6 ms·

I’m a Former Green Beret and Here’s How I Would Bring Down Bitcoin

46 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

matt_wulfeck 11y ago
> Intensify Discussion: Any news that could be perceived as negative must be amplified to extremes and made into hyperbolic worst-case scenarios. Isn't this kind of thing just natural? Don't reporters do this on their own for everything? The author's entire paper seems geared into convincing us there's some dark forces at work. A conspiracy maybe?? To someone that doesn't care about cryptocurrency it just comes off as... silly. It feels to me that people who love bitcoins make their whole world into some binary existence about the currency either moving forward or why it's being held back because of XYZ.
matt4077 11y ago
This reads like one of those threatened authoritarian dictators blaming the recent mass protests on 'foreign agitators'. It's also completely generic. If someone important had died, the advice would include 'murder the key people and make it look like an accident'. If there had been a crippling bug, it'd be 'introduce critical bugs into the software'.
- mcbrown 11y ago
  Well you're just engaging in the tactic of discrediting the defenders. You must be one of the foreign agitators threatening the community. Then again, the authoritarian dictator has to play up the credibility of the foreign agitators so they seem more real. I must be a member of the regime trying to consolidate power. It's bots and sock puppets all the way down.
- erdevs 11y ago
  This was my take exactly. Also, the strategy seems ineffectual, focusing mostly on influencing discussion communities when the real rub with Bitcoin has been disagreement among the core devs. If someone's goal was to stop or slow Bitcoin, you'd think they'd focus their strategy on at least trying to shape the behavior of core devs and trying to drive wedges among them.
late2part 11y ago
I love this article - as it creates a plausible conspiracy. But, it's also possible that these disruptive actions are innate human behaviour in process. I'd attribute to Hanlon's Razor until the incompetence of natural human actions can be falsified. (how do you know I'm not one of the conspirators...?)
intern4tional 11y ago
While the items noted in the article could cause disruption, pain, or confusion to the community for some time, none of them really seem to be a linchpin that will actually bring down Bitcoin. Social, strategic, and unconventional attacks can and do work against a technical or online community, but they need to be modified to account for the countermeasures the community will put in place. Lastly, while the author has interesting experience, that doesn't make it relevant to bitcoin. A former employer of mine once hired a former secret services person to run and manage a red team. He was great with physical security, but didn't understand the technical layer and so a lot of his efforts went no where.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  I think his point (according to the first paragraph) is that what he would do to bring down Bitcoin seems to be already happening.
bitwize 11y ago
The first step to winning in Gradius is to get a full complement of options as soon as possible. ("Options" being the phantom ships that automatically follow your ship around and fire when you do.) A friend of mine had the worst ex-girlfriend in the world, and she would use sockpuppet accounts on social media to humiliate him, as well as make it look like she was surrounded by loving and supportive friends. I nicknamed them "options", after the Gradius phantom ships, and left a link on each of their pages to the Gradius's Option card from Yu-Gi-Oh to show I was wise to her game, after which she dropped the ruse. It turns out that each of the "options" was based on someone -- a friend or boyfriend -- she had offended to the point of no return, and she was also using them to create a fantasy world in which those people still loved her. And she only got more messed up from there. I find it interesting that the strategy outlined here is pretty standard fare for a psycho ex-girlfriend from hell (and a stupid one at that).
- objectivistbrit 11y ago
  This sounds a little like someone I used to know. Can you say more about how her personality came to light? Any little red flags your friend initially tried to ignore?
  - bitwize 11y ago
    There were lots of warning signs he suppressed so well that he wouldn't even tell me about them until years later. She would verbally abuse him, wheedle money out of him with sob stories, demand to be written into his fiction, constantly demand his time and attention and threaten to leave him if he didn't comply, etc. The first hint to me that something was off was the fact that she, and all of the options, typed exactly alike in a sort of moronic mix of Spanglish, weeaboo, and lolcat speak. The particular phrases, abbreviations, emoticons, and choice of word misspellings were very easy to pick out with enough careful observation. She didn't even attempt to disguise her style. By the time I caught on, my friend was already run roughshod by the abuse, and only stayed with her because he was in deep denial, lacked the courage to leave, or both. Thankfully he did leave before actually meeting her in person, which experience would have been absolutely harrowing.
greggarious 11y ago
Palantir is an entire company, not a mapping tool. Stopped reading at that point, this person is out of their element.
- digler999 11y ago
  He had all those advanced "warfare degrees" and "green beret" training, but couldn't manage to find any WMD's in Iraq... ;(
sftcore 11y ago
he should have used the sock puppet accounts to improve the feasability of this article
yomism 11y ago
Every time I see a Sun-tzu quote my cringe-o-meter explodes...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Rather than talking about hypotheticals, it might be better to discuss the actual problems Bitcoin currently faces. The development team for the most-widely-used implementation are mostly in the employ of a particular startup. That development team are refusing to raise Bitcoin's maximum block size – presumably because it would be contrary to that startup's interests – despite that inevitably resulting in the strangulation of the currency, as it introduces artificial scarcity to the number of transactions that can be processed. That would be bad enough by itself, but how they've handled disagreement is worse. There have been several attempts to fork the primary implementation, producing alternative implementations which support a higher block size. Official bitcoin forums have now banned discussion of these forks, leading to an acrimonious community split. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 Bitcoin doesn't need an outside infiltration to bring it down. Its own leadership are sealing its fate.

46 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

> Intensify Discussion: Any news that could be perceived as negative must be amplified to extremes and made into hyperbolic worst-case scenarios. Isn't this kind of thing just natural? Don't reporters do this on their own for everything? The author's entire paper seems geared into convincing us there's some dark forces at work. A conspiracy maybe?? To someone that doesn't care about cryptocurrency it just comes off as... silly. It feels to me that people who love bitcoins make their whole world into some binary existence about the currency either moving forward or why it's being held back because of XYZ.

matt4077 11y ago

This reads like one of those threatened authoritarian dictators blaming the recent mass protests on 'foreign agitators'. It's also completely generic. If someone important had died, the advice would include 'murder the key people and make it look like an accident'. If there had been a crippling bug, it'd be 'introduce critical bugs into the software'.

mcbrown 11y ago
Well you're just engaging in the tactic of discrediting the defenders. You must be one of the foreign agitators threatening the community. Then again, the authoritarian dictator has to play up the credibility of the foreign agitators so they seem more real. I must be a member of the regime trying to consolidate power. It's bots and sock puppets all the way down.
erdevs 11y ago
This was my take exactly. Also, the strategy seems ineffectual, focusing mostly on influencing discussion communities when the real rub with Bitcoin has been disagreement among the core devs. If someone's goal was to stop or slow Bitcoin, you'd think they'd focus their strategy on at least trying to shape the behavior of core devs and trying to drive wedges among them.

late2part 11y ago

I love this article - as it creates a plausible conspiracy. But, it's also possible that these disruptive actions are innate human behaviour in process. I'd attribute to Hanlon's Razor until the incompetence of natural human actions can be falsified. (how do you know I'm not one of the conspirators...?)

intern4tional 11y ago

While the items noted in the article could cause disruption, pain, or confusion to the community for some time, none of them really seem to be a linchpin that will actually bring down Bitcoin. Social, strategic, and unconventional attacks can and do work against a technical or online community, but they need to be modified to account for the countermeasures the community will put in place. Lastly, while the author has interesting experience, that doesn't make it relevant to bitcoin. A former employer of mine once hired a former secret services person to run and manage a red team. He was great with physical security, but didn't understand the technical layer and so a lot of his efforts went no where.

StavrosK 11y ago
I think his point (according to the first paragraph) is that what he would do to bring down Bitcoin seems to be already happening.

bitwize 11y ago

The first step to winning in Gradius is to get a full complement of options as soon as possible. ("Options" being the phantom ships that automatically follow your ship around and fire when you do.) A friend of mine had the worst ex-girlfriend in the world, and she would use sockpuppet accounts on social media to humiliate him, as well as make it look like she was surrounded by loving and supportive friends. I nicknamed them "options", after the Gradius phantom ships, and left a link on each of their pages to the Gradius's Option card from Yu-Gi-Oh to show I was wise to her game, after which she dropped the ruse. It turns out that each of the "options" was based on someone -- a friend or boyfriend -- she had offended to the point of no return, and she was also using them to create a fantasy world in which those people still loved her. And she only got more messed up from there. I find it interesting that the strategy outlined here is pretty standard fare for a psycho ex-girlfriend from hell (and a stupid one at that).

objectivistbrit 11y ago
This sounds a little like someone I used to know. Can you say more about how her personality came to light? Any little red flags your friend initially tried to ignore?
- bitwize 11y ago
  There were lots of warning signs he suppressed so well that he wouldn't even tell me about them until years later. She would verbally abuse him, wheedle money out of him with sob stories, demand to be written into his fiction, constantly demand his time and attention and threaten to leave him if he didn't comply, etc. The first hint to me that something was off was the fact that she, and all of the options, typed exactly alike in a sort of moronic mix of Spanglish, weeaboo, and lolcat speak. The particular phrases, abbreviations, emoticons, and choice of word misspellings were very easy to pick out with enough careful observation. She didn't even attempt to disguise her style. By the time I caught on, my friend was already run roughshod by the abuse, and only stayed with her because he was in deep denial, lacked the courage to leave, or both. Thankfully he did leave before actually meeting her in person, which experience would have been absolutely harrowing.

greggarious 11y ago

Palantir is an entire company, not a mapping tool. Stopped reading at that point, this person is out of their element.

digler999 11y ago
He had all those advanced "warfare degrees" and "green beret" training, but couldn't manage to find any WMD's in Iraq... ;(

sftcore 11y ago

he should have used the sock puppet accounts to improve the feasability of this article

yomism 11y ago

Every time I see a Sun-tzu quote my cringe-o-meter explodes...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Rather than talking about hypotheticals, it might be better to discuss the actual problems Bitcoin currently faces. The development team for the most-widely-used implementation are mostly in the employ of a particular startup. That development team are refusing to raise Bitcoin's maximum block size – presumably because it would be contrary to that startup's interests – despite that inevitably resulting in the strangulation of the currency, as it introduces artificial scarcity to the number of transactions that can be processed. That would be bad enough by itself, but how they've handled disagreement is worse. There have been several attempts to fork the primary implementation, producing alternative implementations which support a higher block size. Official bitcoin forums have now banned discussion of these forks, leading to an acrimonious community split. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 Bitcoin doesn't need an outside infiltration to bring it down. Its own leadership are sealing its fate.