How does the Bitcoin network deal with bad actors?
How does the Bitcoin network deal with bad actors? Can someone explain at a high level how the network deals with bad actors (either intentionally (ie- attacker) or unintentional (ie- misconfigured node or a node running outdated code, forked code, etc)) ? Without knowing too much about Bitcoin's low level internals, I am assuming there are routine checks as data flows through the code on the network to test that the protocol is adhered to; and that anything outside of expected protocol becomes rejected or flagged. I assume these checks are all essentially checked exclusively against the expected 'data model' since obviously it's impossible to directly analyze what code is being run on independent miners/nodes. So please correct me if I'm wrong here, or elaborate further to fill in the big picture a bit more. Secondly, I wanted to know - in the case of a known hostile miner/node (or to a lesser extent, a known outdated or misconfigured network participant)- what ...