That may be entirely possible, but who (besides us, people who already have a large investment in bitcoin) would be willing to go through all the trouble of updating their clients and verifying they were indeed on the "new" network.

Some people still surf with IE6 for goodness sake.

Once press coverage hit that bitcoin blows and "theShitCoin" is the next best thing, the public will probably follow.

The bitcoin community is really going to go places with it's "authority" figures shooting down newcomers ideas as "stupid".

I was not suggesting that we accept the USD forever. I am not suggesting that we peg it at the same rate as Belize does. I am not even suggesting we peg it to USD.

Think about the IDEA for a moment, before you shoot somebody down. Belize is a small economy like Bitcoin (actually, it overshadows the bitcoin economy by almost a factor of 1,000 - but it is still tiny).

Who in their right mind would invest any money in belize if their currency's value fluctuated as wildly as bitcoins?

How old are you, theymos? Seriously.

Good luck explaining bitcoin to fashion models. You would probably have to still pay them in cash.

Just to gain some stability in the bitcoin markets.

One belizean dollar is worth, and has been worth since 1978 $0.50 USD. Since the belizean dollar is pegged at 2 belizean dollars per american dollar.

Makes sense for a country/group of people who have literally no power or authority in the world.

In the next 50 or 100 years I am sure they will divest themselves of that bond. But for the meantime, it seems to make sense.

Exactly what I was thinking.

It could be a great "call to action" for everybody to join forces with bitcoin and run their generator client 24/7.

Secret mail service = instant terrorist threat = no go.

I would be REALLY wary of purchasing bitcoins via PayPal. They are quite trigger happy with their "banned account" reasonings. Seems to me that something like "Bitcoin" might be grounds for seizing your money. In their eyes at least.

"The people" generally do not like governments and/or other powerful entities interfering in free markets.

If anybody did attempt to gain more than 50% computing/node power of the network in order to sabotage it... (meaning it was a significant game changing idea).

A headline like that could make the new york times.

Hrmmm.. not so sure about that one.

If it is determined that btc2 has absolutely no flaws (probably by the bitcoin community) then bitcoin would quickly deplete to 0 dollars value. People would forget about it, and move on to btc2.

I know I would. It's business, not personal. I'm not going to stick around and keep any amount of real value in a system that is sub par.

You can still keep your life savings in a paper bag under your mattress... you'd even save on so many banking fees... but do you? No. Not if you are worth any serious amount of money. (And are legally sane.)

Here here people. Gather round. I, too believe that the governments cannot control your currencies properly.

Please, allow ME to take better control over them.

If all of our electrical equipment ceased to work. I doubt there would be much of a world left, let alone bitcoin.

Police and authoritarian figures couldn't communicate. TVs couldn't sooth the public back to sleep. It would be mayhem.

My thoughts exactly.

That's what we need. A car, a building, a business perhaps...? Something that society deems to be a large purchase... To be sold in exchange for bitcoins.

The press potential for that one is phenomenal.

A money market on the planet Zlorg wouldn't be able to "communicate" quickly enough with Earth either for that matter.

What with quantum finance erupting as a new business model. It would be pointless to try and communicate a sale of USD between Earth and some planet 50 lightyears away.

This is in itself a DDOS attack. Theoretically the entire networks difficulty can be hijacked in an instant. That can be done for quite "cheaply" given the world's size.

I like your thinking though... if we could get the EFF to create something like their DES cracking board... that would give us substantial publicity, safety and reason for investment.

Even if you don't have to because you're mining in a shared pool and don't really use bitcoin yet...

I know I am!

There is strength in numbers. The larger our network looks to outsiders the more secure/accepted it will be perceived.

I'm pretty sure 10 million CPUs running 1,000 kHash/sec could make a significant dent in our hash rate. That's still 10,000,000 * 1,000,000 hashes/sec = 10 trillion hashes/second.

Ok so it seems to be "case closed" then. Any massively funded operation could bring bitcoin to a screeching halt (for at least a few days) at any point in time until we are accepted worldwide.

I guess we will have to come up with reasons to dissuade these massively funded operations we are going to disrupt from crushing us like an ant.

I'm going to go and watch "The Jungle Book" 

Thanks for all of the replies guys, we have a great discussion going on here! But I think Gavin said is best... and I am paraphrasing this it's still quite risky to invest in bitcoin until the entire world is running near-quantum-computer level super computers and the bitcoin software from their home.

To everybody who says "but they cannot make a supercomputer that powerful..."

Let's just say for simplicity's sake that a 5970 costs $1,000 and that it is too difficult to overclock too many of them at once.

That means 600,000 kHash/sec or 600 MHash/sec costs about $1,000 USD.

With $10,000,000 USD one could place 10,000 x 5970s in parallel. Creating a machine capable of 6,000,000,000 kHash/sec or 6 trillion hashes per second.

According to the bitcoin calculator, that would take an infinitesimally small time to generate a block.

Thus putting us in our doomsday situation that I described above with just a "splash in the pond" to most of the world rich's wallets.

vladimir, are you talking about 50% network capacity in terms of computer power or networking nodes? I am referring to a single computer capable of generating 2016 blocks within a matter of seconds on a single node/ip address. And then abandoning the network. Thus making it nearly impossible for the rest of us to solve a block... ever.

That was going to be one of the suggestions I just had as a way to stop this attack... but how often do the "adjustments" take place?

Theoretically this is just a bandaid to the attack vector. Even if the bitcoin network forced a new difficultly to be increased by only 4x every 10 minutes... the difficulty could be increased 4^6=4096 times within one hour. Thus ceasing all transactions to a halt (once they backed out of generating).

I doubt the bitcoin core developers will update their software once an hour.

And what if the difficulty adjustment takes place instantaneously? Which I assume it would... the attacker could ramp up a 10,000 factor difficulty in a matter of seconds just as originally described. With a 4x per increment maximum or not.