= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
sfb comments on Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (100)
What government attack vectors against Bitcoin do you deem most likely to work? (There is probably a discussion thread on the Bitcoin forums on this matter.)
One obvious (and rather covert) method to undermine Bitcoin is to apply sufficient computational power before the computational power of honest users becomes prohibitive. This would permit a wealthy government to perhaps double-spend bitcoins, undermining the entire network.
An overt method would be to join, and then try to track down (via ISPs) the user associated with every public key.
From Wikipedia:
So I would transact the heck out of it and make the database huge. IIRC at the moment every user needs a full copy of the database of every transaction, so if the .gov can make a multi-terabyte database a requirement, that would knock it on the head quite hard.
Also, the last time I glanced at the source code it looked quite ropey, and that makes me think it will have lots of exploitable parts lurking for the right skilled people to find and attack.
Do users need to store the Merkle tree only, or the full database? If they only need to store the Merkle tree, then could the network proportionally counteract the effect of this database lengthening by increasing the datablock length? Does use of a Merkel tree reduce the fraction of the database that each user needs to store?