Thread by @lndevs

Some additional context to my threads: why my emphasis on knowing the attack vector? If everyone knows how to kill you, doesn't that put you at a greater risk?

The point is that it is ALWAYS possible to attack and destroy an enemy system. ALWAYS. Anyone saying their system can't be killed even in theory is wrong. And when we as Bitcoiners say Bitcoin can't be killed, that's not what we're saying.

Bitcoin is optimized for survivability against attack. It optimizes for that survivability by making tradeoffs (defining its engagement area) in a manner which minimizes its unknown and unknowable attack vectors and funnels its attackers against a KNOWN AND DEFINED surface.

There's no maneuvering around Bitcoin, it's got the one attack surface: hashrate and a fat stack. You can be covered by fires or covered by terrain. Bitcoin's tradeoffs are the terrain, funnelling attackers into its killzone, its hashrate is the intersecting elevated MGs.

The most effective way to attack an enemy system is to achieve surprise. Surprise isn't what I do, it's the chaotic activity my enemy engages in in RESPONSE to what I do. Surprise is what lets me retake the initiative. It creates opportunities for me to close with and kill

Everybody who's ever attacked an entrenched defense knows that your only chance at winning is of you can hit a flank or the rear. If you go where they want you to go, they win.

Bitcoin's design tradeoffs are like giant impenetrable mountains protecting its flanks and rear. If you want to attack it, you have to run through its engagement area to do it. And in the process of doing so, you have at every moment the open invitation to defect to Bitcoin.

And this is the final thing I want to expand on. Returning to our understanding of the nature of war: conflict is always and forever a contest between 2 irreconcilable wills. But those wills are not giant monolithic entities. They are amalgamations of human beings.

It's not just 1 guy accumulating 51% of the hash in an attack. It's tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of people, each of whom is offered by Bitcoin the ability to defect to honest hashing to protect the wealth they accumulate on the process of attacking the network.

The thing that destroys the enemy system is when you can achieve surprise, breaking their coordination and forcing them to respond to a circumstance where you have complete information and they are trying to figure shit out on the fly.

To summarize: everything has attack vectors, the trick for good defense is forcing the enemy to attack you in a manner where you can maximize your relative advantage. Bad defense is trying to defend from everything, because that's not possible, all you're doing is creating gaps.

Bitcoin's security is in it's simplicity, in its design decisions to accept and optimize for security at a specific attack vector. By designing to be attacked there, it closes the gaps of being attacked elsewhere in an unsuspected way.