one:  http://bitcoinwatch.com/ (http://bitcoinwatch.com/)

That's a very old report you were reading.  The current data can be found at www.bitcoinwatch.com, down near the bottom in a pie chart.  BTW "other" is a collection of unknown miners, that may or may not be a single entity, but probably not.  No single group comes close to 50%.

Worst case scenario, asteroid hits the earth, we all die, no more bitcoin

The computational power doesn't back the bitcoin economy, it secures the blockchain against a brute force attack, commonly called a "51% attack" here.  Even a successful 51% attack would not "bring it down".  More like aggravate the legit users for as long as the attacker can keep it up, and maybe perform a double spend against a particular user the attacker recently had a transaction with.  If that user isn't you, then your coins are safe even during a 51% attack, you just can't spend them while the attack is ongoing.

Worst case the bubble bursts and BTC go back down to let's say $10 and I buy back what I just sold, oh, wait that does not sound that bad now that I read it back.

ping pong ping pong.....

hhaha love it!

Quantum computer is not a threat to bitcoin. If quantum computer develops, the whole banking system and I mean, all banks in the world would be at risk... (credit cards, all websites that rely in ssl, etc)
So bitcoin would be the least of our worries...

Around June 2011, so yes I suppose: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12120.0. Thanks for the information, everyone!

I wish a quantum computer did exist. Imagine the computer games possible.

Wasn't the blockchain farked couple of weeks back.

We had a blockchain split, due to a database bug.  We have naturally occuring blockchain splits all of the time, but the network is normally self-correcting.  The bug was preventing a self-correction. It was a big deal only to the developers, as their reputation was impacted.  Users weren't impacted except for some short term confirmation delays.  If you weren't trying to move funds at the time, you woudn't have noticed.

I wrote an article about it which includes an interview with Gavin on what they learned and plan to change as a result of this. 

http://endthelie.com/2013/03/13/financial-crisis-revealed-and-resolved-in-the-world-of-bitcoin/