Well, I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for a while now, and finally they got my lifeline.
Ransomware in cryptocurrency could be easy to stop naturally. Miners just need to know that there is a nonzero chance of their blocks being forked off if they help them. It’s a technical problem of out-of-band governance protocols among miners, not unlike what is already being done for positive gain (MEV) by FlashBots. That’s the incredible possibility of cryptocurrency. It’s designed to turn selfishness into a public good, with no coercion, recognition, or good will. And sure, they could include a massive reward to convince miners to include the block, but then that also goes for every coinbase and transaction afterward, until there is nothing left, and no incentive at all for ransomware.
The present reality, of course, is that miners are just not that sophisticated. For the most part they’re just aping the repos that are released by the foundations. But the foundations certainly should understand that it’s in their interest to protect their currency by at least giving the miners information about transactions in the mempool or utxos, and perhaps some kind of out-of-band signaling mechanism to indicate unwillingness to accept blocks that include them. Perhaps better yet, a price for inclusion demanded in the form of an MEV burn added to the next block, which would of course fetch its own price. There is some criticism of the foundations here, as there is also some criticism of some PoS implementations that do not allow fork selection, but ultimately I think that they can solve it.
So that takes care of economic hackers. I’m far more concerned with non-economic or peri-economic agents. There is a doctrine of “unrestricted warfare” that everybody should know about. It explains many things about how and why things do not make sense. It is because we are under attack, and it’s a truly brilliant offensive, for which all of our defenses only work in their favor. I don’t have the answers for this. But it does give a warning. The effect they seek is not the damage they’ve done, but our reaction to it. Our reaction, by regulation that cripples our competitiveness, by restricting our own freedoms, could be disastrous to our country and our way of life, which is exactly what they want. And these attacks, although they may be carried out by economic agents, almost certainly find their roots in exploits created by long-standing programs of infiltration. Nature too, has learned this trick; SARS kills by turning the immune system against the host.