Cyber Attacks Against Scaling Bitcoin
The somewhat idyllic early years of Bitcoin, during which time nearly everyone agreed on the proper way to scale the Bitcoin protocol in the long term, came to an end around 2013 or 2014 depending on whom you ask. What began as debates in online forums amongst people with seemingly shared goals who just disagreed about how to achieve them quickly escalated in 2015 to information and often criminal cyber warfare from the faction of Bitcoin that did not want Bitcoin to scale by increasing the blocksize.
Between 2015 and 2018 there were over 30 alleged cyber attacks on companies and node implementations who supported the big-block roadmap, with many more reports that have been lost to link-rot and perhaps many more that went unreported. The number “30” may sound small, but remember that each attack affected thousands of people. The attacks included things like denial-of-service attacks which took down internet providers hosting Bitcoin XT nodes and mass email spam that left companies struggling to deliver emails to customers, and they had a chilling effect on the willingness of people with substantial skin in the game to put themselves out there in support of raising the blocksize, no matter their personal beliefs. Despite four attempts to raise the blocksize on the BTC chain, the big-blockers ultimately had to give up and create their own fork, losing nearly a decade of hard work, millions of dollars in infastructure, and the network effect and branding that the BTC chain enjoys.
Having participated in this part of Bitcoin history myself, I have been fascinated by the way in which popular Bitcoin history on Twitter and in the media has ignored and often rewritten what actually happened. At the time I never could have believed that the laughable idea that scaling was debated on technical and economic grounds would become orthodox history for many in the future. It seemed obvious at the time that social and psychologial forces decided the issue. Now I see that what we experienced was living through a proof for the old platitude “history is written by the victors.”
And so, I documented it, starting with all the known alleged cyber attacks that took place during the years of 2015-2018, as a step towards demonstrating that it wasn’t technical or economic superiority that allowed the small-blockers to retain control of Bitcoin, but their willingness to do whatever it took to keep the other side from even getting off the ground.
Support or Contribute
You can support the ongoing collection of information in Bitcoin. contribute to this page by sending me an email with the data, date, and link you would like to include, or your own personal story with as much evidence as possible. I’m happy to list your name in the credits for the entry.
Citation
In academic work, please cite this resource as Makgill, Deryk, “Known Cyber Attacks Against Scaling Bitcoin.” https://makgill.github.io/deryk/bitcoin/data/cyber-attacks. Retrieved [access date].