The Three Most Probable and Effective Ways For Governments to Attack Most Cryptocurrencies

With so much talk of bad actors and people claiming that certain ones are trying to destroy coins like bitcoin, I thought I might talk about the likely ways governments would attack if they chose to do so. These are my opinions but I also think that one of the three ways im going to talk about are ultimately the way a government would approach just because of resource limits, ect. Each offers a level of efficiency, but there are drawbacks to each method as well. I write this as a way to highlight why decentralization is important in making sure none of these attacks could take place.

The first one is perhaps the most simple, but possibly the most devastating if carried out, which is an attack that exploits a bug in the code. Essentially it would consist of government programmers scouring the bitcoin code or a mixture of another method I will talk about later and inserting a bug into the code via infiltration and exploiting it. Most likely the exploitation would be used over a long period of time to achieve a specific goal without many noticing what is going on. However there are many drawbacks with this method. First of all you would have to hope the bug available, which might not even exist, would be exploitable to your benefit (allowing movement of coins, exposing someone’s privacy, ect), which itself is unlikely. In addition you have to hope that no one actually notices what you are doing any make sure you can be as disruptive as possible over a long period of time. If you do a quick attack, you risk the chain being hardforked and rolled back which means your work meant nothing.

The second and perhaps most likely attack if governments decided to go after bitcoin would be an endpoint attack, or basically go after the exit points in the economy. Most likely since most of the endpoints deal with bitcoin, they would go after exchanges that pull out or accept withdrawals. They would either use a denial of service attack to bring the websites offline continuously, or more than likely bring them down via the hosting service. Many would be back online, but if you cut off any transfers to banks, you would hurt the investment greatly. Even just saying they plan on doing it, would make many weary people try and cause a stampede out the door. This is why we need localbitcoins and better decentralized exchanges. Some countries have already cut off access to exchanges and more could attempt to do this.

The third and final way an attack would likely take place is through infiltration. There are many organizations where you could infiltrate. Infiltrating developers might work, but there are many idealists in the space who would call you out and the chances of your bip being implemented without people scanning over it for any little bit of hint that you are trying something, isn’t likely. The most effective method would probably be infiltrating the companies around the space that support the network, miners specifically who could purposefully slow down the network. You could also DDOS the blockchain with many small spam transactions which has been an effective strategy. Also manipulating community thought through upvotes and specifically placed individuals is a possibility. Overall infiltration is probably the largest area of possibilities and probably a thought that has already crossed many government’s minds. We saw it happen in the silk road bust, so we know the government isn’t above that.

I think the three methods I covered are the most likely avenues of attack, not just for governments, but for any bad actor to try and take over various protocols. It would most likely not kill any of the coins, but it could hurt them for a long time/indefinitely. You could shrink a coin’s user base with one of these attacks. Again I tell you this because you should know what to look for and question people who seem like they are doing shady things.