Can Governments take over BitCoin?

Andreas Antonopoulos answers to a question at the Texas BitCoin Conference

Question from the audience: Do you have any concerns about a large nation state that has interest in just actively destroying BitCoin? To make their own super rigs and design chips and just throw hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to intentionally disrupt the blockchain?

Antonopoulos answers: I don't worry about that at all. This can not be done with BitCoin anymore. This is something that can only be done with nascent altcoins. BitCoin has achieved a level of computing that no single nation state can overthrow it through computation alone. The effort to do so would require a massive covert operation of chip fabrication, then the coordinated assault that would give them dominance over the next block for ten minutes, until we kick those bastards off the network and rework the protocol around them. They would be revealed, they would have lost a billion dollars doing this, and all they got to do is one double spend.

(Applauds.)

And here is the thing: Long before we get to that point, they figure out that if they just let this stuff run, they can actually get some BitCoin - as a reward. Because the incentive structure actually works. And so, I'm not worried about that. This is the kind of heavy-handed action that can drive conspiracy theory, but is really only applicable on a small scale for a small altcoin. Governments aren't good at doing massive conspiracy. They are good at doing small conspiracy. But massive conspiracy doesn't go unnoticed. And a lot of people are watching the blockchain. And, as I said before: What are they going to do? So, they take over and they fork the blockchain and they go... somewhere.

Right, they have created an alternative Blockchain. Great. What are we going to do? Who is going to join the "NSA-Blockchain"? Anybody wants to jump on "FedCoin"? So we are all going to stay on the old fork. Difficulty will go down. It will get more profitable for the miners who stayed behind, and we'll carry on with our coin and they can go mine whatever the hell they want in the alternative blockchain. They achieve nothing. They can't make protocol changes. As I said: Five constituencies in consensus. And it will take a billion dollars to pull the most ridiculous keystone-cops failure in history. Plus: This would actually require a government that can do IT. Do you think they can organize a massive mining rig?
(Laughs.)

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Original video on YouTube