531–540 of 747 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You assume the value of bitcoin is somewhat logical, the Etc 51% attack proves otherwise; in the short term holders would rather sustain the delusion.
This is an important perspective. Many BTC investors are unsophisticated retail investors, and are often "true believer" and magical thinking types. They're this decade's version of gold bugs.
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If your plan is to use general-purpose computers for mining then Bitcoin has nothing to worry about. You'll never manage a 51% attack that way, no when all your competition is using ASICs. Moreover, to gain $184B by shorting Bitcoin you'd need to find someone willing to loan you $184B worth of Bitcoin, and then somehow sell all of it without crashing the price or drawing unwanted attention to your activities. Of cour…
It all depends on who is doing the attacking. If the attacker is a state government or someone with billions of dollars and compute to spare, ASICs aren't going to fight this losing battle. Heck, you can buy off the ASIC miners for a few million dollars (all we have to cover is their net profit, which is pretty low)
That is, the attack you're proposing would require commandeering 15% of the world economy and more than doubling world electrical generation capacity.
Bribing or backdooring ASIC miners is a far more likely vulnerability.
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The point of the quote is to demonstrate that using poor-folk calculations to try and figure out what things cost for rich folk is pointless, and has been for the past ~100 years.
Poor people measure their stuff by its momentary monetary value, rich people measure their assets by their long-term projected intrinsic value. Rich people look for good value, not a good price. The rich man’s mentality can also work for middle class people if every purchase they make is a long-term well-informed decision, rather than flying with the pop culture of what everyone else is currently buying, wearing or v…
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” ― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
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Hash rate is 90+m terahash and increasing, good luck R&Ding the chips and obtaining enough to achieve. Retail pricing is around 3k per 50 TH/s, and that is just for hardware.
There is a reason you are lurking in HN instead of working in a hedge fund. The theoretical maximum value one can gain from Bitcoin going to $0 is it's market cap ($184,000,000,000). If you take out the liquidity and risk, I can spend upto $184B to make the Bitcoin go to 0. If you are state actor, you can direct all the energy and all the computers to attack Bitcoin
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>The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0 Yes indeed. There are a number of very interesting game-theoretic feedback loops built into bitcoin that enhance security. This is one of them.
I disagree, because historically major cryptos have allowed known attacks to succeed if they targeted a member of the public at large, and have defended only if they targeted named insiders. The expectation, at this point, is that defense will only occur if you are an elite insider. An unknown user may or may not be such an elite, and thus may or may not get defense.
Surely you aren't going to make such a statement without examples! I can think of examples where things were attacked, including some of the largest value destructions, and insider status didn't help. For example, the multisig thing that happened to Gav Wood (the second time).
If your lone example is the Dao attack, that looked like successful governance to me.
I'd take issue on two points. First, "wallets' don't exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Second, the tool being used is not sophisticated enough to list the inputs and outputs, giving the false impression that something unusual is "unknown." Try this link to get details: https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7... There are numerous inputs and a single pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) output. The relatively h…
You really misused the term "coin". In Bitcoin protocol you don't "put value" into something named a "coin". "Wallet" is far more widely used and well-defined.
Probably just Elon letting his GF fiddle with his Trezor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your plan is to use general-purpose computers for mining then Bitcoin has nothing to worry about. You'll never manage a 51% attack that way, no when all your competition is using ASICs. Moreover, to gain $184B by shorting Bitcoin you'd need to find someone willing to loan you $184B worth of Bitcoin, and then somehow sell all of it without crashing the price or drawing unwanted attention to your activities. Of cour…
It all depends on who is doing the attacking. If the attacker is a state government or someone with billions of dollars and compute to spare, ASICs aren't going to fight this losing battle. Heck, you can buy off the ASIC miners for a few million dollars (all we have to cover is their net profit, which is pretty low)
Finally, you certainly cannot buy off the ASIC miners with a few million, not least because they own billions of dollars worth of ASICS that can't do anything but mine Bitcoin, and a successful state-orchestrated attack on Bitcoin would make all of them worthless. I don't think a state government taking down Bitcoin by its own rules is completely impossible, but you don't seem to have any grasp of the scales involved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your plan is to use general-purpose computers for mining then Bitcoin has nothing to worry about. You'll never manage a 51% attack that way, no when all your competition is using ASICs. Moreover, to gain $184B by shorting Bitcoin you'd need to find someone willing to loan you $184B worth of Bitcoin, and then somehow sell all of it without crashing the price or drawing unwanted attention to your activities. Of cour…
It all depends on who is doing the attacking. If the attacker is a state government or someone with billions of dollars and compute to spare, ASICs aren't going to fight this losing battle. Heck, you can buy off the ASIC miners for a few million dollars (all we have to cover is their net profit, which is pretty low)
And in the end, after your massive investment, the community would just make some trivial change to the protocol and completely ignore the attack. Really, if this sort of thing was so easy then everyone would be doing it. You're certainly welcome to try.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hash rate is 90+m terahash and increasing, good luck R&Ding the chips and obtaining enough to achieve. Retail pricing is around 3k per 50 TH/s, and that is just for hardware.
There is a reason you are lurking in HN instead of working in a hedge fund. The theoretical maximum value one can gain from Bitcoin going to $0 is it's market cap ($184,000,000,000). If you take out the liquidity and risk, I can spend upto $184B to make the Bitcoin go to 0. If you are state actor, you can direct all the energy and all the computers to attack Bitcoin
You assume you can take the liquidity and risk factors out of a 51% attack. You also assume you can procure that amount of hardware. You also you can procure it instantly.
Bitcoin is at least immune to imaginary 51% attacks, so I don't think anyone has anything to be worried about from your fake imaginary hedge fund.