Doctor Matthew Green, part of the team that created Zcash, stated in a debate that if there were a malicious party willing to spend $7 billion USD it could start a cyber attack that could crash the network, effectively making it impossible for any transactions to be processed by the network.
However that would require the resources (power, money) of a nation-state or some secret billionaire to get the ball rolling, and since there is no monetary incentive it would possibly be for malicious reasons.
The way this Denial of Service (DoS) would be done is like a 51% attack, where if some entity spent $7 billion USD to create empty blocks it could flood the system. Therefore, that would stop other transactions from being validated and “deny service” to others wanting to use the network. That amount of money spent would produce the largest cumulative difficulty chain, with blocks that are empty (which is valid).
DoS attack to Bitcoin: the end?
Since a prolonged attack will be so expensive in both power and monetary cost it would be impossible to sustain it indefinitely. This means that it wouldn’t necessarily bring Bitcoin (BTC) down completely, but the price will probably drop temporarily and people won’t be able to use the network until the attack is over.
There are some counter measures that can be implemented to prevent instances like these. Project horizon created one such solution after they were hit by a 51% attack. Because a 51 percent attack requires a miner to produce blocks in secret before posting them to the blockchain, they added a delay penalty if a block takes too long to be created. Other methods include adding an element of Proof-of-Stake so that members that don’t own any of the digital asset can’t “grief” the network.
The way blockchain is designed also intrinsically helps against standard DoS attacks according to Alexandre Francois of PenTest Magazine.
For starters, it eliminates the risk of having a single point of failure. It can maintain a list of compromised IPs in its ledger, and this would be resistant to disruption attempts. As soon as a server with the list is compromised, a user can switch to any other node on the network to access a safe copy.
Alexandre Francois, PenTest Magazine
Bitcoin Mining Pools Have Been Targeted in The Past
A report published by U.S. technology company Neustar, for example, estimates a 200% increase in DoS events against their customers in Q1 2019 compared to the same period in 2018.
AntPool, BW.com, NiceHash, CKPool and GHash.io are among a number of Bitcoin mining pools and operations that have been hit by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) showing that this is not a rare occurrence.
However, as Bitcoin becomes more decentralised and mining power is spread over various continents it seems clear that even a nation state with a massive amount of resources could not crash Bitcoin permanently. The aggressor would arguably just incur massive costs to achieve a debatable result.
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