Bitcoin Forum

Ok I know to some what I'm saying is 'Conspiracy' but I say to them stop watching the mainstream media and wake up to the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O8vM0-6EEE


So it seems to me Bitcoin if and when it develops and grows WILL be a threat to the Western banking system, its a fact. So if you think the West won't do whatever they need to do to stop it or neutralize it then you're wrong.



The question is we should think seriously how we would try to stop Bitcoin so we can predict what the Western governments will do to stop it. My first one is simple, they will first do their best to create fear and misinformation about it. (where we are today). I think at some point they might make illegal anyone who accepts it but this will bring too much attention to the why they would even do that....I don't rule it out however. They will try to create a government backed cryptocurrency that has a backdoor that allows them to increase the supply.

What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?

I would buy slowly huge amounts of BTC then dump them to make the price fall.
Then do that again.
And again..

..until 90% of the people here will give up.


Yeah, it would cost some money. But banks' smallest problem.

they will find a way to centralise bitcoin. then control it. no need to fight it, just use brains.

Trying to stop bitcoin is pointless as people will use other cyptocurrencies, there are already over 500 different ones http://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

So they will have to ban cryptocurrencies as a whole and in this case they will have a hard time to get people using their illegal cryptocurrency.

Banning cryptocurrencies will not stop people from using it and if government wanted to ban cryptocurrencies they would have done so long time ago, now it is almost impossible to ban it without a kinda revolution, there is too much money at stake

problem is it hits the symptoms not the cause. I would say government dumping of conficated Bitcoin is already trying to do this, but its life pushing a beachball under water it will only pop back up. I guess those in power could simply buy most Bitcoin and buy holding they become the new power rich. But I think banks want to be able to create inflation, simply being the richest isn't enough. But it could become a default and last resort that they simply  decide if you cant beat them join them. But I think they would want to be creating some kind of Bitcoin deriverative that they control.

I think one way to destroy Bitcoin is to create too many cryptocurencies, it kind of undermines the concept in the eyes of the mainstream I think.

As long as bitcoin value price is on decreasing trend, people are in fear. And fear makes adoption .. not really happen.
If people will not trust bitcoin, but they like the technology, the banks may make their own regulated, centralized, safe, "backed up with their money" currencies.
This would be the second step.

not sure about that,people usually only heard about bitcoin and merchants are only accepting one crypto or 2 at most, so if you are not into trading i doubt you will hear about all of these.

my point is that satoshi gave us an alternative to the fiat system and this can't be destroyed, if government bans cryptocurrencies they will be traded underground on the tor network

there is a distinction between stopping bitcoin and preventing it to reach mass adoption

I would argue thats simply not possible however many times we are all told the Price of Bitcoin has tanked I won't believe it. Look at a logarithmic chart of Bitcoin, after such a massive rise all it has done has paused slightly. Once bitten by Bitcoin do you personally think you can leave it alone completely?

How many of us are actually "bitten by Bitcoin"? 100000? 500000? That's too small number to actually count for the banks.

I agree, which is I believe the only reason Western governments are leaving us alone so far. But clearly as tech gets more user friendly and people send some bitcoin or a cureency collapse etc uptake will progress. Even at a snails pace we are progressing into the mainstream I believe. Look at how many companies are taking them we wouldn't dream would 2 years ago. Look at the CNN special about to be aired on Bitcoin. Its not going away.

Nothing.
Just not use it.
This is more than enough to stop this ponzi.

I thinks this is still not make bitcoin stop because the price of the cryptocurrency is based on bitcoin price

If they want to stop it or severely limit its use they will just make it illegal to use or accept as payment or at the very least restrict its use with legislation and restrictions etc. Simple as that. I'm not sure if it'll ever grow to be a threat but it could become a alternative means but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

It reaks of desperation on the establishment's part. I mean if you ban Bitcoin you got to have an actual reason otherwise people are going to protest, scream and shout if suddenly it becomes illegal. It will start the mainstream asking questions why?


I guess the reason I'm asking this question is for the community to think like they think and predict what kind of attacks Bitcoin will face.

If they wanted to stop it , they would've do that ages ago . Because now .. well now it's just too late to do that . They had to stop it once Satoshi Nakamoto launched it but I guess they didn't see it as threat back then .
As I said for now they can't do anything , one Country can for sure simply ban the Digital currency but it's expanding so fast and even if one Ban it , the others won't . so It's unstoppable .

~ Madness

Bitcoin cannot be stopped, if it had to be closed, you would have to bomb the entire internet and cut off internet access everywhere. Even so, people can still find a solution to transmit transactions.

Of course it can be stopped.
I would infiltrate the foundation and change the code at my will.

That won't stop them trying I believe.

But is it bypassable? I wonder if Bitcoins biggest threat will simply be the ignorance of the mainstream who won't know the difference between Bitcoin and a Government sponsored Crypto.

They can try of course but they will never success . as I said one country , two , three maybe .. but all of them is simply impossible . Countries those days can simply not agree on the same things .
You got a point tho , people ignorance may make them switch to goverment sponsored Crypto and that's a problem . because this defeats the whole purpose of Digital currencies which is "being annonymus" and I wonder who will use such a thing

~ Madness

you don't need to infiltrate the foundation to change the code, it's open source anyone on the planet can change the code at anytime, the difficult part would be to convince people to use your flawed blockchain

I think it's inevitable some countries will try to ban it or heavily regulate it, but most will just like it because its another thing to tax. I think people will always need banks so I doubt they're scared at the moment.


I'm not sure if you're trolling but The Foundation has nothing to do with the code nor could they change it.

Somehow I do not think, it can be stopped in a sense, reason being it is decentralized. The worst thing you could do, is fiddle with its value, but the mere fact that there is no single point to disrupt it , means that even if it was stopped, it would not stop(get my drift). Perhaps if it was centralized it would be possible to stop it. But hey that is my opinion.

Why would you think to stop it ! It's been such a nice time with it
Anyways It will take a lot of money and time , first thing you can do is start a new cryptocurrency and then start pumping dumping btc and stablizing your currency , thus taking it down slowly(not going to be easy at all) , though i still think if people will ever leave btc even if it hits 1$ or lower

If I had the resources I would send people to destroy the main mining caves and collapse the transaction processing power.

Is this the government posting ? Dump those auction coins maybe.

"What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?"

Well with unlimited funds

They could buy up a lot of miners 25-40% of the hashrate

Modify the software to mine block in 30 seconds or less (20x faster)

Mine ahead of main chain a few blocks

Collect all the DDOS machines, Switch software back to the same as main block, Attack all the main mining pools,
Enter main chain and have the longest chain

...
All the coins are now on the attackers wallet
..everyone's wallets empty! and it would be worthless in 120 blocks with the fork?

Yes the part of the enter of the main chain is a bit tricky but stranger things have happened in the past..

my way create a website scammers everywhere and as much as possible

Imagine the amount of space needed to house a few million hardwares, not very feasible. You won't be able to modify the protocol unless you convince everyone to use it, having 51% of the hashrate won't allow you to do that. Mining pools aren't that easy to attack due to their ddos migration system. P2pool is even harder with so much nodes. AFAIK, you can't reverse or empty other's wallet or transaction.

Own as much as possible, then sell it on an exchange for $0

i would ban Bitcoin and support Litecoin as a Gov.






/s

Well assuming if they have every resource at their disposal, the faster way would be to attempt a 51% attack and then modify the codes to mine all the remaining coins. Enter a difficulty level no machine in this world would be able to solve and without transaction reward, no miner would want to process and maintain the network.

In fact, fiat money is on the verge of collapse, they need bitcoin to save them

Keynes said that not one in a million could discover the fiat money scam, but with internet there will soon be millions understand this scam, what will happen by then is totally unknown

Make it illegal for people to live in their parents basement.

To stop anything just spread negative news in media.
If you include words like ''money laundering'', terrorism financial support or something like this, such things can really destroy reputation of anything.
I hope nobody will connect bitcoin ever with such terms.

The easy way would be...take the home miners out of the picture. And it seems that might have started.
It is the home miners that have a big network of communication and interest in bitcoin and its value.
Can anyone really say that the mining farms are getting on these threads and helping eachother???
Or the day traders???

it is not that easy to make it illegal. and also because it is not restricted to one country announcing it illegal will not have that kind of impact on stopping it

If I had much power and wanted to stop bitcoin I would start three big campaigns worldwide:

1. Making links to child porn as illegal as the child porn content itsself, no matter if the link is still working or not. Avarge Joe would agree. (imho the blockchain already contains these links - if not, a hacked pedophile's computer can be used to add these links to the blockchain).

This should heavyly decrease the number of full nodes at least.

2. Support trusted computing as a safety feature. Avarge Joe would eat this. This locks up every OS including Linux/Ubuntu and Windows like iOS. Because the blockchain is illegal, no official Bitcoin app will be ever released.

After this, with no official exchanger and requiring to jailbreak your own PC first to install all the anonymity and bitcoin stuff, the usage should be close to zero now.

3. Altering the principle how the internet works and advertise this as a protection against cyber crime, pedophiles and terrorist. Avarge Joe would eat this. Altering the principle means: slowly replacing IP with a closed source one which supports goverment issued certificates and disallows the usage of arbitrary P2P. Every running service needs to be approved by the goverments first. If replacing IP is too slow, the other approach is to block incoming connection requests by the internet service providers which restricts arbitrary P2P too beside the political pressure to introduce expensive licenses to operate a server (which means accepting incoming connections).

Now with no free P2P, no unregulated VPS due to licenses, with the need to jailbreak your computer prior to install Bitcoin and no anonymization service because they don't get a license, the blockchain has no place to exists anymore and finally dies.

Start World War 3. Nothing short of total nuclear annihilation will stop Bitcoin.

there are already many i can name atlest 50 here , so there is no point of stopping bitcoins users gonna use others and also there isnt a way to destroy it as long as you buy all and dump it

With sufficient resources, a government could manage a long range/history attack. Suppose a government gathered twice the current mining power, but did not apply it to the network. Instead they could start at some early point in Bitcoin's history (even the genesis block) and within a year or so (since those first years had much lower difficulty than now) they would have a block chain with more cumulative difficulty than the "real" block chain. They could then release this block chain and, according to the protocol, it would then be the "real" block chain. At that point, according to the protocol, everyone who currently has bitcoins would not only no longer have bitcoins, but they would never have had bitcoins. I imagine chaos would follow.

This may be a bit of an exaggeration because I believe (though I'm not sure) there are some checkpoints built into the software. If there are, then the attacker could start mining at a block between two checkpoints and likely cause a fork between nodes using different clients. Rolling checkpoints (or more generally what Vitalik Buterin calls "weak subjectivity") would help avoid the long range attacks, but introduces the risk of making forking attacks easier.

This is a kind of attack people suspect could be achieved against proof-of-stake coins, but it's clear that with enough resources the attacks apply to proof-of-work as well.

If there were such an attack, people would probably agree to a common checkpoint on the "real" (but less work) chain (in which case Bitcoin actually does use a "weakly subjective" criteria) or move to an altcoin. However a determined attacker could continue carrying out such long range/history attacks to keep people and business discouraged.

If yo uhad bill gates money you could build an insane mining mine and do a 51+% attack I guess.

This would be virtually impossible to accomplish today, it may have been feasible in 2011-2012 though.

Spam the blockchain and dump it.

Actually Bill Gates could buy the remaining entire supply of bitcoin for life and control the price..

He could play around with the price but actually him buying would only increase the price.

Ignore it. That's the only way for it to die, people ignoring it would kill it. Sabotaging it wouldn't do it.

you could always bribe developers into adding things into the core code (little by little ofcourse) which remove the things we love about btc.  such as the 21m limit.

Bitcoin's core developers aren't as easy to bribe as you think, if the limit gets changed, people would most likely see it by reviewing the source code and don't update. If majority of the network do not agree, a fork will be created which will be useless in destroying Bitcoin.

why do you even use bitcoin if you belive its simply a ponzi ?
to dev , a bank would just have to dump a million btc in hope for ppl giving up on it

i agree , the bitcoin core developers are already pretty wealthy probably , and wouldnt give up something they worked for so hard.

No, you couldn't. Miners are extremely conservative about updating. If you implemented bad code, 99.9% of the network's miners would route around that damage by ignoring the update and keeping one of the non-compromised older versions. Just like gamers do with graphics drivers. And any developer who tried this would swiftly become blackballed from the bitcoin community forever. Bitcoin is truly democracy in action.

Think of the bitcoin network like an organism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaPgfErzeu0) and you will begin to see things more accurately.

If I had unlimited money, I'd buy enough hashrate to get more than half of the network and spend like there's no tomorrow  ;D

If you had no shortage of money , just get alot of hash and do a 51% attack ;)

Most of the people who don't like Bitcoin don't care enough to do anything about it. I think we overestimate how much sleep the so called "evil bankers" and governments lose over this very small market.

I'd buy up all the bitcoins slowly over many years, the same way the US Gov buys ammunition.
So that one day when bitcoin reaches its realized capacity/purpose, there aren't enough coins actually trading to make it a viable threat to world commerce.

That or I would blackmail the Devs and coerce them to propose/insert currently unknown malicious code that ultimately makes Bitcoin nonviable.

Government won't bother with a 51% attack, when there are cheaper easier options that are tested throughout history.

I don't understand why a multi-billion dollar corp hasn't premined their own cryptocurrency and released it for quick mass adoption and essentially free money generation.

Everyday citizen doesn't give a shit about decentralization, but just wants instant irreversible payments that are publically verifiable.

I think it'd be easier to convince someone to buy GoogleCoin that Bitcoin.

I'd probably marry Bitcoin if I wanted to stop it. Everytime I get married it stops everything good in my life.

So this bitcoin lives in the internet and is supported by people around the world? The answer is simple - destroy the internet! Wait...

if i wanted to stop bitcoin i would go on bitcointalk forum and create a topic asking people for ideas, you know like a brainstorming and use them to crash bitcoin :D

The most important part of your plan is having a shit ton of money to execute it. No matter how much brainstorming you do, without the massive resources it would all be to no avail.

In my own thought experiments, the only way to kill bitcoin is play the "long" game.

You couldnt really kill it by mining as far as I know, cause even if you invested 80 million dollars in equipment, you would have to attack the network without being able to be banned, so way too much investment for such a small chance of success.

You would have to "plant" a pair of persuasive individuals within the Bitcoin Foundation and evangelize a code change that fixes a real problem.  The fix has "short term" merit, but in the end would result in a hard fork.

A hard fork is where bitcoin is truly weakened and will fall apart.  There would be 1000 reasons for people to not mine the new fork and a division would just crumble the community and merchants would drop Bitcoin extremely quick if it hindered their day-to-day operations.

A government could not regulate bitcoin out of existence.  The dark markets are our "legal tender laws" (there will always be a bottom price for BTC because of this).

So it would have to be a fatal mistake in code.  There is no other way I can see.

We could look at the numbers to get an idea for how feasible a history attack would be.

The highest hash rate so far has been approximately 350,000 TH/s.

An ASIC miner at the moment is capable of approximately 1 TH/s (https://bitmaintech.com/product.htm (https://bitmaintech.com/product.htm)). It takes minimal cost to fabricate an ASIC. (The main costs are in the design work, and this has already been done. Even if it's proprietary, this does not prevent a government from using it.) A reasonable estimate would be only a few million dollars to fabricate a million ASICS giving a hashing rate of 1,000,000 TH/s. (Of course, then there is the cost of running them, but large governments have easy access to both large-scale energy resources and very cold climates.)

How long would it take for an agent with 1,000,000 TH/s of hashing power to catch up with the difficulty of the current block chain? Charts for the total cumulative number of hashes are here:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/)

Assuming the charts are correct, the total cumulative number of hashes up to now is approximately 1e25.

1,000,000 TH/s means the attacker could try 1e18 hashes each second, requiring 10 million seconds to catch up. That's approximately 116 days. Of course, at that point they would be 116 days behind still (as the "real" chain continued), but as long as they maintained at least double the current public hash rate they would completely catch up within another 58 days.

I do not expect this to happen, but mainly because governments will likely find ways to accommodate Bitcoin. However the attack does seem to be feasible.

well honestly i don't understand why someone would want to stop bitcoin! but yes if you want to stop something big, you have to be big with deep pockets

I would make something better.

Right now, with all the VC money pouring in, there are enough bets being placed on Bitcoin as well.
So even if somebody throws money and tries to stop Bitcoin (by pushing its price down and making people lose confidence), it is not necessary that he will succeed.

By deep pockets..Im sure u mean really really deep pockets..its pretty unlikely though that someone would try it..

I think you got a wrong idea about 51% attack. 51% attack is about solving blocks faster than others thus being able to reverse own transaction, prevent others from generating any BTC and preventing others from having confirmations in their transaction. To have 51% of the network, you need to have at least (319,019,636gh/s divide by 2) of hashrate.

To reply to the title...

I'd use this thread for ideas.

Good reply, but everyone is trying to do just that and failing in the process. What do you propose?

If the Us government wanted to stop bitcoin they would wag the dog. They would create more phony propaganda about terrorists and how they are directly connected to bitcoin. They would make using bitcoin a federal crime and then force all other countries to ban it's use as well.
This pattern has already been used several time by the US. The latest being the sanctions against Russia.

What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?

I would start a thread called "What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?" and send the best ideas to the proper authorities.
Thank you, for your great service to the Brave New World.

Get some help from Chuck Norris

This would be Chuck Norris' first failure.
Bitcoin is too big even for Chuck Norris.  :D

I would first start a campign with ton of people who lost everything on "perfect investment opportunity" that gone bad, toss in some crying children that are now without a house, few families that were torn apart by their father/mother gambling it all with bitcoin trading, and in the end just replay news about mt.gox and others that went down/were robbed.. etc
After that straight on bitcoin usage ban, both trading/owning/mining would be federal crime...everything would fall apart at that point probably.

cheers

Come again?  >:( >:(

We need to bring down big mining farms and when confirmation will start taking long , they will stop

I see a serious risk that someone with money could try to "clogg" the blockchain. It would take a network of maybe 1,000 computers, bots, each making one smallish transaction every second. All transactions fees would be fully paid, but that would slow every other normal transaction.

Hmm. If I wanted to stop bitcoin?

This is fictitious but if I have the brain power, I would definitely edit and disrupt the source code and stop all the incoming and ongoing transactions in the ledger. The thing is, I don't have the brain, nor the power to do this. So that's basically it. :(

Have you saw the movie LUCY (scarlett johnson) , that's what we need ,to use 100% of our brain and that's it ;)

Nodes have rules which prohibits them from relaying spam transaction. Your transaction would not get any confirmations and will not slow down other's transaction.

That's good to know, though I wonder how does the software makes the distinction between spam and legit. I'll look into that.

I would tax it if I wanted to stop it from growing.

Time to present Amaclin with two awards:

1.  10 millionth person to incorrectly use the term "ponzi" when describing bitcoin.

2.  Worst prediction of the year for 2014 - "BTC will be $10 in three months."

Congratulations, Amaclin.  Keep up the good work.

Thank you. I am grateful.

i would force exchanges under my control to only allow btc to be bought and sold to addresses that are registered on my gov database & i'd audit the exchanges to make sure this happens, i would also have the individuals registered on my database pay a btc Gst, 10% of every purchase to be forwarded to my government addresses, audits as usual and the best part, hefty fines for any who break "the law"

early adopters wont be allowed to cash out on my regulated exchanges, until back taxes are paid on all previous transactions.

That's not going to stop anything if you ask me . People can simply leave exchangers also if you ask for my opinion , I'd say that Exchanges are the thing that kills Bitcoin for the moment ... I mean Bitcoin is basically a symbol for paying in "privacy" and Exchanges defeats the whole purpose of that because they ask you for ID and passport and Resident and stuff like that ...

~ Madess

They wont stop , but even if yes , theres like more lots lots of other crypto ..

I will do nothing, because it is impossible to stop bitcoin (only if all the miners shut down their hardware machine). Can you stop a wave? Can buy all the air? I think the reply will be , no I cannot. Bitcoin will succeed because it is the best alternative for the moment (much better than the actual economic system).

Isn't this what they are doing already?

bitcoin can't be stop, as the BT can't  be shut down, you see the pirate bay never be really shutdown.

Hmmm... to stop Bitcoin quickly but with loads of time/money needed, would be to buy and dump, buy and dump, buy and dump until the value of Bitcoin pretty much nose-dives into the double digit range, then wait for the value to reach ground zero on its own. Honestly, i doubt this will work.
But then again, we could look at what's happening now- regulation. IMHO it's shackling bitcoins price now. Could either make it worse or cause bitcoin to be recognized and accepted by governments. Right now, it's pretty much neutral so it's anyone's guess.

bitcoin shouldn't be recognized and accepted by governments, it should 'destroy' them. Do you think bitcoin will be accepted by them? No more corruption, no more high fee instead of a pure 'transparency' , rapidity ...  a real freedom of our "money".

There is no way to stop it now

However, government can greatly benefit from it. Today, governments around the world have a forever expanding debt, so they need a forever appreciating asset to balance it, otherwise the system will collapse. Bitcoin is the last piece of this puzzle. They have tried use IT companies, housing to make it balanced, and they all collapsed due to the fact that supply of those things can be increased at will

well, if I was a central bank, I would buy up almost all the bitcoins out there .. watch the price rise over a couple years then dump the whole lot, crashing the price and completely destroying faith in the currency

if I was the NSA, I'd simply launch a 51% attack

I agree with what you said, at most it would allow me to gather a large amount of btc for little cost, until people started to trade privately. at most, governments working together would eventually force people to use more anonymous methods or be enslaved, as has been the cycle throughout history.