[michaniskin]

Exactly. Also the carrot is far more effective and palatable to citizens than the stick. The US government could deploy the attack described in the article under the guise of a stimulus program, with their hands completely clean. No legislation required, the Fed would just need to print a little fiat from the money printer and everyone is happy.

The government is happy because their fiat monetary system is secure from any threat crypto poses, bitcoiners are happy because the Fed buys their bitcoin for fiat at a good rate, the miners are happy because they got to sell their assets to the Fed for a sweet pile of fiat.

The only people crying is the middle class who bears the burden of all this currency debasement. I think we have more empirical data than we'd ever need to predict that nobody who matters politically cares about the tears of the middle class.

[mikeblackson]

One more thing that's overlooked, the nodes control the Bitcoin network, not miners. In the face of a 51% attack, consensus would be reached that banning malicious miners is in the interest of the majority of node owners.

They would fork Bitcoin and the Fed would burn a ton of money with very little to show for it. The miners they bribed would pile into the non-Fed controlled fork using the Fed funds they received. The network may actually grow after this kind of attack is successfully sidestepped purely from the Streisand Effect and the corrective action proving what people theorized about the difficulty of censoring the bitcoin network.

[michaniskin]

But that's just turtles all the way down. The Fed can mine that forked chain even more easily than the original one.

When one actor has a money printer they can use the permissionless, decentralized nature of the bitcoin network as a weapon. It's a vulnerability they can exploit.

[michaniskin]

What prevents the Fed from operating as many nodes as they need to overrule the "honest" node operators?