Rand Corporation: National Security Implications of Virtual Currencies

[Bitware]

PDF -> National Security Implications of Virtual Currencies: Examining the Potential for Non-state Actor Deployment

Summary -> http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1231.html

RR-1231-OSD

RAND National Defense Research Institute


Recommendations:

The Department of Defense should be aware of the following:

• (1) VCs are an increasingly technologically feasible tool for non-state actors to deploy in order to increase their political and/or economic power;
• (2) efforts to destabilize confidence in a new VC are effective, while popular sentiment is still untrusting of VCs for common transactions;
• (3) VCs are just like any other service in cyberspace, and methods to successfully attack them are not meaningfully different than for any other cyberspace operation;
• (4) decentralization affords more, though not total, resilience to disruptions from cyber attacks;
• (5) the trend toward decentralized cyber service will only make it easier for unsophisticated cyber actors to have increasingly resilient access to cyber services, which is a two-way street that could enable unprecedented global access to information and communication services that, at its core, is agnostic to the national security interests of the United States.

Reddit discussion thread -> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3xnchr/rand_corporation_is_researching_how_to_destroy/

 

[franky1]

i love how they say about ddosing mining pools.
well that mining pool mightbe down for a few minutes. but other pools continue. and then the attacked pool just changes ip addresses and continues as usual.

i love how they say about publicly targetting high profile individuals.
charlie shrem, ross ulbricht, etc.. yet this public defamation is just free advertising for the word "bitcoin" which makes people curious.. what is bitcoin and how did these people get millions of dollars of value

i love how they say they can corrupt the manufacturing/predelivery of cellphones, hardwallets and mining equipment to gain access to the supply chain of mining rewards and individual private keys.
this is possible but then people stop using such devices, and eventually the authorities sell the bitcoin they grabbed(IE silkroad funds) and eventually its back to normal, with a very limited amount of victims.

in short if they have enough information to link a criminal to bitcoin.. its much easier and cheaper to slap the criminal with a wet fish than it is to defeat bitcoin. and if the DoD ignores the criminal and just wants to attack bitcoin. then they are not doing their job, and wont succeed