So that supposed government would have to get BTC at some point. If they speculate BTC to crash in value - after all that is the goal of the attack - they would probably not buy a stash up-front but buy BTC as needed to sustain the attack.
With 4500 tx per block, fees per block would have to be at least $450k.
A significant part of these $450k would have to come from the attacker as it would have to assume that if legit use priced the attacker out, the attack would not be an attack anymore. If 99% of the transactions paid more than $100 in fees, the attacker's transactions would be irrelevant to the mempool and the attacker would have to further up the fees.
A necessity for winning would be that the attacker's transactions would dominate the blocks.
As the attacker is primarily concerned with keeping the fees up - with paying high fees - it could buy its Bitcoin from small sellers assuming at least part of the fees. All the small holders would send their BTC directly to the attacker.
But Bitcoin wouldn't go away. LN would boom. Custodial LN for sure but also Chaumian mints and slightly bigger pockets will maintain their own channels.
This Satoshi guy knew Game Theory well. Almost unbelievably well.
And the adoption curve has been perfect so far as well. Harder to kill over time.
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