For someone to alter the record of the network they would need to invest hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars building new ASIC chips to alter it. Should an attacker succeed in altering the record, he would be highly unlikely to gain any economic benefit from it, as compromising the network would probably reduce the value of bitcoins to close to nothing. In other words, to destroy Bitcoin, an attacker needs to expend very large sums of money with no return at all. And in fact, even if such an attempt succeeded, the honest nodes on the network can effectively go back to the record
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