> Let's say one day China had enough of Bitcoin, and used their essentially limitless resources to gain enough hashing power at will, to block transactions or rewrite them or what have you. Entirely plausible with Bitcoin
That's the Maginot Line attack, at Tim Swanson calls it. The more realistic attack is that China just hacks into five data centers and serves a warrant to another ten. An interesting property of the PoW incentive structure is that there is actually fairly little incentive to protect oneself against hacks, so I would not be surprised if it was fairly easy.
> By hacking enough organizations to take control of their nodes?
The key point in Stellar consensus is that even if enough nodes are hacked, then users can just stop trusting them and switch to other nodes, and so the network would "route around" the damage. With Bitcoin PoW, there's no way to exclude an attacker from participating; you have to accept their work just as much as everyone else's.
Maginot Line attack, I like that. And yep, that's basically the point I've been trying to make in my posts. IMO Bitcoin isn't "trustless" - you need to implicitly trust those with hashing power aren't colluding to screw you.
That's the Maginot Line attack, at Tim Swanson calls it. The more realistic attack is that China just hacks into five data centers and serves a warrant to another ten. An interesting property of the PoW incentive structure is that there is actually fairly little incentive to protect oneself against hacks, so I would not be surprised if it was fairly easy.
> By hacking enough organizations to take control of their nodes?
The key point in Stellar consensus is that even if enough nodes are hacked, then users can just stop trusting them and switch to other nodes, and so the network would "route around" the damage. With Bitcoin PoW, there's no way to exclude an attacker from participating; you have to accept their work just as much as everyone else's.