Topic: Can countries highjack Bitcoin? At what cost? (Read 112 times)

This is how terrorist organisations have functioned in the past. Delivering threats of certain days, on some they launch an attack and on some they cause fear.

What if China just wants people to think they have power? Threats are generally more powerful than an actual attack.

If they also launch an attack and say they're only doing it for a day, or if it only lasts a day,  then it'd be interesting to see if anyone would pay attention to it.


For your first point it depends on what other countries would deem reasonable as a sanction on China as to whether they'd get enough hashrate. A lot of countries would probably have enough (idle) power to be able to launch a cou ter attack if they wanted to - especially if it occurred at the weekend.

And no the nodes wouldn't need to agree to it. The miners, traders and users of the crypto would have to.

A lot of older people in crypto here, first off, have diversifications into altcoins so might not care as much with what btc is doing. Retailers have only heard of bitcoin and will probably still likely buy it from the places they've heard of it from.

The new update would just be advertised as a critical one and would be able to pick a block it stops mining the old chain and starts mining the new. (full nodes store the entire blockchains history so it'd just rewind the transactions back to a certain block).

"Governments are actually completely uninterested in gaining control over a decentralized cryptocurrency" - Could you please provide some resources? Or at least intuition?

I can think of many hypothetical reasons why China will be interested in taking it down. For instance, if China is into constructing full surveillance over the payments of its citizens and wants it to be private (namely, occur outside of the blockchain). We discuss a country that bans Google, making high-profile individuals disappear (Jack Ma), and many more stories of (supposedly) irrational behavior.

China has already launched a campaign against cryptocurrencies and is currently assumed to take *regulatory* measures against Bitcoin. Here, I suggest a better approach for China to handle it.

This cannot even happen theoretically. Governments are actually completely uninterested in gaining control over a decentralized cryptocurrency. They will use their own currency exclusively, including the stablecoins of their central banks, or other similar state currencies, or even regional stablecoins of states for international payments.

Let me clarify, adding some additional events that I think will occur:

1. China picks a date and declares it will utilize huge amounts of hashrates for mining Bitcoin for 24 hours (at the cost of ~ 20 Million dollars, per hd49728's reply, which is pocket money for countries), implementing a 51% attack.

2. Scared individuals and institutions sell their coins ASAP, generating a colossal "run to the bank". The BTC to USD rate tanks.

3. The decline in BTC, along with the threats of a player of endless resources, make the mining farms stop mining Bitcoin. They divert their resources to other cryptocurrencies. Consequently, on the attack date, the total computational power of Bitcoin miners is significantly low.

4. Intended to rent huge amounts of hashrates, China finds itself with almost empty mining pools. The attack turns to be significantly cheaper than intended in the first place.

What do you think?

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(a+c) Well, it should be compared with the cost of the alternative. If China wants to ban Bitcoin, it must be because it has something to lose (for instance, losing the ability to spy on its citizens). In such a case, China has everything to gain by taking it down.


In a sense, 700KUSD per hour is not a lot. Furthermore, Chinese miners account for 75% of the world's Bitcoin hash rate(https://fortune.com/2021/05/24/bitcoin-china-crypto-miners-crackdown/); shutting (some of) them down will result in a huge discount over this price. But even at that rate - a 24 hour attack will cost ~17 Million USD, which is pocket money for governments.

Why do you think the chances of such an attack being low (assuming that China *wants* to implement it)?




Do you agree such an attack will result in BTC price tanking? in such a case, the rewards granted for newly created blocks will tank, removing a huge proportion of miners from Bitcoin, undermining the faith in Bitcoin. Then, to get those 50+% will be easier, won't it?

How is it possible to recover a snapshot? Shouldn't all nodes agree to it in a decentralized manner? How plausible is that in your opinion?

It would be possible for a country to build up to 50+% of mining power but it would probably be futile.

There's a good chance a snapshot will be taken and the coin will be reincarnated and functioning with a different algorithm. If this doesn't occur, there's potential some governments use a snapshot to reimburse investors or offer some sort of compensation (especially if large companies or even the government have a stake) - either that or another set of countries would launch a counter attack on the 51% attack being done by the attackers.

1. Cost is too expensive. It is cost to have enough hashrate that is more than 51% and keep it in a few hour.
The cost does not only about equipment cost. You don't need to own equipment to run attack. What you need is hashrate.
The Estimated cost of 1 hour 51% attack on BTC network is $716,072. It is not absolute correct estimated cost but you can refer to in
https://www.crypto51.app/coins/BTC.html

2. The network, nodes will detect the attack and they will react very fastly.

3. Cost is expensive but chance for success is very low. It is not deserving any attack attempt.

(a) Nah, I don't think it will bring any incentives for them, on the contrary, it will cost them millions if not billions, doesn't make sense at all. 51% attack has never been attempted because it's a futile effort to stop bitcoin.

(b) Not feasible, and it is a worst idea to begin with.

(c)  Not that I can think off, again, it's because of the huge money involved. And no country and individual are willing to do this because they simply have nothing to gain.

We've heard recently about China’s efforts to restrain cryptocurrency trading and mining. I wonder if China or other coalition of countries could use the following approach to take Bitcoin's blockchain down (or better yer, to highjack it).


0. Buy equipment to start a huge mining farm (let's call it the highjacking farm).
1. (illegal, but reasonable) take down the electricity in the largest mining farms.
2. The highjacking farm mines using selfish mining of empty blocks solely, collecting coins but forbidding transactions.
3. Repeat 1-2 as needed to make sure the entire public branch is composed of the highjacking farm's blocks.

My questions are:

a) What is the cost of buying equipment for this highjack? Assuming that an alpha fraction of the electricity (and hence other mining farms) could be taken down? How does it scale with alpha?
b) How likely you find this approach to be taken in real life?
c) Do you know of other non-regulatory ways countries can fight Bitcoin (or other coins), turning Bitcoin's decentralization against it?