Topic: 3 Bitcoin Doomsday Scenarios I can't find much discussion on... - page 3. (Read 6194 times)

Interesting idea, though my opinion on value is that it came initially from people who genuinely believe in the tech and the possibility of it beccoming mainstream and globally acceptable anywhere.

The rest , like me came after we heard it could actually be successful, and others came after they saw the number of zeros increase.

Nice to review doomsday scenarios but the biggest risk, BY FAR, is that Bitcoin will drop in popularity, be forgotten, and approach $0 in value.

The fact that it isn't backed by anything real is a major problem. In the old days, it was backed by general purpose GPU's with quantifiable market value - NASA would, for example, love to have all that horsepower at their disposal. Now it is backed by specific purpose ASICS that are useless for anything other than SHA  hashing.

In a real sense, the Bitcoin network was running on Gold and has now been replaced with Tin.

I'm going to go ahead and stop replying to a troll, and if it's not a troll simply someone that does not want to learn or understand. Op has a lot of reading to do if he ever wants to even so much as have a grasp of understanding how Bitcoin works. And seeing how he if having problems at understanding even the most basic concepts I'm afraid that might take a few years.

If someone cracked the hash algorithm, or found a cheaper way to compute it, they'd make a lot of money, difficulty would go to the moon, but the rate of Bitcoin creation would not increase. Just like when ASICs came in.

113.9% of them in fact

Ok, I will take your word for it that you merely have a short attention span and have genuine intentions.


You are just pulling numbers out of thin air. I would suggest a majority of Bitcoin users care about the idea and technology from what i have seen.


Perhaps we take a more constructive approach, instead of asking for statistics for something that is almost impossible to accurately determine, and instead promote better security. This will be positive for everyone.

Contribute here or make your own thread encouraging better security practices:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/options-for-securing-your-bitcoin-wallet-858604

P.s... I created a poll for you so you can gather inaccurate stats that have too small of a sample size and impossible to verify since you seem to be interested.

Stealth Code Scenario :- 90% possible

Just gain access to public figures accounts , temporarily detain them and release an emergency update that fixes some flaw.

Here is why it is possible

1) The US has access to 80% of all servers public and private

2) when the need has arisen.....Have they not somehow out of the blue managed to capture anyone they want ? Be it in a day or ten years? This is a government , they make the rules.

3) with over 20 heavily funded and massively staffed security agencies including 3 military and non military ones whose single purpose in life is net dominance, you think compromising the accounts of 8 people or replacing a number of people who go by pseudonyms on the net is a difficult task?

The only reason we have not yet seen any real devastating attacks physical or otherwise is because they thus far are intrigued by the concept and do not perceive any serious threat from it.

While they may not be able to completely demolish the idea and the network, just taking the above measures or simply applying Russia like legislation will result in a collapse of the bitcoin price down to single didgits.

Do not kid yourselves that BTC is out of reach , a lot of nonsense about how it will function against governments has been spouted here by people who are either ignorant or arrogant. The honest truth is that we rely on the good graces of governments that allow us to have such freedoms else this idea would die.

Keeping those facts in mind note that only 1% or less of BTC users actually give a crap about the idea or technology, most just joined when they realised it could be profitable, if and when that ceases to be true,....u know it yourselves what they will do.

I am advocating that moving onwards the community be honest about our position in the world, that is the first step to making the rest of the world join us, otherwise staying in this bubble of over confident arrongance, will lead to sad results.

I am Ukrainian by birth, and I have lived on both sides of the divide ( west vs rest of the world) long enough to know that  even the best ideas , facts and figures fall short when a government decides to use force, let alone an informed well funded and heavily staffed government being egged on by bankers, heavy handed conservatives and Military industries.

Damn straight. More than that. I want to know what percentage of the bitcoin network is controlled by hot private keys, and what percentage by cold ones. I think it should be part of the protocol, somehow.

So how can this be measured? ...


Oooh... wow! Taking comments, made - in computer-time-relative-terms - centuries ago - out of context, even... In April, global hashrates flipped between PoS coins like fleas on a poor old infested dog...  can't even remember I said that. And I will probably forget that I said this in a few months time, when I'm thinking about something else again...

And my short attention span is a symptom of humanity, hence the need for science, or anything useful in general, to record hard metrics on things, to make them useful, and hence my post.

I hold no allegiances to anything, except the notion that all things are variable... let's refrain from getting personal and try to navigate closer to the topic at hand, shall we?


I only have two accounts here... and I've forgotten the login details or pseudonym of my first.

It's not a targeted attack. Seeing as that my Bitcoins will only be worth something in a few years, and I'm frustrated at that, having more time than money, I'm staring at the cracks and sharing my thoughts. I do appreciate you trying to understand them...

This is silly and proves nothing, besides being wrong: it's like saying you can't play chess simply because you can't count to 2^64. Okay, I'll be reasonable: it's like saying that because you can't contain every possible chess game in memory.

Also, you have my lottery comment out of context: If I have your private key, and you change it, then you're safe again. But you changing your private key all the time, obviously maximizes my chances of stealing it... or does it?

Come on! Catch up.


Looks like a cool book.

But again... have you been living under a rock? No encryption needed to get cracked for millions of hosts to get compromised via ssh, which is also secured by various flavours of encryption, including SHA hashes... all it took was a little "bug". How many private keys got changed after that fiasco??! Did you change yours?

You realize that to do a transaction, you need to put your private key into your computer, and if you've put your key into your computer any one of around half a million or more "security researchers", software developers and potential bad guys who have touched the code resident in your computer's memory, have potentially had an opportunity to capture some part of your key in one way or another... anywhere from recording the sound your keyboard makes when you hit each key, up to the hardware or software in your keyboard, browser, OS, or that of the phone your little nephew carried in there a few moments before you did the transaction, you know, the one where he loads new "unlocked" versions of whatever on daily...

I am not poking at the absence of holes in Bitcoin. I'm poking at the holes in the slab of swiss cheese that Bitcoin lives on, and I'm saying that Bitcoin can shield itself against that, even...

Actually, I'm not even poking at it yet... I'm just asking... who has? Where are they? Where are their findings?

No, reading a computer security manual is not the answer, because the vast majority of people using bitcoin will never do that; I'm saying that Bitcoin needs an official security strategy... be it "security through obscurity", or "security through unscrupulous transparency"... whatever it is, it's going to need more of it if it's to weather the coming waves... where is it?

Turing complete devices will never be 100% secure. This is why people should store a bulk of their savings with mutisig cold storage and hardware wallets.

If you really care about bitcoin security I would like to see you promote cold storage and hardware wallets.

Instead it looks like you are merely a PoS shill:


These targeted attacks from PoS shills will not be forgotten and will come back to haunt your projects. Why don't you try and compete honestly through real development instead of creating shill accounts on bitcointalk?

I am really not trying to troll... only one out of more than 10 replies so far has come near addressing any of my questions directly.

Stop assuming that I'm asking what has already been answered. I'm not. How can I prove this to you?! Let's dig deeper...

Yes, I can, because I also have a huge number of private keys, including yours. (Hypothetically speaking) - do you really think that hacking syndicates who have stolen private keys, are going to rush out and use them right away?

Let me put it to you this way: even if I didn't copy your private key the moment you generated it, with some backdoor in your PC software or hardware, all I need to do is to look at the time and date of your first transaction, your OS, wallet software, and any and all other information leaking out from your computing devices, consult my vast database of PRNG quirks, to vastly reduce the amount of time I'll need to crack it.

But cracking, or tracking the crackability of the various parts of Bitcoin or the computing infrastructure it runs on, is the least of my concern. BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE IS FOCUSED ON THIS. So this isn't what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the lower layers that Bitcoin is built on and my concern is with measuring. With gathering metrics. With free and unfettered access to actual collected metrics. All which is wide open, and available, yet there's no concerted effort to gather any in a public forum.

Please address this concern. You seem to think this is irrelevant... why?!

All the encryption in the world won't help you if your key is stored in memory in your computer, and I have access to your computer.

So how many private keys are offline, and how many online? I am willing to take a substantial bet that 99.9% of all private Bitcoin keys are stored online, within reach of a CPU.

Still, when I originally posted, this was not my primary concern... but granted, it seems obvious that its perhaps the most relevant metric, and perhaps the most difficult to collect with great accuracy.


"Pretty much"... Have you done an internet search on "Bitcoin metrics", or "Most important bitcoin metrics"?

According to http://www.coindesk.com/state-of-bitcoin-q2-2014-report-expanding-bitcoin-economy/ about 5m wallets have been seen on the network, projected to be around 8m by December.

Soo..... 5m wallets. How many of those wallets' keys are stored offline? 100? 1000? 10 000? What's that? 0.001%.

Are you saying that's not a significant metric to get right?

Let's see... how many of those wallets are stored on some web-wallet service? A quick internet search reveals that coinbase is on track to keep around 2m of those by December. 25% of all wallets. Yes, coinbase is quite a high value target... so who runs the security over at Coinbase, and what's his experience? How many lines of code has he written? How many layers of security does he oversee, and what's the furthest anyone has come?

Googling for Bitcoin security, around about the first 2 pages only point to one person: Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Is this the only person on the planet who knows anything about securing computers?

So, needless to say, Coinbase sounds like they have pretty beefy security. But if I pull the geolocation records on all their keyholders (how many could there be now, 3? 5? 10? ... I track them down, put them all in the same room, and hold a gun to their head, how many of them will give their lives for a bunch of secret codes? Even this I can gather metrics on... how many of them served in the military? How many of them carry guns? How many of them adhere to a strict routine of visiting friends or relatives? How many of them visit random new places weekly?...)

How many others web wallet-services are there? How many exchanges? How many coins are held in pools and exchanges' wallets, for how long, on average?

Once again, I can almost guarantee you that the syndicates taking down exchanges, do not merely pick these exchanges at random...

Yes, considering this, perhaps putting this information out there is not the best idea.

All I want is a dashboard, showing the vital signs of Bitcoin. The real vital signs, not the surface features that are discussed to here and gone.


Perhaps I should just clear this up: I am not trying to hack anyone... and I am not the hacker. I'm the concerned citizen, the messenger, the coder, the mathematician, the philosopher, who have looked into the future beyond the horizon commonly discussed, and I want the community to look further too... and be better prepared for what's coming.

Because, where there's a way, there's a will.

This thread looked interesting at first, but it became obvious, that the OP is either a troll or an idiot.
Thanks to all the people, who gave great answers here.

great to share, thanks

Useful links. But Bitcoin is neither an OS, nor an open hardware standard, nor a person, yet it runs on all of these, and each is prone to exploitation on a wide scale.

What I'm saying is that these are relevant vulnerabilities with measurable metrics - and that these could and should be measured and could even perhaps find their way back into the protocol itself, so as to make it even more resilient...

Again, you're staring yourself blind at the front-door approach. I have now have thousands of the highest value wallets and their keys. And malicious control of the pools. Now I'm emptying all those wallets into a network of new wallets under my control, too complex for anyone without a list of the exact wallets, to decipher.

Which will be near impossible, if at all feasible, without preparing for this exact scenario in advance.

How often do you change wallets? Every hour? Every day? Every month? How many transactions on the blockchain is purely people changing wallets? How many automatic-wallet-changing-apps are in the public domain? What's safer - a static wallet, or a dynamic wallet?

...Which improves your chances of winning the lottery - always playing the same number, or playing a different number every time? ... See what I'm doing here. Inception. And then reversing it. The bad guys don't. You've been incepted to stare yourself blind at how secure a protocol is that you don't understand yourself, nor tried to circumvent yourself.

And then, of course... not to mention that I have remote agents, and plenty of bandwidth, on my own dark net, and on almost every AS on the internet, and a decentralized control system of my own, that only I can control. Using encryption that is decades ahead of what is mainstream or available in the public domain today.


That's about all you need. What's the potential damage value, per minute, per hour, per day?
Hard numbers. What's the best hedge against it? Someone has worked it out. Is it in the public domain? No.
Is it being tracked in real-time, in the public domain?
No.
Should it be?
Would it be better that only a handful of malicious agents track it... or if everyone was keenly aware of the score?

Hey, the score can even make itself back into the protocol, to beef it up even more. The only beefing-up today is against Moore's law and the size of the network. Do you really, truly and honestly believe that that is enough?

---

This is the initial point of my post. Everyone is going on about how bullet-proof the protocol is, yet there are gaping vulnerabilities that nobody is talking about. Okay, perhaps they're not "gaping" yet, and perhaps not unique to Bitcoin, save for the fact that Bitcoin could potentially present their highest-value taget... perhaps the little talk about it is more a symptom of them not being an issue ...yet.

The protocol is pretty great, yes... but even the ancient Greeks had stories about how fallibility... the Indians were ahead by another few thousand years. Icarus. Jatayu.

What kills you? It's what you don't know or don't see coming. Complacency. What is the weakest link in the chain? It's you - and where you save your key. And your limited knowledge of- and ability to control the hardware-, software- and networks you need to utilize it. Which I started mastering before you could speak your mother tongue, which I stole even before you generated it (if you used my wallet software, or OS...) ... and you're still blissfully eating your steak, pretending that me and my world don't exist, simply because you've not come face-to-face with it yet... once you have, you'll be beyond thinking it will go away if you just close your eyes and pretend, you'll be beyond sticking your fingers in your ears... so perhaps all this is, is your assertion that you have not.


So... what's the reaction time on that? Microseconds? Hours? Days? Weeks?...
How many of the blockchain downloaders are actually running metrics on it? 5? 10? 100? 1000? How many of them are sharing their metrics with the world?...

How many people use randomized pool lists...? Because what if I even engineered those?...

Don't you want to know more?...

BTW... have you checked the p2pool code yourself? Which client and server versions? Downloaded from where? Who can you trust.... ? MUHAHAHAHA.

I'll mail you a postcard from my island... where the only currency I need is bananas and boobs.

I think the only one of these things that is even remotely possible is stealth code.

The others don't make sense on the face of things.
"Computer intelligence optimizing"?  What's that supposed to mean?
The protocol hasn't been "cracked" in 6 years.  The only way
to crack it would be to break the cryptography, which doesn't
seem possible.

Your questions lead us to believe that you really don't understand Bitcoin or how secure open source projects are developed. The problem with answering your questions is that the scope is so broad because their are so many details and different layers of security specific to every facet that it would cover a very large wiki of information.

You can start here :
http://mhuan.name/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/05/ExJobb_Final_Report_Huan_Meng.pdf

and than read more here :

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/

Just keep in mind that Bitcoin having almost a 6 billion dollar market cap, which peaked at over 10 billion last year is incentive enough for black hats to test all security weaknesses of the Bitcoin infrastructure. Bitcoin is constantly being tested and attacked because of this.

For someone claiming to have read into the matter and know a lot about network security you certainly don't seem to know too much about the Bitcoin protocol. As I've answered before, taking down those pools would technically be the best possible thing you could do for the health of the network, since within hours all miners will step over to DECENTRALIZED solutions like p2poool, since none of them want to be missing out on potential mining profits. I wrote this before but I doubt you read it.

Now lets step over to the social engineering part of it all. Ok, so congratulations you've hacked into all of those pools and you can now unleash your evil plans on the blockchain... One problem, you can't STEAL anyone's wallet! WALLETS ARE SECURED BY CRYPTOGRAPHY STRONG ENOUGH THAT IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THE ENERGY OF THE ENTIRE SUN FOR ITS ENTIRE LIFESPAN TO CRACK. Having 51 or even 99% of the network changes nothing about that.

You could prevent transactions of your choosing from gaining any confirmations, thus making them invalid, potentially preventing people from sending Bitcoins between addresses. You could also reverse transactions you send during the time they are in control (allowing double spend transactions), and they could potentially prevent other miners from finding any blocks for a short period of time. That’s really about it

And all of this would be blatantly obvious to people monitoring the blockchain. Miners that notice they're mining on a malicious pool would step over to a different pool, or simply to p2pool. Once miners step over you and your evil plans will be left in control of nice pools.... controlling exactly 0% of the networks hashrate.

There is nearly no profit is obtaining 51% of the network through hacking except for doing some doublespends after which miners stop providing their hashing power to mine for your evil plans. In short, you'd be doing the network a favor since people will finally step over to decentralized mining pools.

What I mean, is, how easy is it to gain access to the largest mining operations and pool control structures?
On the physical layer?
On the OS layer?
On the social engineering layer?

What I mean is, how easy would it be to disrupt the 5 or 6 largest pools, and take half the network hashrate offline? How feasible is it? And as with anything, surely a cost can be attached to that... and a reward. Does it even out? Has anyone done a qualitative calculation? At what price point will it become feasible?

Where is this calculation? Or do I have to do it myself...?