Attacks create Resilience

**I remember very clearly, in the early days when lots of articles were written about how the internet was not resilient, could not scale to do voice, was not secure.**  I remember times when denial-of-service attacks would take down Yahoo, AltaVista, and even Google for hours, sometimes days. What happened between then and now? How many times have you seen Google go down in the last five years? Have people stopped attacking Google? Quite the opposite. Google can now sustain gigabits of denial-of-service anywhere in the world and dynamically reroute. The same applies for all internet applications. The attacks didn’t stop. The system became immune because, like a human immune system, if you are exposed to a virus and it doesn’t kill you, you evolve resistance, and the next time you’re exposed to the virus, it does nothing to you. Will governments try to ban bitcoin? Regulate bitcoin? Attack bitcoin? They already are. They have been, almost since the beginning, and bitcoin is still getting stronger. It’s a system that is under a constant denial-of-service attack, that is on the internet being attacked by hackers, by agents, by other systems, 24 hours a day. In security, we have a really funny term, which is a honeypot. A honeypot is a system that is designed to attract hackers. What bigger honeypot could you have than a financial network that has $6 billion on it? If you hack bitcoin, there is a $6 billion reward for you finding a way to hack it. No one has collected that reward yet, and it’s not because they haven’t been trying. They’ve been trying nonstop. But systems like bitcoin are resilient. **Excerpt from Andreas Antonopoulos - The Internet Of Money**