>b) relying on random numbers being both fair and not being tampered with, even though over-reliance on that is one of the common failure modes with cryptograph

>b) relying on random numbers being both fair and not being tampered with, even though over-reliance on that is one of the common failure modes with cryptography in general. If you are interested I was an author on a paper which looked at the probability of choosing bad nodes, how an attacker could manipulate this and what bad things an attacker can do once they partition you from the network. Many of the countermeasures and security enhancements we proposed are now in Bitcoin making the network harder to attack. > Could someone surround my node with malicious nodes and put me on a forked chain? Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf