Sociological and geopolitical attack vectors

I’ve mentioned before that technological attack vectors of bitcoin are severely limited. It’s common that you hear speculators in the crypto space regurgitating information about centralization and 51% attacks, but the reality is that Bitcoin is secure. So secure in fact, that it’s never been hacked, and likely won’t be in the near future. The amount of security the Bitcoin network has compared to other cryptocurrencies is very significant. It is the longest running and most secure blockchain, period. In all reality, technological attack vectors of Bitcoin are limited and unrealistic. Potential adversaries are incentivized to participate in the network rather than disrupt it.

It is important to make a distinction here, however, as just because there is more direct incentive to participate in the network than to disrupt it, say for the owner of a large mining farm…does not, necessarily, hinder an entity who does have incentive to disrupt the network. In this case, we would be considering either nation states looking to preserve a oligarchic monetary system or rival cryptocurrencies looking to tarnish and/or subvert Bitcoin’s market dominance to capture value for creators/shareholders.

The likelihood of Bitcoin being outright replaced by a hostile takeover is unlikely, as we’ve already seen examples of this attempted by various cryptocurrencies looking to divide and conquer the Bitcoin network. The most notable would be the attempted aggressive hardfork (which ultimately failed and resulted in the subversive Bitcoin Cash sociological narrative that BCH is the real BTC), and far lesser realistic Bitcoin 2.0 bootstrapped networks which saw tremendous, yet fragmented growth up into the end of 2017.

If you have any faith in the various economic and technological features at Bitcoin’s back, then you know Bitcoin won’t easily be replaced by a slightly altered “Bitcoin 2.0” anytime in the near future. In order to capture the vast majority of the value created by the Bitcoin network, the new protocol would have to create and capture value many orders of magnitude greater than the value created by the Bitcoin network and perform its function on a far superior scale, whilst retaining it’s security and usability. This is why any altcoin which has sought to simply capture Bitcoin’s network value by offering “a better, faster, more secure, more fairydusted network” has failed to do so and will continue to fail to do so.

But even a year after a failed aggressive hardfork, projects like Bitcoin Cash still survive, even if aggressively hemorrhaging value. This brings to light the far more important attack vectors of Bitcoin’s security which are sociological and geopolitical. All the hashing power in the world can’t protect against subversion, coercion, and defamation. Nation states or powerful entities with a desire to retain or institute a new monetary protocol will likely shift more and more resources towards these vectors in the future.

This could have a wide range of consequences, which could be as transparent as “Bitcoin is only used by drug dealers” to the more technocratically intertwined “Bitcoin core has strayed from Satoshi’s original vision”. The problem with these types of attacks is their scope and asymmetry. It is similar to the types of warfare that have evolved on the battlefields of the 21st century. Rather than direct, conventional attacks against the Bitcoin network (which are akin to picking a conventional naval battle against the United States, which you lose 10 times out of 10) small, guerilla, decentralized cells work behind the scenes to chip away at public perception and narrative. Whether these cells are working in tandem with one another is yet to be seen, but this could pose certain threats to adoption rates, network security, and geopolitical implications (taxes, B2P, B2B, legality of use, confiscation).

Media narrative propaganda campaigns which appeal to reason, emotion, authority, and ignorance are common in asymmetric warfare. It is important that we remain vigilant of this the future. Education is our most valuable tool.

In a future post I hope to delve more deeply into what these attacks may look like.

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