Well, it's a relatively small sum. And if it grows into a large and valuable asset relative to the government's budget, that's a bad sign: it means the government-backed dollar is losing steam relative to crypto.
It's in the government's interest to lop off the head of its biggest existential threat.
Also, Satoshi presumably passed his coins to his heirs. Who controls 6% of all wealth? I wonder.
Yes, but that simply raises the price and encourages BTC adoption.
Governments will need to become active miners to destroy it. And unlike miners, they won't care whether they can mine faster than everybody else. Their objective is to ruin BTC.
Can someone please explain how exactly a 51% attack would actually cause double-spends to be accepted?
All the miners do is accept transactions into a block. We don't trust any given machine to validate that there were no double-spends. For that, each client would have to check the entire history before accepting payment. So, how would mining the blocks cause double spending to take place?
Don't bitcoin miners have to SIGN their blocks? If so, then broadcasting two different histories would quickly be discovered.
I guess the only thing they can do is make a bitcoin fork, something that is possible anyway, by enough miners agreeing.
Perhaps they can alternate the two forks length growth, making the clients thrash and re download the two forks over and over.
you're asking the wrong question. mainly because bitcoin mining is done with ASICs and not general purpose computers. I would be surprised if the bitcoin network hashrate isn't higher than all the general purpose computing power in the world combined (converted to double SHA256 hash rate).
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-08/bulgaria-government...