Why is Bitcoin rising ? How might it be broken ?
Firstly why is it rising ?
Folks think it's a great way to get cash out of places like China . The recent Saudi experience of wealth confiscation , together with success the Chinese government is having at curtailing cash flight means that encrypted currency, held virtually stateless is pretty appealing , it’s become a stateless way to move hot money anywhere on the planet .
How might it be broken ?
The risk though is that while it's pretty hard to get at the transactions and coins , it’s pretty easy to detect the energy foot prints of the exact locations of the data centers and the servers of the miners , it's other weakness is the conversion point to traditional currencies is completely transparent . Miners are at the heart of Bitcoin, if you stop the miners you stop Bitcoin.
If governments see it as a threat to traditional currencies expect them to exploit these weaknesses to break it . For instance 70% of miners are in China and the data centers are in known or at least traceable locations , they are traceable because they use so much energy , it would NOT be to hard to close them down . Sure the mining could be moved to places like Mongolia , which has cheap electricity and optic fiber , although my guess is they wouldn’t like to piss off China .
Maybe India ? Although they have a long history of central banking cooperation .
Another way to break it would be direct central bank intervention , which is where the Fed could simply print money and send it through the roof then sell it crashing it’s value . A classical pump and dump could destroy the confidence of the crypto currency all at virtually zero cost to the central bank who would walk away with everyone’s money .
Lastly technologies Hashgraph provide secure distributed ledgers at a fraction of the cost , very little power or CPU , it would be very ironic if block-chain got disrupted just as it got started .