The harder the hashing is, the more difficult it becomes for an attacker to overwelm the blockchain by brute force computation.
Is it correct to restate "overwhelm the blockchain" as:
The harder the hashing is, the more difficult it becomes for an attacker to
create tons of Bitcoins, potentially exceeding the designed creation rate which difficulty regulates by brute force computation.
Actually, no. It's not possible to "counterfit" bitcoins, nor to exceed the designed creation rate. That's a little oversimplified, but in practice it's impossible
Or is there something else about the blockchain which could be overwhelmed by brute force? Thanks.
The blockchain could be overhelmed by any attacker that can outhash the whole of the honest network, and for as long as the attacker is willing to keep it up, the attacker
could (under the right conditions) rewrite the most recent block or prevent transactions from being processed. To rewrite farther back into the blockchain history requires significantly more hashing power than the whole of the honest network. To rewrite as far back as the 100 block requirement to spend 'new' coins would require orders of magnitude more power than the whole of the honest network. Which is why the system doesn't let new block rewards be spent until they are 100 blocks deep. If such an attack were to occur, the most recent blocks might get overwritten and their rewards taken by the attacker, and teh attacker would be able to retake coins that he recently owned and spent; but at least the number of people affected would be limited to very few and the rest of the network would recover without much fuss. However, anyone with that much hashing power is better off to hash honestly for the future block rewards than try to reverse recent ones to take rewards away from honest miners. And if this is ever done, the addresses of the attacker would be widely known, because the evidence would be right there in the blockchain.