Hah! :)) So naive. No way this is possible. Attacking compute used to secure it means attacking a whole lot of machines. And the people near those machines will patch them. An you need to attack 51% of them at the same time. Even if you manage to do a 2x spend, they will live with it and patch the stuff and people will still use it. Because what is a couple of 2x somewhere along the way compared to the rest of the blocks it secured?
Not to mention of the geopolitical consequence.
No, this "have the NSA directly attack the compute " is not feasible and would only strengthen its position in the long term.
If government agencies can hack into and disable secured nuclear facilities (this happened... yesterday), I dont see why it would be "impossible" to attack random Bitcoin mining facilities. When state level intelligence agencies are your adversary, I wouldn't assume you can "just patch it" either.
Oh, it's possible. You hack into, what? One? A couple? But it does not scale up like that. Do you really honestly think you can reach 51% like that? Besides, yes, you can just patch the vulnerabilities. Contrary to popular belief, vulns are not plentiful and are not cheap. Using one kind of burns it. So it would be a _very_ stupid usage of vulns.
Precisely the decentralized nature of BTC makes it impossible to shut it down exactly the same way you shut down a nuclear power plant.
And ok, you 51% the network. Then what? You can't create BTC's or change the rules of the game dramatically, without a fork. so the people on the original network are kind of... meh, at your attack. You could double spend but you need to own the coins you spend, so you shaft a couple of people. What then? I do not think that would kill it, there are cryptos that were 51%'ed (looking at ETH classic) and are still alive and chugging along.
That's assuming that they couldn't attack cooling infrastructure to fry the chips or the fabs making the asics. Also, enough chaos would surely have an impact on the price.
Only psychologically. The mining capacity is driven by the price not the other way around. The rest of the miners not hit would be ecstatic because now they get less competition. The difficulty would self-adjust eventually or new mining would get brought up.
The mined supply is very small compared to the circulating one. Besides, if you were to slow minting, it should drive the price up, not down. :)
Not to mention of the geopolitical consequence.
No, this "have the NSA directly attack the compute " is not feasible and would only strengthen its position in the long term.