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A comment on Inside the Race to Build the World’s Fastest Bitcoin Miner. Parent comment

Re:Inside the Race to Build the World’s Fastest Bitcoin Miner by betterunix on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @03:38PM (#5597432)
Maybe you only want to deny confirmations to your enemies. I can imagine that the US government might want to prevent people from making donations to Wikileaks. Maybe someone just wants to destroy Bitcoin, for reasons that are beyond your imagination.

Really though, trying to figure out your attacker's intentions or goals, or their willingness to commit resources to an attack, is a fool's errand. This is even more so when your system has known and exploitable weaknesses. The Germans learned this lesson the hard way with Enigma:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TICOM

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Re:Inside the Race to Build the World’s Fastest Bitcoin Miner by notaddicted on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @03:53PM (#5597527)
I guess that by "Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies" this discussion has officially run its course :P.

I think I agree with the major implications of what you are saying: bitcoin hasn't demonstrably withstood nation-state levels of attack effort, so calling anything impossible is premature.

If the bitcoin network survives for long enough [which can't be taken for granted] this will eventually happen, but it hasn't demonstrably happened yet.

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