
I’m a Former Green Beret and Here’s How I Would Bring Down Bitcoin - jackgavigan
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/i-m-a-former-green-beret-here-s-how-i-would-bring-down-bitcoin-1456165726
======
matt4077
This reads like one of those threatened authoritarian dictators blaming the
recent mass protests on 'foreign agitators'.

It's also completely generic. If someone important had died, the advice would
include 'murder the key people and make it look like an accident'. If there
had been a crippling bug, it'd be 'introduce critical bugs into the software'.

~~~
erdevs
This was my take exactly. Also, the strategy seems ineffectual, focusing
mostly on influencing discussion communities when the real rub with Bitcoin
has been disagreement among the core devs. If someone's goal was to stop or
slow Bitcoin, you'd think they'd focus their strategy on at least trying to
shape the behavior of core devs and trying to drive wedges among them.

------
bitwize
The first step to winning in Gradius is to get a full complement of options as
soon as possible. ("Options" being the phantom ships that automatically follow
your ship around and fire when you do.)

A friend of mine had the worst ex-girlfriend in the world, and she would use
sockpuppet accounts on social media to humiliate him, as well as make it look
like she was surrounded by loving and supportive friends. I nicknamed them
"options", after the Gradius phantom ships, and left a link on each of their
pages to the Gradius's Option card from Yu-Gi-Oh to show I was wise to her
game, after which she dropped the ruse.

It turns out that each of the "options" was based on someone -- a friend or
boyfriend -- she had offended to the point of no return, and she was also
using them to create a fantasy world in which those people still loved her.

And she only got more messed up from there.

I find it interesting that the strategy outlined here is pretty standard fare
for a psycho ex-girlfriend from hell (and a stupid one at that).

~~~
objectivistbrit
This sounds a little like someone I used to know. Can you say more about how
her personality came to light? Any little red flags your friend initially
tried to ignore?

~~~
bitwize
There were lots of warning signs he suppressed so well that he wouldn't even
tell me about them until years later. She would verbally abuse him, wheedle
money out of him with sob stories, demand to be written into his fiction,
constantly demand his time and attention and threaten to leave him if he
didn't comply, etc.

The first hint to me that something was off was the fact that she, and all of
the options, typed exactly alike in a sort of moronic mix of Spanglish,
weeaboo, and lolcat speak. The particular phrases, abbreviations, emoticons,
and choice of word misspellings were very easy to pick out with enough careful
observation. She didn't even attempt to disguise her style. By the time I
caught on, my friend was already run roughshod by the abuse, and only stayed
with her because he was in deep denial, lacked the courage to leave, or both.
Thankfully he did leave before actually meeting her in person, which
experience would have been absolutely harrowing.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Rather than talking about hypotheticals, it might be better to discuss the
actual problems Bitcoin currently faces. The development team for the most-
widely-used implementation are mostly in the employ of a particular startup.
That development team are refusing to raise Bitcoin's maximum block size –
presumably because it would be contrary to that startup's interests – despite
that inevitably resulting in the strangulation of the currency, as it
introduces artificial scarcity to the number of transactions that can be
processed.

That would be bad enough by itself, but how they've handled disagreement is
worse. There have been several attempts to fork the primary implementation,
producing alternative implementations which support a higher block size.
Official bitcoin forums have now banned discussion of these forks, leading to
an acrimonious community split.

See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118)

Bitcoin doesn't need an outside infiltration to bring it down. Its own
leadership are sealing its fate.

------
matt_wulfeck
> Intensify Discussion: Any news that could be perceived as negative must be
> amplified to extremes and made into hyperbolic worst-case scenarios.

Isn't this kind of thing just natural? Don't reporters do this on their own
for everything? The author's entire paper seems geared into convincing us
there's some dark forces at work. A conspiracy maybe?? To someone that doesn't
care about cryptocurrency it just comes off as... silly.

It feels to me that people who love bitcoins make their whole world into some
binary existence about the currency either moving forward or why it's being
held back because of XYZ.

------
late2part
I love this article - as it creates a plausible conspiracy. But, it's also
possible that these disruptive actions are innate human behaviour in process.

I'd attribute to Hanlon's Razor until the incompetence of natural human
actions can be falsified.

(how do you know I'm not one of the conspirators...?)

------
intern4tional
While the items noted in the article could cause disruption, pain, or
confusion to the community for some time, none of them really seem to be a
linchpin that will actually bring down Bitcoin.

Social, strategic, and unconventional attacks can and do work against a
technical or online community, but they need to be modified to account for the
countermeasures the community will put in place.

Lastly, while the author has interesting experience, that doesn't make it
relevant to bitcoin. A former employer of mine once hired a former secret
services person to run and manage a red team. He was great with physical
security, but didn't understand the technical layer and so a lot of his
efforts went no where.

~~~
StavrosK
I think his point (according to the first paragraph) is that what he would do
to bring down Bitcoin _seems to be already happening_.

------
greggarious
Palantir is an entire company, not a mapping tool. Stopped reading at that
point, this person is out of their element.

~~~
digler999
He had all those advanced "warfare degrees" and "green beret" training, but
couldn't manage to find any WMD's in Iraq... ;(

------
sftcore
he should have used the sock puppet accounts to improve the feasability of
this article

------
yomism
Every time I see a Sun-tzu quote my cringe-o-meter explodes...

