Pentagon Planned for a Bitcoin Rebellion

A college friend teaches at the Naval War College. Most of these "Pentagon planned for X" stories are breathless reporting on some scenario put together by a low-level officer as a training exercise. Often some component is something "hot" in the culture at the moment to make the training exercise more compelling for trainees. This is also why there was, for example, pentagon "plans" for a zombie apocalypse, etc.

&gt; &quot;global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial... The group... funnelling ... bitcoin to ... &quot;worthy recipients&quot;<p>&gt; The Pentagon war game documents ... revealed after ... Representative ... called for the government to &quot;freeze&quot; the money of demonstrators after country-wide protests<p>&gt; &quot;One of the most important tools in the authoritarian toolkit is the ability to freeze the funding of legitimate political dissent,&quot;<p>&gt; By separating the infrastructure of money from the infrastructure of state power, bitcoin makes it that much harder for this type of politically motivated confiscation.<p>People have been using bitcoin to donate to Snowden or get money to people in place like Venezuela. Cyprus happened. Now it might happen that anyone who protests might lose their ability to access banking services.<p>Yet somehow many here think this is just a scenario.

&gt; The group, called Zbellion, encourages cyber attacks against organizations that support &quot;the establishment,&quot; funnelling stolen cash into bitcoin to make &quot;small, below the threshold donations&quot; to &quot;worthy recipients&quot; and Zbellion members.<p>That happens. Most of the non-drug and non-porn sections on dark net marketplaces are about tools for doing this specific thing, and creating completely parallel identities for bank accounts and investing.<p>Illicit funds in, get crypto, leave crypto into fake&#x2F;real&#x2F;not-you person bank account.<p>They even have entire marketplaces for compromised windows computers, so that you can find a computer near the address of someone&#x27;s compromised visa card, so that it is more likely your transactions will not get blocked because it looks to be in the same area.

It should already be abundantly clear that the current banking system and Western governments are one and the same thing so no surprises here.

So, from the comments, it&#x27;s not a real action plan, more like a scenario for case analysis.<p>Which is a shame. I&#x27;d really like to read about how well blockchain technology -- which is based on very transparent p2p communication -- would fare against the NSA or the Great Chinese Firewall if the US or China actually wanted to stop it.

Change bitcoin to its successor and &quot;theft&quot; and selective redistribution to transference and automatic redistribution along a curve back to labor or into public works, and I think you&#x27;ve got something that probably should destroy finance, insurance, etc.

If software world managed to create esoteric languages like brainfuck, expect from any military to study a hypothetical spontaneous human combustion pandemic. The exercise itself is useful for learning despite the comical outcome or product.

Tracking funds across a transparent ledger like Bitcoin is unfortunately too easy. After going after individuals is trivial. Would love to know if they&#x27;re also planning to attack more private options decentralized networks like Monero!

The cheapest way to deal with a Bitcoin rebellion is to use some of the military budget and buy and run Bitcoin miners to dominate the chain and then do stuff like double spending, etc to undermine confidence in Bitcoin.

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mods: The original (better) article is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;pentagon-war-game-gen-z&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;pentagon-war-game-gen-z&#x2F;</a>

In which scenario is the Secretary of Defense required to inspect a public bathroom?

More like “planning”

Holy shit, this is absolutely fascinating. I find it incredibly interesting that this scenario of a &quot;Generation Z Rebellion&quot; was constructed in 2018, and projected increasing tensions until 2026, at which point things would flame up. Yet the current pandemic has essentially forced everybody&#x27;s hand and put history on fast forward. Maybe, in the end, the pandemic will end up being a strategically good thing for the United States, at least compared to how our adversaries will fare.