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Just as a fun hypothetical to think about... an effective way to crack down on cryptocurrencies would be to do it under the table. Don't make any official polic
by rspeele 6y ago
Just as a fun hypothetical to think about... an effective way to crack down on cryptocurrencies would be to do it under the table. Don't make any official policy about crypto other than recommending that US citizens don't invest in it. Attack the crypto ecosystem the way they attacked Iranian centrifuges. The damage is done by the CIA and NSA, not the SEC and FBI.
The goal is not to make it impossible to use crypto but to make it so untrustworthy that nobody wants to touch it. Host mirrors of popular software wallets with hidden malware. Add backdoors to some hardware wallets at the factory. Create trojans that sit quietly and harmlessly until you try to deposit your coins at an exchange, at which point, unbeknownst to you, your compromised browser is displaying the CIA's bitcoin address instead of the exchange's as the place to send your coins. Make smart contracts with increasingly clever obfuscated time bomb backdoors. And it all comes with easy plausible deniability, since any of these tricks could just as well be regular old crypto thieves, highly motivated by the massive "bug bounty" on any exploit, including social engineering, that lets them steal coins.
Of course, the backlash if this was ever found out would be immense. It would basically be the US government operating a cybercrime organization. Many of the victims would likely be US citizens speculating in crypto. It wouldn't be worth it unless the powers that be decided crypto is THAT dangerous to the status quo.
- ttul 6y agoWhat's to say CIA and others aren't already operating all sorts of crypto infrastructure? I absolutely guarantee they are. The people who run the financial system are a different group and would not necessarily be aware of what the three-letter agencies are doing.
- RealityVoid 6y agoSo just... like... what scammers are currently doing?
- rspeele 6y agoYep, just with a stuxnet level of sophistication.
- postalrat 6y agoThey could throw a ton of money into mining, raise the difficulty to some absurd number, then cut it. Rinse and repeat.
- hudon 6y agoIndeed, and this may already be ongoing. Programmers find a handful of vulnerabilities in core Bitcoin software every year [0], and there is no way for us to know if those bugs were planted intentionally. Some of these bugs caused the supply inflation to be wildly different than what is claimed (so much for "there can only less than 21mm coins"). We also don't know what bugs currently exist in the software that are or will be exploited. We also don't know if any of the core contributors and influencers in the project actually work for the CIA/NSA/PRC/etc. [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
- seriousquestion 6y agoLike the NSA and Snowden, there would be backlash, but with little to no actual effect. Business continues as usual.
- intricatedetail 6y agoThey could get a few supercomputers and sneak in illegal content into blockchain then everyone having a copy of it would be risking jail.