Hence my specification for industrial scale. More likely: a corrupt data centre system admin or government official. In any case, if you’re taking on the Bitcoin network, doing it with fairly-obtained resources would be silly.
A corrupt data center official has much easier options to attack bitcoin at the network level. For example, a rogue sysadmin at a major Tier 1 ISP could use BGP hijacking to mount a partitioning attack against the network.
See the paper “Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies” [0] for more details on this.
It seems very implausible. Anyone with that level of sophistication may as well look for exploits in bitcoin exchanges and steal the bitcoins directly.
Hence my specification for industrial scale. More likely: a corrupt data centre system admin or government official. In any case, if you’re taking on the Bitcoin network, doing it with fairly-obtained resources would be silly.