What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?

[Bill White]

With sufficient resources, a government could manage a long range/history attack. Suppose a government gathered twice the current mining power, but did not apply it to the network. Instead they could start at some early point in Bitcoin's history (even the genesis block) and within a year or so (since those first years had much lower difficulty than now) they would have a block chain with more cumulative difficulty than the "real" block chain. They could then release this block chain and, according to the protocol, it would then be the "real" block chain. At that point, according to the protocol, everyone who currently has bitcoins would not only no longer have bitcoins, but they would never have had bitcoins. I imagine chaos would follow.

This may be a bit of an exaggeration because I believe (though I'm not sure) there are some checkpoints built into the software. If there are, then the attacker could start mining at a block between two checkpoints and likely cause a fork between nodes using different clients. Rolling checkpoints (or more generally what Vitalik Buterin calls "weak subjectivity") would help avoid the long range attacks, but introduces the risk of making forking attacks easier.

This is a kind of attack people suspect could be achieved against proof-of-stake coins, but it's clear that with enough resources the attacks apply to proof-of-work as well.

If there were such an attack, people would probably agree to a common checkpoint on the "real" (but less work) chain (in which case Bitcoin actually does use a "weakly subjective" criteria) or move to an altcoin. However a determined attacker could continue carrying out such long range/history attacks to keep people and business discouraged.

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[oblivi]

If yo uhad bill gates money you could build an insane mining mine and do a 51+% attack I guess.

[Beliathon]

With sufficient resources, a government could manage a long range/history attack. Suppose a government gathered twice the current mining power, but did not apply it to the network. Instead they could start at some early point in Bitcoin's history (even the genesis block) and within a year or so (since those first years had much lower difficulty than now) they would have a block chain with more cumulative difficulty than the "real" block chain.

This would be virtually impossible to accomplish today, it may have been feasible in 2011-2012 though.

[TrianglePythagoras]

Spam the blockchain and dump it.

[neurotypical]

Sell all my bitcoin to crash it(1.5 million ) to 0$

Actually Bill Gates could buy the remaining entire supply of bitcoin for life and control the price..

[nextgencoin]

Sell all my bitcoin to crash it(1.5 million ) to 0$

Actually Bill Gates could buy the remaining entire supply of bitcoin for life and control the price..

He could play around with the price but actually him buying would only increase the price.

[Harry Hood]

Ignore it. That's the only way for it to die, people ignoring it would kill it. Sabotaging it wouldn't do it.

[tss]

you could always bribe developers into adding things into the core code (little by little ofcourse) which remove the things we love about btc.  such as the 21m limit.

[ranochigo]

you could always bribe developers into adding things into the core code (little by little ofcourse) which remove the things we love about btc.  such as the 21m limit.

Bitcoin's core developers aren't as easy to bribe as you think, if the limit gets changed, people would most likely see it by reviewing the source code and don't update. If majority of the network do not agree, a fork will be created which will be useless in destroying Bitcoin.

[najzenmajsen]

What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?

Nothing.
Just not use it.
This is more than enough to stop this ponzi.

why do you even use bitcoin if you belive its simply a ponzi ?
to dev , a bank would just have to dump a million btc in hope for ppl giving up on it

[najzenmajsen]

you could always bribe developers into adding things into the core code (little by little ofcourse) which remove the things we love about btc.  such as the 21m limit.

Bitcoin's core developers aren't as easy to bribe as you think, if the limit gets changed, people would most likely see it by reviewing the source code and don't update. If majority of the network do not agree, a fork will be created which will be useless in destroying Bitcoin.

i agree , the bitcoin core developers are already pretty wealthy probably , and wouldnt give up something they worked for so hard.

[Beliathon]

you could always bribe developers into adding things into the core code (little by little ofcourse) which remove the things we love about btc.  such as the 21m limit.

No, you couldn't. Miners are extremely conservative about updating. If you implemented bad code, 99.9% of the network's miners would route around that damage by ignoring the update and keeping one of the non-compromised older versions. Just like gamers do with graphics drivers. And any developer who tried this would swiftly become blackballed from the bitcoin community forever. Bitcoin is truly democracy in action.

Think of the bitcoin network like an organism and you will begin to see things more accurately.

[jeffhuys]

If I had unlimited money, I'd buy enough hashrate to get more than half of the network and spend like there's no tomorrow 

[Beymond]

If you had no shortage of money , just get alot of hash and do a 51% attack

[Razick]

Most of the people who don't like Bitcoin don't care enough to do anything about it. I think we overestimate how much sleep the so called "evil bankers" and governments lose over this very small market.

[AgentofCoin]

I'd buy up all the bitcoins slowly over many years, the same way the US Gov buys ammunition.
So that one day when bitcoin reaches its realized capacity/purpose, there aren't enough coins actually trading to make it a viable threat to world commerce.

That or I would blackmail the Devs and coerce them to propose/insert currently unknown malicious code that ultimately makes Bitcoin nonviable.

Government won't bother with a 51% attack, when there are cheaper easier options that are tested throughout history.

[champbronc2]

I don't understand why a multi-billion dollar corp hasn't premined their own cryptocurrency and released it for quick mass adoption and essentially free money generation.

Everyday citizen doesn't give a shit about decentralization, but just wants instant irreversible payments that are publically verifiable.

I think it'd be easier to convince someone to buy GoogleCoin that Bitcoin.

[QuestionAuthority]

I'd probably marry Bitcoin if I wanted to stop it. Everytime I get married it stops everything good in my life.

[EvilPanda]

So this bitcoin lives in the internet and is supported by people around the world? The answer is simple - destroy the internet! Wait...

[pooya87]

if i wanted to stop bitcoin i would go on bitcointalk forum and create a topic asking people for ideas, you know like a brainstorming and use them to crash bitcoin