What a great idea. The attack described there is plausible, and experimenting in the means of defence before it happens is crucial for the continuity of cryptocurrncies.
I think thats actually a solid idea for a crypto wallet on-boarding: simulate each scam that's likely to be tried against you, let you fall for it so you can see how the scheme works, thereby teaching you how crypto works, one exploit at a time.
Yeah it seems like the real defense of an obvious attack is "This Ethereum proof of stake chain with all of the wallets from right before the attack is the new Bitcoin".
That’s the hope anyway - even if the cryptography is perfect against all future attacks (remember they’ve already had at least one flaw in earlier versions) there are still things like timing attacks:
Nation states are some of hardest attackers since they can do things like monitoring network traffic to correlate with chain activity or compel some fraction of the participants to surrender data. I know some smart people work on Zcash but there’s no safety net when all of the transactions are public and immutable.
This is not an attack. If anything, it serves to make the bitcoin ecosystem stronger. A course of anti-bionics if you like, forcing the network to build up safeguards against the lack of understanding of this characteristic of the protocol.
If they did this, the attack would cause a panic, and Bitcoin would likely instantly loose its value, thereby undermining the validity of their own (illegitimately acquired) wealth. Not very smart...
The inventor of Bitcoin once described this scenario, saying it would be smarter and more profitable to simply mine bitcoins legitimately...
This would address some regulatory vulnerabilities, for a little while anywat.
Meanwhile, the real underlying vulnerabilities in the system remain wide open with an ever growing attack surface. I'm of course referring to wallets, smart contracts, etc.
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