Bitcoin Forum

Hey,
From what i've read, biggest threat for cryptocurrencies are 51% attacks. From what i understood it becomes harder and harder to be done ( thus the risk being minimal ) when the currency is distributed to as many individuals as possible.

However, i think there's something else that can be done in order to achieve 51% and i want you to confirm/blame my theory.

The theory: from what i understand, there was this guy, Satoshi who made the software, then he said he's moving to other projects and gave/sold bitcoin software to someone else. I also understood there are actually more clients, not just one for BTC, made by other individuals, but the initial software ( the one made by Satoshi ) is used by the majority. The question is: what if the developer gets bribed by an unknown entity and add a function that transfer all your bitcoin to another account ( briber's account ) as soon as you open the application ? ( bitcoin qt, for example ). As long as you don't have a password, i guess it would work. This way, the attacker could try to gain 51% of bitcoins, thus destroying the whole project. I know it would be useless to gain 51% because nobody will use bitcoins after that, thus it's value will drop and you'll probably be spending more money by bribing the developer than what you'll make by selling the coins before the heist is revealed, but what if the attacker's purpose is just to destory the coin ? He can throw away 1 bilion dollars just to do that ( there are individuals that hold many billions, so don't tell me it can't be done ). Or what id the developer gets killed "by accident', which would be a much cheaper solution and the attacker introduces the malicious code into the application and try the 51% attack ? If there are enough people without their wallets encrypted, this would work, wouldn't it ?

Advanced theory
Also, what if the developer intorduces a FUD keylogger into the application, to gain even a better advantage and "hack" even the individuals that have a password ( encryption ) applied to their wallet ? I know the source code is public, but how many of us know programming or check what's up with every update ? Personally, i don't check. I take it for granted that the update is "something better" than what i had. But that may not always be the case...

First, what the heck is a "FUD keylogger". You are misusing words you heard somewhere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

Secondly, a 51% attack has nothing to do with acquiring Bitcoins. It has to do with gaining a majority of the hashrate that secures the blockchain (mining), which would allow you to erase blocks or transactions in the blocks, containing payments that others may already have trusted. One doesn't even need 51% if the goal is just to occasionally cause orphan blocks.

The "biggest threat" is not 51% mining attacks; the Bitcoin blockchain is secured by an extreme amount of processing power, and there is small profit opportunity available for executing one. The biggest threat is entrenched bankers and their bought-and-paid-for governments continuing to discourage and harass legitimate businesses by freezing and seizing the fiat currency accounts necessary to exchange money in a non-homogenous currency environment and criminalizing the use of non-sanctioned non-centrally controlled money in various ways.

Deepceleron, thanks for answer and for pointing out flaws in my statements.

First of all, FUD, when used as an adjective for virus,malware,etc means Fully undetectable (FUD). I'm not misusing words i heard somehwere, i just didn't know the acronym also stands for "Fear, uncertainty and doubt" too. It seems it is indeed more frequently used as "Fear, uncertainty and doubt", so it was my mistake for not pointing out what i mean by FUD, thus creating this confusion.

Secondly, yeah, the 51% attack was about hashrate, not about bitcoin amount. I didn't know that, thanks for pointing it out :) So, the only thing you can do by modifying the software and stealing the bitcoins is to create more panic and to reduce the trust level of the cryptocurrency, if you chose to just bribe the developer and introduce a malicios code into the software.

Yes, by "unknown entity" i mean bankers and their slaves, governments.That's what i don't understand. Why are they only discouraging the use of bitcoins ? I mean there's always a country that will not collaborate with US government and/or their slaves, the European Union. Someone can open the business in a such country, thus making all the bankers and governments efforts futile. Why aren't they just building more supercomputers and take over the network ? I've read the actual bitcoin hashrate is bigger than the hashrate of all supercomputers, if they chosed to mine. But what stops the bankers buy/build supercomputers or buy ASICS ? I mean, discouraging people to use bitcoin may or may not be successful, but buying a huge amount of asics would be a 100% success if they really wanted to do a 51% attack. Money aint a problem for them anyway since they control the money printing machines... They would basically give away colored paper and succeed destroying any cryptocurrency this way. Why aren't they doing that already, if that's the purpose ? That's what i'm trying to understand.

Nothing is Fully Undetectable, that's a stupid concept and it is the first time I see this interpretation of FUD.

Let's assume something can be fully undetectable. This implies its existence cannot be proven, and by Occham's Razor we would need to assume it does not exist, contradicting the first assumption. QED.

Why would the antivirus vendors release updates to their software then, huh?

Because they found new malware and a way to detect it. Else why bother? Huh.