cryptocurrency

[Baugi]

Originally Posted by yyrkoon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

banks are being robbed / hacked into / defrauded since banks exist. everyone still uses banks. also banks are much, much more vulnerable to dos than the bitcoin network.

they've forked? who are "they"? what did it to to bitcoin? not much except boosting its price.

you can fork the bitcoin chain today, it takes a couple days to learn how, from scratch. just like you can create your own paper currency today. it won't matter unless people actually attach value to it (which is a whole different story).

I think you misunderstood what I meant by "dos" (which is fair, I didn't give much detail). I don't mean flooding some node with packets. I mean attacking transactions and transaction histories such that making and storing transactions becomes computationally infeasible. With a sufficient share of miners, you can also abuse the consensus protocol to invalidate a correct branch of the chain. Ect.

There's not an appropriate banking analogy for these attacks because they have the potential to bring down the entire system.

If someone came up with a feasible attack on the cryptographic side of the protocol, the whole thing would be donezo instantly; zero value because your only insurance was cryptographic. This is obviously less likely, but we've broken plenty of provably secure protocols over the years.