What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?

[oblivi]

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

The most important part of your plan is having a shit ton of money to execute it. No matter how much brainstorming you do, without the massive resources it would all be to no avail.

[AaronPaul]

In my own thought experiments, the only way to kill bitcoin is play the "long" game.

You couldnt really kill it by mining as far as I know, cause even if you invested 80 million dollars in equipment, you would have to attack the network without being able to be banned, so way too much investment for such a small chance of success.

You would have to "plant" a pair of persuasive individuals within the Bitcoin Foundation and evangelize a code change that fixes a real problem.  The fix has "short term" merit, but in the end would result in a hard fork.

A hard fork is where bitcoin is truly weakened and will fall apart.  There would be 1000 reasons for people to not mine the new fork and a division would just crumble the community and merchants would drop Bitcoin extremely quick if it hindered their day-to-day operations.

A government could not regulate bitcoin out of existence.  The dark markets are our "legal tender laws" (there will always be a bottom price for BTC because of this).

So it would have to be a fatal mistake in code.  There is no other way I can see.

[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.

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

We could look at the numbers to get an idea for how feasible a history attack would be.

The highest hash rate so far has been approximately 350,000 TH/s.

An ASIC miner at the moment is capable of approximately 1 TH/s (https://bitmaintech.com/product.htm). It takes minimal cost to fabricate an ASIC. (The main costs are in the design work, and this has already been done. Even if it's proprietary, this does not prevent a government from using it.) A reasonable estimate would be only a few million dollars to fabricate a million ASICS giving a hashing rate of 1,000,000 TH/s. (Of course, then there is the cost of running them, but large governments have easy access to both large-scale energy resources and very cold climates.)

How long would it take for an agent with 1,000,000 TH/s of hashing power to catch up with the difficulty of the current block chain? Charts for the total cumulative number of hashes are here:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Assuming the charts are correct, the total cumulative number of hashes up to now is approximately 1e25.

1,000,000 TH/s means the attacker could try 1e18 hashes each second, requiring 10 million seconds to catch up. That's approximately 116 days. Of course, at that point they would be 116 days behind still (as the "real" chain continued), but as long as they maintained at least double the current public hash rate they would completely catch up within another 58 days.

I do not expect this to happen, but mainly because governments will likely find ways to accommodate Bitcoin. However the attack does seem to be feasible.

[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

The most important part of your plan is having a shit ton of money to execute it. No matter how much brainstorming you do, without the massive resources it would all be to no avail.

well honestly i don't understand why someone would want to stop bitcoin! but yes if you want to stop something big, you have to be big with deep pockets

[btbrae]

I would make something better.

[pitham1]

Right now, with all the VC money pouring in, there are enough bets being placed on Bitcoin as well.
So even if somebody throws money and tries to stop Bitcoin (by pushing its price down and making people lose confidence), it is not necessary that he will succeed.

[nikona]

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

The most important part of your plan is having a shit ton of money to execute it. No matter how much brainstorming you do, without the massive resources it would all be to no avail.

well honestly i don't understand why someone would want to stop bitcoin! but yes if you want to stop something big, you have to be big with deep pockets

By deep pockets..Im sure u mean really really deep pockets..its pretty unlikely though that someone would try it..

[ranochigo]

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.

We could look at the numbers to get an idea for how feasible a history attack would be.

The highest hash rate so far has been approximately 350,000 TH/s.

An ASIC miner at the moment is capable of approximately 1 TH/s (https://bitmaintech.com/product.htm). It takes minimal cost to fabricate an ASIC. (The main costs are in the design work, and this has already been done. Even if it's proprietary, this does not prevent a government from using it.) A reasonable estimate would be only a few million dollars to fabricate a million ASICS giving a hashing rate of 1,000,000 TH/s. (Of course, then there is the cost of running them, but large governments have easy access to both large-scale energy resources and very cold climates.)

How long would it take for an agent with 1,000,000 TH/s of hashing power to catch up with the difficulty of the current block chain? Charts for the total cumulative number of hashes are here:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Assuming the charts are correct, the total cumulative number of hashes up to now is approximately 1e25.

1,000,000 TH/s means the attacker could try 1e18 hashes each second, requiring 10 million seconds to catch up. That's approximately 116 days. Of course, at that point they would be 116 days behind still (as the "real" chain continued), but as long as they maintained at least double the current public hash rate they would completely catch up within another 58 days.

I do not expect this to happen, but mainly because governments will likely find ways to accommodate Bitcoin. However the attack does seem to be feasible.

I think you got a wrong idea about 51% attack. 51% attack is about solving blocks faster than others thus being able to reverse own transaction, prevent others from generating any BTC and preventing others from having confirmations in their transaction. To have 51% of the network, you need to have at least (319,019,636gh/s divide by 2) of hashrate.

[GigaBit]

To reply to the title...

I'd use this thread for ideas.

[BillyBobZorton]

I would make something better.

Good reply, but everyone is trying to do just that and failing in the process. What do you propose?

[runningfree]

If the Us government wanted to stop bitcoin they would wag the dog. They would create more phony propaganda about terrorists and how they are directly connected to bitcoin. They would make using bitcoin a federal crime and then force all other countries to ban it's use as well.
This pattern has already been used several time by the US. The latest being the sanctions against Russia.

[Bit_Happy]

What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?

I would start a thread called "What would you do if you wanted to stop Bitcoin?" and send the best ideas to the proper authorities.
Thank you, for your great service to the Brave New World.

[Beymond]

Get some help from Chuck Norris

[pitham1]

Get some help from Chuck Norris

This would be Chuck Norris' first failure.
Bitcoin is too big even for Chuck Norris. 

[ajareselde]

I would first start a campign with ton of people who lost everything on "perfect investment opportunity" that gone bad, toss in some crying children that are now without a house, few families that were torn apart by their father/mother gambling it all with bitcoin trading, and in the end just replay news about mt.gox and others that went down/were robbed.. etc
After that straight on bitcoin usage ban, both trading/owning/mining would be federal crime...everything would fall apart at that point probably.

cheers

[Beymond]

Get some help from Chuck Norris

This would be Chuck Norris' first failure.
Bitcoin is too big even for Chuck Norris. 

Come again? 

[networthsigns]

We need to bring down big mining farms and when confirmation will start taking long , they will stop

[countryfree]

I see a serious risk that someone with money could try to "clogg" the blockchain. It would take a network of maybe 1,000 computers, bots, each making one smallish transaction every second. All transactions fees would be fully paid, but that would slow every other normal transaction.

[dothebeats]

Hmm. If I wanted to stop bitcoin?

This is fictitious but if I have the brain power, I would definitely edit and disrupt the source code and stop all the incoming and ongoing transactions in the ledger. The thing is, I don't have the brain, nor the power to do this. So that's basically it.

[koelen3]

Hmm. If I wanted to stop bitcoin?

This is fictitious but if I have the brain power, I would definitely edit and disrupt the source code and stop all the incoming and ongoing transactions in the ledger. The thing is, I don't have the brain, nor the power to do this. So that's basically it.

Have you saw the movie LUCY (scarlett johnson) , that's what we need ,to use 100% of our brain and that's it