Topic: Ruh Roh, bitcoin on the radar of the IMF? (Read 12525 times)

+ Like 1000 for this!

What you don't seem to realize is that the world has lived under a "war economy" since WWII. Like president Eisenhower warned us, the Military Industrial Complex grew out of control and is not just an engine for US wars; but for worldwide wars, that will never be shut off again.

States already can and do confiscate anything they want. They don't need a backdrop of violence to steal your bitcoins; they have one already but never needed it in the first place.

What the states need to steal your coins is simply your lack of care. It's now a numbers game for them, and they're more likely to come after wallets by writing trojans and viruses like the theives that they are. So make a paper backup and use the long passcode on your main wallet... And certainly don't make any large buys from a place like Gox that has your ID on file.



We'll simply make our own internet. Meshnet isn't the only P2P internet replacement being built right now... I'm convinced well see the globe covered in many different flavors of wireless mesh in the next 10-15 years.



Actually I believe that the Congo is one of the nations that falls within the 4 Billion cellphone users that now have the ability to use bitcoin but no ability to use internet currencies like paypal... So I'm actually expecting such places to outpace the USA in bitcoin adoption once they get started.


Hopefully before anyone reading this gets in that kind of trouble, cryptocurrencies will have successfully starved the MIC engine of enough funding that the can no longer find such warfare profitable. (Because states can't gather enough tax money to pay for stealth bombers)



Quoted for Awesomeness.  Economic Hitman is an absolute, world-changing classic that every bitcoiner should read. (I'd prefer if every HUMAN read it, but I guess we can start with just the coiners...)



Yeah, they're never going to win against cryptocurrencies taking any approach like that, and I'm sure they know this.

Sadly, nations and organizations like the UN or IMF don't play on your turf. They do really evil shit like turn the world's media against you and make people disappear without a trace. While I'm sure there is no one or even five people they could use the latter tactic on to hurt bitcoin, the former is still a good option for them, so I'd bet that is what they'll do.

Our challenge is now to get out ahead of them and introduce as many ppl to bitcoin as possible before they start that campaign.

Sadly, the oldschool Austrians, too set in their "money must be a commodity" ways, don't support bitcoin yet. Even Ron Paul said he doesn't understand how it can be money.

I wrote this blog post to rebut them:

Why Austrians are wrong about Bitcoin


This one directly confronts them too (From a Mises student):

Crypto-anarchy and libertarian entrepreneurship chapter 3 (I highly recommend all 4 parts in the series.)



There is no question that the IMF itself is evil to the core... Beyond evil, they are downright Diabolical!

Organizations like that would spit out a non-evil member so fast it'd look like a grasshopper flying out of the back of a lawnmower...



This is the real thing to fear folks; not many on this thread seem to understand that the biggest weapon governments and huge organizations have against the masses is PROPAGANDA.

They won't use their printing presses to buy bitcoins with or even miners... The first play in their playbook is to buy PRESS on mainstream outlets to constantly attack bitcoin.

More "bitcoin finances terrorism" press in 3... 2... 1...

Realistically does KNC have $7 million worth of hardware to sell? How long would that take them to produce? While it was happening what do you think would happen to the price of bitcoin and/or the demand for hardware and rate of hardware added to the network? If some huge player were to enter the market all of a sudden mining rigs become a much more attractive investment.

Naah, it would at most cost a couple of tens of millions dollars. For example you could buy 350 tH/s hardware for 7 million USD from KNC and then perform a 51%-attack.
KNC/BFL could perform a 51%-attack themself if they want to when they have produced their hardware, but of course they wont do it, because they dont have any incentive to do it.

Thanks, i'm just having a hard time picturing the logistics.  This megaminer is unlikely to be a single machine/single ip, so "hardcoded" banning seems at least difficult (picture something like a botnet being used as proxies -- err, something like that), so all this crunch power won't even look like one big lump?  What would the magic code look for?

highly recommend this webinar today and tomorrow to anyone serious about US virtual currency regulation.

http://www.comptegrity.com/

Ya - that would be up to the nature of the code change in the magical hard fork.

Even with no hard fork, the difficulty quickly increases to a point where even their super hashing speed is limited to 2016 blocks in two weeks.  The 2nd scenario I laid out above (attacker starts out mining 1 block per second) has almost reached that point.  They would be back to 2 weeks by the next difficulty increase.

Of course, what's not covered is that even after that is restored, then the attacker would still win the lottery for most or all of the blocks going forward.  So maybe the hard fork is that you can't mine if your hashrate is too far out of line with the rest of the network.  "can't mine" means that such blocks are invalidated by the rest of the network.

Sorry if the question is silly, but if the attacker has the great majority of hash power, what's to prevent him from updating his software & repeating the attack? 

Actually, the factor of 4 limit means that the attacker can initially mine the crap out of coins unless there is a hard fork intervention.  But the factor of 4 takes a pretty quick toll on their advantage.

Given the loose parameters laid out previously in this thread, let's say the attacker starts in with hash power that is orders of magnitude above the rest of the network.  How long does it take the rest of the community to recognize the attack, alert developers, developers formulate plan, developers implement plan and fork code, and sufficient number of miners implement the hard fork? 2 days maybe?  So if the attackers equipment is powerful enough to mine one block in say 10 seconds at the current difficulty, then it will take 20160 seconds, or 5.6 hours to mine 2016 blocks.  After that the difficulty goes up by a factor of 4.  I haven't looked at the underlying math, so what follows is an assumption.  The assumption is that the same attacker would then need 22.4 hours to mine the next 2016 blocks.  Total time so far is 28 hours.  After that the difficulty goes up again by a factor of 4 so (using same assumption) it should take 89.6 hours for the attacker to mine the next 2016 blocks.  The hard fork would go into effect about 1/3 of the way through that.  So the attacker would mine about 5000 blocks in the 2 days required to implement a hard fork.

If we instead say the attacker can mine a block in 1 second, then the scenario does not get much worse.  The times for mining 2016 blocks for the attacker go in steps of 33.6 minutes (2016 seconds), 134.4 minutes, 8.96 hours, 35.84 hours, and 143.36 hours.  In this scenario the attacker would mine just under 8100 blocks before the hard fork could be implemented.

I think a few people in here need to read this about how the target is drawn up:


Note that this shoudl be combined with this statement for full understanding:


Taken from
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty and
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Target

Edit: This means, that no single entity can mess with the difficulty more than a single factor of 4 at a time. This would give people(devs) time to notice that something was up and code/propose a fork.
The attacker could, slowly (at each difficulty increase), bring their hardware online, increasing in hashing power multiples of 4. This would increase the difficulty by the maximum 4x every 3.5 days, up to the maximum achieveable level of their hardware hashrate. It would then be possible for them to perform the aforementioned switch-off, to leave the blocks unmined for (potentially) a long time, which again might require a hard fork of some kind to rectify.

The only reason that Bitcoin would make an attack like this more feasible is because none of the IMF member countries own any BTC. To counter a "speculative attack," the country's commercial banks need to be able to sell their own country's currency for Bitcoin using a central bank. Solution: the central banks need to buy bitcoin (or mine their own).

I took a few classes in money/banking and currencies for my upper-level electives and really, the best features (or worst, if you're a major govt or the IMF) of BTC is that it allows individuals to circumvent currency/capital controls, deepens economic sanctions in situations like US-Iran (Iran can't set up a currency price floor if unregulated trading is allowed via a floating rate like BTC via the internet), and also removes the ability of govts to tax any capital gains in related markets.

As for the UC prof's paper, any attempt on the IMF's part to take over BTC would easily be mitigated when everyone raises their ask prices to obscene amounts in response to the attack...everyone has their literal 'price' at which they'd sell out, but if you were to model the situation from a game theory perspective, the holders of BTC would still collectively see gains while the non-holders and the IMF would see heavy losses.  Essentially, what it would amount to would be another redistribution of wealth into the hands of BTC holders.  And even if the IMF did manage to buy out the required 51%, what's to stop the BTC community from just re-creating BTC, switching to LTC, or switching to another altcoin, etc?  As much as they hate to admit it, the IMF is pretty much up the creek without a paddle on this one...

if that happens the software developers can always make a hard fork,
this kind of situation has already happened in alt-chains.

but if they then switch off this monster miner again and hashing goes back to previous speed then difficulty will remain to be 20160 times too high, it will then take 201600 minutes to mine a block, this is 140 days per block or 2.3 years for 6 blocks. It will take 773 years until the next difficulty adjustment.

If you want to know more about the IMF, this is an interesting read: http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081

/r/meshnet?

Yeah! I actually expect they'll choose to do this at some point. That will make today's price look cheap. Again, the incentives regarding bitcoin urge early adopters to move fast and hard. The first central bank to buy a substantial reserve of bitcoin is likely to see that reserve double and triple in value by the time the news hits. And I would expect China to be the first one to do it, just as a wild guess.

Actually we could run the entire world economy on one bitcoin. I don't think they'd be able to buy them all by any means. The attempt would only make the price shoot through the roof and speed adoption of bitcoin.

Indeed. They're likely to try their best to saddle bitcoin with fetters rather than trying to destroy it because bitcoin the idea is a hydra with a thousand heads, and lopping off the first will avail them nothing except to rile up users who will fight back at the injustice of it with renewed energy. They don't want to make a martyr of bitcoin, they want to make a compromiser out of it, to adopt it into the fold and corrupt it with pernicious choices. They don't understand it, and they won't outright destroy that which they don't understand for fear of provoking the sleeping beast to anger by a misdirected attack.

Ultimately what I expect is for their own activities to lead them into crisis on their own terms and bitcoin to simply take over from the resulting chaos. When the crowd moves they have no choice. It will be a grand day when that happens.