4 ms·

I'm interested in collecting strategies for destroying bitcoin. Would anyone like to brainstorm? If the resources of all governments combined were brought to b

I'm interested in collecting strategies for destroying bitcoin. Would anyone like to brainstorm? If the resources of all governments combined were brought to bear on the problem of demolishing BTC, what would be a way to accomplish that? Making it illegal won't work. Neither will buying it – that will just raise the price. 51% attacks aren't effective because all they can do is double-spend coins, not arbitrarily reassign wealth.

raducu 9y ago
Just let it unregulated, it will destroy itself through all of the tried and tested methods that brought said regulations in the first place.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  It's worth worrying that it won't. There's no upper bound on the price, and everyone who thought BTC wouldn't continue growing exponentially was wrong. BTC is gearing up to be the biggest financial disaster in history, and it's better to start planning for it now.
  - IamNotAtWork 9y ago
    Are you just sad that you didn't buy in a year ago? Don't worry, me too. :) Heck, my brother in law who is a lawyer and don't know anything about blockchain bought some and my niece's college education is paid for now. LOL.
    - mrlinx 9y ago
      You should check his comment history, its worth reading.
    - pyvpx 9y ago
      has he successfully converted his bitcoin into "fiat" currency? or does the college accept and denominate tuition in BTC?
      - pbrb 9y ago
        It's pretty easy to do - sell for fiat on any exchange that trades in it, and deposit fiat to your linked bank account. Unless you're unloading millions, then you're better off doing an auction.
      - wakkaflokka 9y ago
        Serious question - is there any doubt that one can successfully convert BTC to fiat? I've done it many times on the major exchanges (Gemini & Coinbase) with absolutely no problem.
        pyvpx 9y ago
        because past $100K it becomes difficult rising to impossible from every person I've directly spoken to
    - deadmetheny 9y ago
      Ah yes, the "you're just jealous" argument, champion to people who are too blind to realize that BTC has serious downsides. Look man, a massive speculative bubble popping is gonna have huge repercussions to a non-trivial number of average non-techie people who read an article about how some nerd got rich on digital Beanie Babies and threw their life's savings at it. Those are the people who are gonna get fucked, not the people over at Bitcoin Idiots, LLC who can afford to lose some fun money betting on Internet bucks.
  - atentaten 9y ago
    >BTC is gearing up to be the biggest financial disaster in history, and it's better to start planning for it now. I can see how one can arrive at this sentiment based on how quickly the price has increased, but I wonder how bad it would really be since the vast majority of Bitcoin investment is not debt based. Additionally most people I've talked to on the matter, only invest what they are willing to lose. Now, if a significant amount of investors get in via margin and other debt-based approaches, then that could be problematic. BTC have seen huge drops in value in the past, how individuals new to the space react is unknown.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > BTC is gearing up to be the biggest financial disaster in history Lots of value evaporating doesn't necessarily make for a disaster. It only does that when it interacts with the larger financial universe in unexpected ways. In countries where people will start missing their mortgage payments as a result of Bitcoin losses, yes, there are systemic risks. In the United States, we're still far from that point.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Another concern is that Satoshi probably passed his coins to his heirs. Whoever they are, they could emerge a de-facto world power since they alone control ~5% of wealth. And there's no way for society to decide that should change. They can act as evil as they want with no fear of losing their coins.
      - dpc_pw 9y ago
        "8 people owns 50% of the world." https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-people-have-same-wealth-as-poorest-50 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/w...
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    The upper bound is how much capital can be deployed to pump it up. It's one thing if hedge funds are pouring in, another if housewives in Japan (if the press stories are to be believed), but at the end of the day there's a finite amount of capital that will be pumped into it, as capital wants to go to other investments, too.
    - hndamien 9y ago
      All that will happen is that the growth rate will slow down. When that happens, the opportunity for people to spend on investments that offer a greater return on investment will become attractive to holders.
CoryG89 9y ago
You go after the exchanges. Don't make BTC illegal. Make it illegal to trade it for fiat currency or vice-versa.
- diggan 9y ago
  When forex trading becomes illegal for the regular Joe, those trades just goes out on the street instead. See USD/Peso situation in Argentina for an example.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago
    Friction matters. Especially for something that relies on a network effect. Banning transactions might not prevent all transactions, but it would prevent many of them.
wyldfire 9y ago
It's virtually indestructible. But global prohibition would limit its utility and likely cascade to diminished investment in mining. But it will likely never go away until/unless you could find an unfixable flaw. For example, a flaw in the hashing algorithm that permits you to double-spend. Unfortunately there's effectively an enormous bounty on that particular defect that no one has yet claimed. If someone did, another coin with another hashing algorithm would take bitcoin's place. More importantly -- what is your motivation? Let's please enumerate the evils going on in the world and rank bitcoin appropriately. It's not worth your time. If you are really in a huff over the energy consumption I think your consternation is poorly focused. Again, let's rank our concerns here. In any case, the best way to "destroy" proof-of-work coins is to invest and promote coins that are similarly effective without proof-of-work. e.g. proof-of-stake coins like Raiblocks.
- empath75 9y ago
  If china decided to shut down the mining operations, that would have a massive impact on the block chain.
  - wyldfire 9y ago
    You're mistaken. The difficulty would re-calibrate and it's business as usual. However, if China or some other government compelled miners to sign invalid transactions, this would have a big impact. This is a weakness of proof-of-work secured coins (note that they also have many strengths that proof-of-stake coins lack). EDIT: I was unclear what I meant by "this is a weakness of PoW" -- the energy signature of concentrated mining operations make them easy for governments to find.
    - option_greek 9y ago
      I don't think a transaction would just become valid if a miner (who mined a block) signs it. Each participating node will independently verify the chain for signatures of transactions before it accepts the latest block. So a miner who mines a block with invalid block will just waste his efforts on it. The chain length is used a proxy to find out a valid chain only when two competing chains have valid blocks throughout but have different lengths.
runeks 9y ago
> 51% attacks aren't effective because all they can do is double-spend coins, not arbitrarily reassign wealth. The only problem Bitcoin solves is double spending. Without this ability it’s worthless.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  This is completely true. A blockchain that didn't prevent double spending could be both very efficient and support hidden transactions without any tricky math.
ad_hominem 9y ago
* Crack ECDSA and forge transactions (slowly/slyly enough to make a hard fork fix infeasible) * Create exchange(s), get users, then implode them ("oops, bad code / we got hacked") (bonus: free $ for black ops) * Create competing coins, either crappy ones just to suck away mindshare or legit one(s) backed by the gov't that grants some stability through gov't capability. Or heck just designed well enough that people want to actually use it for spending. Or just go the more traditional / direct route and create regulations or make it outright illegal, and shut down exchanges and throw people in jail (probably the most effective)
makomk 9y ago
51% attacks can also censor transactions, ensuring that they never confirm and that any block which attempts to do so is rewritten out of history.
Nursie 9y ago
Making it illegal would have a huge impact on mainstream uptake. If it were made illegal across the US and Canada, Europe and SE Asia, that could effectively kill it for most people.
mancerayder 9y ago
DDOS some of the biggest miners while simultaneously deploying a large force of compute power to exceed the 51%, even for a few minutes? This is my best guess, and I'm legitimately curious if it's a believable threat.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  This would be difficult because the hash rate doesn't change dynamically every block, so you'd need to make up all the hash power of the DDOS'ed miners. But you could just do the DDOS, then blocks would stop being confirmed and the value would plummet.
lawn 9y ago
Slowly infiltrate the development team and sabotage the progress from within. Utilize divide and conquer and fracture the community by controlling social media with strong censorship and an army of trolls. Sabotage the development by inserting poison pills, stalling any progress and develop vaporware.
gnopgnip 9y ago
There is a substantial demand for money laundering and purchasing things like drugs that traditional payment processors will not allow. Bitcoin works for this now. Another crypto currency could replace bitcoin, and destroy the value. If the value goes down enough, miners will switch currencies and this could leave bitcoin as unusuable with a frisbee on roof attack. To destroy crypto currencies in general you would need to solve the underlying issues and reduce demand or block money laundering and payments for illegal goods.

raducu 9y ago

Just let it unregulated, it will destroy itself through all of the tried and tested methods that brought said regulations in the first place.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
It's worth worrying that it won't. There's no upper bound on the price, and everyone who thought BTC wouldn't continue growing exponentially was wrong. BTC is gearing up to be the biggest financial disaster in history, and it's better to start planning for it now.
- IamNotAtWork 9y ago
  Are you just sad that you didn't buy in a year ago? Don't worry, me too. :) Heck, my brother in law who is a lawyer and don't know anything about blockchain bought some and my niece's college education is paid for now. LOL.
  - mrlinx 9y ago
    You should check his comment history, its worth reading.
  - pyvpx 9y ago
    has he successfully converted his bitcoin into "fiat" currency? or does the college accept and denominate tuition in BTC?
    - pbrb 9y ago
      It's pretty easy to do - sell for fiat on any exchange that trades in it, and deposit fiat to your linked bank account. Unless you're unloading millions, then you're better off doing an auction.
    - wakkaflokka 9y ago
      Serious question - is there any doubt that one can successfully convert BTC to fiat? I've done it many times on the major exchanges (Gemini & Coinbase) with absolutely no problem.
      - pyvpx 9y ago
        because past $100K it becomes difficult rising to impossible from every person I've directly spoken to
  - deadmetheny 9y ago
    Ah yes, the "you're just jealous" argument, champion to people who are too blind to realize that BTC has serious downsides. Look man, a massive speculative bubble popping is gonna have huge repercussions to a non-trivial number of average non-techie people who read an article about how some nerd got rich on digital Beanie Babies and threw their life's savings at it. Those are the people who are gonna get fucked, not the people over at Bitcoin Idiots, LLC who can afford to lose some fun money betting on Internet bucks.
- atentaten 9y ago
  >BTC is gearing up to be the biggest financial disaster in history, and it's better to start planning for it now. I can see how one can arrive at this sentiment based on how quickly the price has increased, but I wonder how bad it would really be since the vast majority of Bitcoin investment is not debt based. Additionally most people I've talked to on the matter, only invest what they are willing to lose. Now, if a significant amount of investors get in via margin and other debt-based approaches, then that could be problematic. BTC have seen huge drops in value in the past, how individuals new to the space react is unknown.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > BTC is gearing up to be the biggest financial disaster in history Lots of value evaporating doesn't necessarily make for a disaster. It only does that when it interacts with the larger financial universe in unexpected ways. In countries where people will start missing their mortgage payments as a result of Bitcoin losses, yes, there are systemic risks. In the United States, we're still far from that point.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Another concern is that Satoshi probably passed his coins to his heirs. Whoever they are, they could emerge a de-facto world power since they alone control ~5% of wealth. And there's no way for society to decide that should change. They can act as evil as they want with no fear of losing their coins.
    - dpc_pw 9y ago
      "8 people owns 50% of the world." https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-people-have-same-wealth-as-poorest-50 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/w...
- mancerayder 9y ago
  The upper bound is how much capital can be deployed to pump it up. It's one thing if hedge funds are pouring in, another if housewives in Japan (if the press stories are to be believed), but at the end of the day there's a finite amount of capital that will be pumped into it, as capital wants to go to other investments, too.
  - hndamien 9y ago
    All that will happen is that the growth rate will slow down. When that happens, the opportunity for people to spend on investments that offer a greater return on investment will become attractive to holders.

CoryG89 9y ago

You go after the exchanges. Don't make BTC illegal. Make it illegal to trade it for fiat currency or vice-versa.

diggan 9y ago
When forex trading becomes illegal for the regular Joe, those trades just goes out on the street instead. See USD/Peso situation in Argentina for an example.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Friction matters. Especially for something that relies on a network effect. Banning transactions might not prevent all transactions, but it would prevent many of them.

wyldfire 9y ago

It's virtually indestructible. But global prohibition would limit its utility and likely cascade to diminished investment in mining. But it will likely never go away until/unless you could find an unfixable flaw. For example, a flaw in the hashing algorithm that permits you to double-spend. Unfortunately there's effectively an enormous bounty on that particular defect that no one has yet claimed. If someone did, another coin with another hashing algorithm would take bitcoin's place. More importantly -- what is your motivation? Let's please enumerate the evils going on in the world and rank bitcoin appropriately. It's not worth your time. If you are really in a huff over the energy consumption I think your consternation is poorly focused. Again, let's rank our concerns here. In any case, the best way to "destroy" proof-of-work coins is to invest and promote coins that are similarly effective without proof-of-work. e.g. proof-of-stake coins like Raiblocks.

empath75 9y ago
If china decided to shut down the mining operations, that would have a massive impact on the block chain.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  You're mistaken. The difficulty would re-calibrate and it's business as usual. However, if China or some other government compelled miners to sign invalid transactions, this would have a big impact. This is a weakness of proof-of-work secured coins (note that they also have many strengths that proof-of-stake coins lack). EDIT: I was unclear what I meant by "this is a weakness of PoW" -- the energy signature of concentrated mining operations make them easy for governments to find.
  - option_greek 9y ago
    I don't think a transaction would just become valid if a miner (who mined a block) signs it. Each participating node will independently verify the chain for signatures of transactions before it accepts the latest block. So a miner who mines a block with invalid block will just waste his efforts on it. The chain length is used a proxy to find out a valid chain only when two competing chains have valid blocks throughout but have different lengths.

runeks 9y ago

> 51% attacks aren't effective because all they can do is double-spend coins, not arbitrarily reassign wealth. The only problem Bitcoin solves is double spending. Without this ability it’s worthless.

akvadrako 9y ago
This is completely true. A blockchain that didn't prevent double spending could be both very efficient and support hidden transactions without any tricky math.

ad_hominem 9y ago

* Crack ECDSA and forge transactions (slowly/slyly enough to make a hard fork fix infeasible) * Create exchange(s), get users, then implode them ("oops, bad code / we got hacked") (bonus: free $ for black ops) * Create competing coins, either crappy ones just to suck away mindshare or legit one(s) backed by the gov't that grants some stability through gov't capability. Or heck just designed well enough that people want to actually use it for spending. Or just go the more traditional / direct route and create regulations or make it outright illegal, and shut down exchanges and throw people in jail (probably the most effective)

makomk 9y ago

51% attacks can also censor transactions, ensuring that they never confirm and that any block which attempts to do so is rewritten out of history.

Nursie 9y ago

Making it illegal would have a huge impact on mainstream uptake. If it were made illegal across the US and Canada, Europe and SE Asia, that could effectively kill it for most people.

mancerayder 9y ago

DDOS some of the biggest miners while simultaneously deploying a large force of compute power to exceed the 51%, even for a few minutes? This is my best guess, and I'm legitimately curious if it's a believable threat.

akvadrako 9y ago
This would be difficult because the hash rate doesn't change dynamically every block, so you'd need to make up all the hash power of the DDOS'ed miners. But you could just do the DDOS, then blocks would stop being confirmed and the value would plummet.

lawn 9y ago

Slowly infiltrate the development team and sabotage the progress from within. Utilize divide and conquer and fracture the community by controlling social media with strong censorship and an army of trolls. Sabotage the development by inserting poison pills, stalling any progress and develop vaporware.

gnopgnip 9y ago

There is a substantial demand for money laundering and purchasing things like drugs that traditional payment processors will not allow. Bitcoin works for this now. Another crypto currency could replace bitcoin, and destroy the value. If the value goes down enough, miners will switch currencies and this could leave bitcoin as unusuable with a frisbee on roof attack. To destroy crypto currencies in general you would need to solve the underlying issues and reduce demand or block money laundering and payments for illegal goods.