We've heard recently about China’s efforts to restrain cryptocurrency trading and mining. I wonder if China or other coalition of countries could use the following approach to take Bitcoin's blockchain down (or better yer, to highjack it).
0. Buy equipment to start a huge mining farm (let's call it the highjacking farm).
1. (illegal, but reasonable) take down the electricity in the largest mining farms.
2. The highjacking farm mines using selfish mining of empty blocks solely, collecting coins but forbidding transactions.
3. Repeat 1-2 as needed to make sure the entire public branch is composed of the highjacking farm's blocks.
My questions are:
a) What is the cost of buying equipment for this highjack? Assuming that an alpha fraction of the electricity (and hence other mining farms) could be taken down? How does it scale with alpha?
b) How likely you find this approach to be taken in real life?
c) Do you know of other non-regulatory ways countries can fight Bitcoin (or other coins), turning Bitcoin's decentralization against it?
Most old-timers...who are still around...don't actually transact very often and don't need to. With the blockchain and a few brain cells to rub together you really cannot get screwed on a long-term basis. Just sit things out for a few days. Pay the relatively tiny transaction fee of, say $50 (roughly equiv of the fees in the bankster operated fiat apparatus) and a miner who mines a block gets something like $120,000 in fees alone for a single block. That's enough incentive to fire up mining nodes anywhere there is sunshine for solar panels.
Maybe that's why Bill Gates wants to dim the sun? Hmmm....
Anyway, the system starts working again (for the purpose of _real_ users) within a few weeks without any honest nodes in China or the U.S.. For small fry to who are trying to buy a pack of Skittles there are about 100,000 'alts', many of them proof-of-stake, which are easily exchanged.
