10 ms·

Pentagon Planned for a Bitcoin Rebellion

87 points by jchandra 6y ago

rm2040 6y ago
More like “planning”
vmception 6y ago
> The group, called Zbellion, encourages cyber attacks against organizations that support "the establishment," funnelling stolen cash into bitcoin to make "small, below the threshold donations" to "worthy recipients" and Zbellion members. That happens. Most of the non-drug and non-porn sections on dark net marketplaces are about tools for doing this specific thing, and creating completely parallel identities for bank accounts and investing. Illicit funds in, get crypto, leave crypto into fake/real/not-you person bank account. They even have entire marketplaces for compromised windows computers, so that you can find a computer near the address of someone's compromised visa card, so that it is more likely your transactions will not get blocked because it looks to be in the same area.
- luckylion 6y ago
  They're not about "the establishment" and "worthy recipients" though, they are ordinary criminals, which is great news for "the establishment", because the people that want to scam people or phish info etc are usually quite aware that they wouldn't be able to do that if it wasn't for "the system" at large operating at a very stable level. It's more lucrative and much safer to be a criminal in a stable, advanced society with lots of laws and regulation and little social mobility than being a criminal in Somalia. Successful criminals don't want to see society end or even change massively, they are doing fine.
  - vmception 6y ago
    yeah, I'm just pointing out the Pentagon's creative writing prompt adds an unnecessary reason to something already quite prevalent, suggesting they don't even know it is prevalent.
- ibitcoin 6y ago
  Can someone break this down in lame terms please?
ur-whale 6y ago
http://archive.is/wip/TaFYy http://archive.is/wip/TaFYy
- scared2 6y ago
  Why do you have to share the archive of an article that is just published
  - ur-whale 6y ago
    Think of it as future-proof snapshot. Also, the archive link won't show you the "I've turned off my ad blocker" popup.
dhosek 6y ago
A college friend teaches at the Naval War College. Most of these "Pentagon planned for X" stories are breathless reporting on some scenario put together by a low-level officer as a training exercise. Often some component is something "hot" in the culture at the moment to make the training exercise more compelling for trainees. This is also why there was, for example, pentagon "plans" for a zombie apocalypse, etc.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  Reminds me of a story that made it onto HN some months (years maybe? how time flies) back about an entrance exam prompt to some British university program requiring the candidate to craft a message defending some unsavory deed on the part of the UK government. That kind of "gaming" is super-common and very valuable in (for example) political science circles, so wasn't, per se, a bit weird or bad or even unusual, but was made to seem so for a headline. [EDIT] specifically I think the prompt was something like "It's 10 years in the future, such-and-such party has control of government and can be assumed to hold policy positions basically the same as they do now. General world situation is X. The government has just violently put down mass protests over [something]. Craft a statement for the prime minister defending these actions as necessary for the preservation of the government and protection of general welfare." Which is a completely normal—if simple—sort of poli-sci exercise.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    It was about Eton, a private high school, and the "unsavory deed" shooting by the Army of protestors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21628900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21628900
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      Yeah, that's the one. Fake "controversy" playing on ignorance.
      - NicolasGorden 6y ago
vslira 6y ago
So, from the comments, it's not a real action plan, more like a scenario for case analysis. Which is a shame. I'd really like to read about how well blockchain technology -- which is based on very transparent p2p communication -- would fare against the NSA or the Great Chinese Firewall if the US or China actually wanted to stop it.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  The whole public transaction log makes it easy to trace every transaction made by a person, especially in widespread use. If you want to stop bitcoin, making using it a crime and then set up false flag merchants (or give immunity to merchants for cooperating) and it becomes trivial to track individuals. And as for p2p communication, again, easy to find and charge anybody participating in the network. Alternatively, don't make bitcoin illegal, just heavily use it to track and arrest people using it for already illegal things, preferably in a shock and awe way where you make a big show of arresting a bunch of criminals at once and then brag in the media about how bitcoin made it all possible. Bitcoin is terrible at privacy unless you're trying really hard to conceal your identity.
  - lawn 6y ago
    If you're serious about privacy you should probably use Monero instead of Bitcoin.
    - colechristensen 6y ago
      If you're serious about privacy, use cash. And know that actively trying to hide the sources and flows of money can be a crime, even if you're not doing anything criminal with the money.
      - lawn 6y ago
        Cash is great yes. But it's not always possible to pay in person, and it can be less private to make transactions in person too.
IAmWorried 6y ago
Holy shit, this is absolutely fascinating. I find it incredibly interesting that this scenario of a "Generation Z Rebellion" was constructed in 2018, and projected increasing tensions until 2026, at which point things would flame up. Yet the current pandemic has essentially forced everybody's hand and put history on fast forward. Maybe, in the end, the pandemic will end up being a strategically good thing for the United States, at least compared to how our adversaries will fare.
- lgl 6y ago
  Yet the saddest thing about your comment is that even in the face of a virus pandemic that sees no borders or races, you still see it as a "good thing" against your "adversaries" as if you're somehow worthier that everybody else in the planet.
NicolasGorden 6y ago
> "global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial... The group... funnelling ... bitcoin to ... "worthy recipients" > The Pentagon war game documents ... revealed after ... Representative ... called for the government to "freeze" the money of demonstrators after country-wide protests > "One of the most important tools in the authoritarian toolkit is the ability to freeze the funding of legitimate political dissent," > By separating the infrastructure of money from the infrastructure of state power, bitcoin makes it that much harder for this type of politically motivated confiscation. People have been using bitcoin to donate to Snowden or get money to people in place like Venezuela. Cyprus happened. Now it might happen that anyone who protests might lose their ability to access banking services. Yet somehow many here think this is just a scenario.
- root_axis 6y ago
  > Now it might happen that anyone who protests might lose their ability to access banking services. What? Why? How? Did you just make that up? Beyond that, if you lose access to banking services then bitcoin isn't going to help you since you need banking services to turn bitcoin into usable money.
  - NicolasGorden 6y ago
    RTFA it's literally in there. Admittedly it says 'freeze the money'. Though I'm really not sure how that's different than 'lose their ability to access banking'. Come to think of it, freeze their money is worse, since that implies losing access to existing funds and the system, not just losing access to the banking system.
    - root_axis 6y ago
      > Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz called for the government to "freeze" the money of demonstrators That is not even remotely close to "it might happen", that's just partisan bloviating from a Florida state rep.
globular-toast 6y ago
It should already be abundantly clear that the current banking system and Western governments are one and the same thing so no surprises here.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
The cheapest way to deal with a Bitcoin rebellion is to use some of the military budget and buy and run Bitcoin miners to dominate the chain and then do stuff like double spending, etc to undermine confidence in Bitcoin.
- dmichulke 6y ago
  Wouldn't that technically be a fork? The other miners are surely free not to accept blocks with double spends, no?
  - lawn 6y ago
    No. As long as you'd have more than 50% of hashrate you will win in the long run and you're free to reverse transactions and double spend as you choose.
    - dmichulke 6y ago
      So you're saying they just accept a block because it's in the longest chain and don't check for double-spends? I have a hard time believing that given that cost for checking should be extremely low relative to creating a valid block. Never checked the source though
      - lawn 6y ago
        No, they do check for double-spends, but the transactions you reverse are now in the shorter chain and no longer exist in the history when you follow the longest chain. Say for example you have these blocks: b1 <- b2 <- b3 And you have a transaction t in b2 that you want to reverse. Then you build another chain starting with b1 like so: b1 <- b2' <- b3' <- b4' Where you double-spend t in b2'. The miners thinks that both b2 and b2' are valid. When they choose to switch from the b2 chain to the b2' chain, it will seem like all transactions in b2 and b3 just disappear (unless included in the other chain of course). Does that make sense?
        6y ago
papito 6y ago
In which scenario is the Secretary of Defense required to inspect a public bathroom?
kim0 6y ago
Tracking funds across a transparent ledger like Bitcoin is unfortunately too easy. After going after individuals is trivial. Would love to know if they're also planning to attack more private options decentralized networks like Monero!
asymmetric 6y ago
mods: The original (better) article is at https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/
diegoperini 6y ago
If software world managed to create esoteric languages like brainfuck, expect from any military to study a hypothetical spontaneous human combustion pandemic. The exercise itself is useful for learning despite the comical outcome or product.
WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
Change bitcoin to its successor and "theft" and selective redistribution to transference and automatic redistribution along a curve back to labor or into public works, and I think you've got something that probably should destroy finance, insurance, etc.

87 points by jchandra 6y ago

rm2040 6y ago

More like “planning”

> The group, called Zbellion, encourages cyber attacks against organizations that support "the establishment," funnelling stolen cash into bitcoin to make "small, below the threshold donations" to "worthy recipients" and Zbellion members. That happens. Most of the non-drug and non-porn sections on dark net marketplaces are about tools for doing this specific thing, and creating completely parallel identities for bank accounts and investing. Illicit funds in, get crypto, leave crypto into fake/real/not-you person bank account. They even have entire marketplaces for compromised windows computers, so that you can find a computer near the address of someone's compromised visa card, so that it is more likely your transactions will not get blocked because it looks to be in the same area.

luckylion 6y ago
They're not about "the establishment" and "worthy recipients" though, they are ordinary criminals, which is great news for "the establishment", because the people that want to scam people or phish info etc are usually quite aware that they wouldn't be able to do that if it wasn't for "the system" at large operating at a very stable level. It's more lucrative and much safer to be a criminal in a stable, advanced society with lots of laws and regulation and little social mobility than being a criminal in Somalia. Successful criminals don't want to see society end or even change massively, they are doing fine.
- vmception 6y ago
  yeah, I'm just pointing out the Pentagon's creative writing prompt adds an unnecessary reason to something already quite prevalent, suggesting they don't even know it is prevalent.
ibitcoin 6y ago
Can someone break this down in lame terms please?

ur-whale 6y ago

http://archive.is/wip/TaFYy http://archive.is/wip/TaFYy

scared2 6y ago
Why do you have to share the archive of an article that is just published
- ur-whale 6y ago
  Think of it as future-proof snapshot. Also, the archive link won't show you the "I've turned off my ad blocker" popup.

dhosek 6y ago

A college friend teaches at the Naval War College. Most of these "Pentagon planned for X" stories are breathless reporting on some scenario put together by a low-level officer as a training exercise. Often some component is something "hot" in the culture at the moment to make the training exercise more compelling for trainees. This is also why there was, for example, pentagon "plans" for a zombie apocalypse, etc.

karatestomp 6y ago
Reminds me of a story that made it onto HN some months (years maybe? how time flies) back about an entrance exam prompt to some British university program requiring the candidate to craft a message defending some unsavory deed on the part of the UK government. That kind of "gaming" is super-common and very valuable in (for example) political science circles, so wasn't, per se, a bit weird or bad or even unusual, but was made to seem so for a headline. [EDIT] specifically I think the prompt was something like "It's 10 years in the future, such-and-such party has control of government and can be assumed to hold policy positions basically the same as they do now. General world situation is X. The government has just violently put down mass protests over [something]. Craft a statement for the prime minister defending these actions as necessary for the preservation of the government and protection of general welfare." Which is a completely normal—if simple—sort of poli-sci exercise.
- arethuza 6y ago
  It was about Eton, a private high school, and the "unsavory deed" shooting by the Army of protestors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21628900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21628900
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    Yeah, that's the one. Fake "controversy" playing on ignorance.
    - NicolasGorden 6y ago

vslira 6y ago

So, from the comments, it's not a real action plan, more like a scenario for case analysis. Which is a shame. I'd really like to read about how well blockchain technology -- which is based on very transparent p2p communication -- would fare against the NSA or the Great Chinese Firewall if the US or China actually wanted to stop it.

colechristensen 6y ago
The whole public transaction log makes it easy to trace every transaction made by a person, especially in widespread use. If you want to stop bitcoin, making using it a crime and then set up false flag merchants (or give immunity to merchants for cooperating) and it becomes trivial to track individuals. And as for p2p communication, again, easy to find and charge anybody participating in the network. Alternatively, don't make bitcoin illegal, just heavily use it to track and arrest people using it for already illegal things, preferably in a shock and awe way where you make a big show of arresting a bunch of criminals at once and then brag in the media about how bitcoin made it all possible. Bitcoin is terrible at privacy unless you're trying really hard to conceal your identity.
- lawn 6y ago
  If you're serious about privacy you should probably use Monero instead of Bitcoin.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    If you're serious about privacy, use cash. And know that actively trying to hide the sources and flows of money can be a crime, even if you're not doing anything criminal with the money.
    - lawn 6y ago
      Cash is great yes. But it's not always possible to pay in person, and it can be less private to make transactions in person too.

IAmWorried 6y ago

Holy shit, this is absolutely fascinating. I find it incredibly interesting that this scenario of a "Generation Z Rebellion" was constructed in 2018, and projected increasing tensions until 2026, at which point things would flame up. Yet the current pandemic has essentially forced everybody's hand and put history on fast forward. Maybe, in the end, the pandemic will end up being a strategically good thing for the United States, at least compared to how our adversaries will fare.

lgl 6y ago
Yet the saddest thing about your comment is that even in the face of a virus pandemic that sees no borders or races, you still see it as a "good thing" against your "adversaries" as if you're somehow worthier that everybody else in the planet.

NicolasGorden 6y ago

> "global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial... The group... funnelling ... bitcoin to ... "worthy recipients" > The Pentagon war game documents ... revealed after ... Representative ... called for the government to "freeze" the money of demonstrators after country-wide protests > "One of the most important tools in the authoritarian toolkit is the ability to freeze the funding of legitimate political dissent," > By separating the infrastructure of money from the infrastructure of state power, bitcoin makes it that much harder for this type of politically motivated confiscation. People have been using bitcoin to donate to Snowden or get money to people in place like Venezuela. Cyprus happened. Now it might happen that anyone who protests might lose their ability to access banking services. Yet somehow many here think this is just a scenario.

root_axis 6y ago
> Now it might happen that anyone who protests might lose their ability to access banking services. What? Why? How? Did you just make that up? Beyond that, if you lose access to banking services then bitcoin isn't going to help you since you need banking services to turn bitcoin into usable money.
- NicolasGorden 6y ago
  RTFA it's literally in there. Admittedly it says 'freeze the money'. Though I'm really not sure how that's different than 'lose their ability to access banking'. Come to think of it, freeze their money is worse, since that implies losing access to existing funds and the system, not just losing access to the banking system.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    > Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz called for the government to "freeze" the money of demonstrators That is not even remotely close to "it might happen", that's just partisan bloviating from a Florida state rep.

globular-toast 6y ago

It should already be abundantly clear that the current banking system and Western governments are one and the same thing so no surprises here.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

The cheapest way to deal with a Bitcoin rebellion is to use some of the military budget and buy and run Bitcoin miners to dominate the chain and then do stuff like double spending, etc to undermine confidence in Bitcoin.

dmichulke 6y ago
Wouldn't that technically be a fork? The other miners are surely free not to accept blocks with double spends, no?
- lawn 6y ago
  No. As long as you'd have more than 50% of hashrate you will win in the long run and you're free to reverse transactions and double spend as you choose.
  - dmichulke 6y ago
    So you're saying they just accept a block because it's in the longest chain and don't check for double-spends? I have a hard time believing that given that cost for checking should be extremely low relative to creating a valid block. Never checked the source though
    - lawn 6y ago
      No, they do check for double-spends, but the transactions you reverse are now in the shorter chain and no longer exist in the history when you follow the longest chain. Say for example you have these blocks: b1 <- b2 <- b3 And you have a transaction t in b2 that you want to reverse. Then you build another chain starting with b1 like so: b1 <- b2' <- b3' <- b4' Where you double-spend t in b2'. The miners thinks that both b2 and b2' are valid. When they choose to switch from the b2 chain to the b2' chain, it will seem like all transactions in b2 and b3 just disappear (unless included in the other chain of course). Does that make sense?
      - 6y ago

papito 6y ago

In which scenario is the Secretary of Defense required to inspect a public bathroom?

kim0 6y ago

Tracking funds across a transparent ledger like Bitcoin is unfortunately too easy. After going after individuals is trivial. Would love to know if they're also planning to attack more private options decentralized networks like Monero!

asymmetric 6y ago

mods: The original (better) article is at https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/

diegoperini 6y ago

If software world managed to create esoteric languages like brainfuck, expect from any military to study a hypothetical spontaneous human combustion pandemic. The exercise itself is useful for learning despite the comical outcome or product.

WealthVsSurvive 6y ago

Change bitcoin to its successor and "theft" and selective redistribution to transference and automatic redistribution along a curve back to labor or into public works, and I think you've got something that probably should destroy finance, insurance, etc.