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Comment by axefrog | Hacker News Reader

I find the very idea of doing anything that would undermine the Bitcoin network to be self defeating and therefore highly unlikely. Miners have a vested interest in high prices, and seeing as doing anything which undermines the network would cause a loss of faith in Bitcoin and cause the price to drop precipitously, I can't imagine the mining community would be particularly interested.

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Perhaps there are other entities who have an interest in undermining the Bitcoin network and who have the resources to compete in the mining space.

That would be a very contrived way to defeat bitcoin.

They can already do that with a 51% attack anyway. Maybe I'm being naive, but I agree that I can't see the mining community letting such an attack happen.

It's also realistic to say that if an attacking entity started a selfish pool, there would be a percentage of the population that would join that selfish pool.

It's obviously the wrong move, but just because you're a sociopath doesn't mean you're smart.

I hear people say to me all the time that it's "ok if I'm the only one doing it". If this papers strategy is effective, it is a realistic threat that lowers the bar necessary to destabilize the network. 33% to take over the network, but much less to start the ball rolling.

Most of those entities have ways to undermine Bitcoin that look rather like this: http://xkcd.com/538/

they'd need a lot of wrenches

Isn't the future viability of a system irrelevant when you're trying to game it for money at today's price?

Does a "vested interest in high prices" stop anyone from gaming any economy, or is it a vested interest in current high prices that causes them to?

I would think miners have an interest in their profitability which happens to be exponentially squandered every day as hashing power joins the network, and every two weeks as difficulty is re-calculated.

We had an old CGI host recently compromised for bitcoin mining, a southern China IP had installed a bot: 100% CPU usage for a couple of hours before we noticed. Maybe a few cents here and there for very little effort on their part?

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