If the FED can happily
print 40,000,000,000 USD (40G$) per month, how can we assume our pet project can withstand even one day of these spendings worth of effort? That would be 1.3G$.
The current total value of mining gear is
25TH/s *
72ct. / MH * s = 18M$ (if you use quite expensive BFL equipment). Thus a
democracy attack would cost only 25M$ (Far less if combined with other tricks).
Hiring a team of 100 experts for one year to spread fud, play the evil pirate, hack into exchanges and
sabotage Bitcoin(p. 28) from within would cost 100*150k$=15M$.
Oh, damn, we still have 1.3G$ - 25M$ - 15M$ = 1.3G$ to spend.
So what would you do with the remaining 1.3G$ if your job were to attack Bitcoin? Launch and fail every thinkable and unthinkable project with seemingly great teams to not get competition even started, only to scam users out of their bitcoins and get more people frustrated? Maybe some child porn exchange with massive referral spam would get people disgusted? Very publicly pay a bitcoin bounty for a dirty bomb somewhere?
The ways to bring Bitcoin down are endless and comparably cheap. All of the above would still not even get close to 10 hours of FED's quantitative easing budget.
Ok, so why the title "Are the USA scamming the world
again?"? Well, my conclusion is that Ƀ might survive because it already has
the full faith and credit of an issuing government. The FED could essentially pay freshly printed 1G$ per Ƀ if it knew it will abandon the $ anyway. Oooops did we debase the world's reserves? Sorry, didn't mean to. Hope you also bought some bitcoin. If that's the evil master plan, Satoshi and many of the early miners might all be the same entity painting a nice picture of a democratic open source money of the people for the people. Designing it as a world currency with 80% of all holdings in the USA would put the USA at the same unfair advantage it had since the
Nixon Shock.
I think this possibility should at least slow down some evangelists' enthusiasm of advertising Bitcoin as the holy grail of fair and sound money and Satoshi as the mysterious god of the church of Bitcoin.
(Disclaimer: This post was written by my paranoid twin.)