[cocktailpeanuts]

"If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."

- Section 6, Bitcoin Whitepaper

[lxgr]

This implies a "rational" actor in the sense that they would not be willing to effectively set money on fire to hurt other system participants.

A nation state wanting to destabilize or destroy trust in a given cryptocurrency might not fit that definition.

I don't think that's a likely outcome, though – governments have much more economical tools at their disposal achieving the same outcome.

[warkdarrior]

As the article explains, those who would want to attack Bitcoin would not care about the costs involved, since their goal is to destroy the network, not to make money off of it.

[Ieghaehia9]

The big caveat is obviously the word "greedy". A state need not be greedy, nor for that matter needs a group of politically motivated people running a LOIC against any Bitcoin node they may find.