Topic: Speculating on future prices (Read 1885 times)

It's much much easier to counterfeit bank notes.

it's a true statement. even the most intuitive attack that requires no special knowledge (the 'overwhelm the hashing power of the network' attack) would cost only a few million dollars at present for permanent purchase of the necessary hardware, and far less for rental. there are many cleverer things that can be done, however. for example, analyses by bytecoin and "s" have explained similar attacks that require fewer resources.

this isn't really a threat to the bitcoin technology as a whole. satoshi wasn't particularly concerned with it, as you can see from his last few messages at the forum. but as i and others have pointed out for a long time, it makes any individual block chain subject to more potential kinds of market manipulation that many speculators seem to suspect.

bitcoin will likely continue, but the value in any particular block chain can at present be very easily 'attacked' through denial of service and similar mechanisms. that we haven't seen much more than a denial-of-service attack on mt gox and a few mining pools likely reflects nothing more than the still-relatively-small footprint of bitcoin and the fact that it is not presently easy to profit from falls in the price of a bitcoin at any significant scale. (as i've also explained many times, the true worth of the bitcoin economy is far less than the 'market capitalisation' figure.)

Not to mention, all the attack can do is allow for double spending, it won't allow the person to create new coins. It's also possible to easily recognize this fork and reset the blockchain to that point. Although the logistics of this would no doubt be difficult.

i expect an abrupt end at some point.
some countries will fight BTC with legal threats to the users and miners but at some point they will realize that they can stop BTC with as little as some million $ to crack the 50% network barrier. If this happens over night, there is no way to recover. The block chain will be finished. This rogue subnet will be kept at 50% and BTC is history. Maintenance will quickly go down as running a miner with 0 output will not pay off for most of the other users. This person behind such an attack would not even have to justify his action and could well be some rich guy protecting his hard earned dollars from becoming obsolete.

i expect an abrupt end at some point.
some countries will fight BTC with legal threats to the users and miners but at some point they will realize that they can stop BTC with as little as some million $ to crack the 50% network barrier. If this happens over night, there is no way to recover. The block chain will be finished. This rogue subnet will be kept at 50% and BTC is history. Maintenance will quickly go down as running a miner with 0 output will not pay off for most of the other users. This person behind such an attack would not even have to justify his action and could well be some rich guy protecting his hard earned dollars from becoming obsolete.