Only if the attack is from the outside, which is not a requirement. It's not mutually exclusive. The miners who control the bitcoin network are already centralized on a handful of organizations in China. If they colluded on this attack they would take over >51% of the network because, hey, they already own and operate most of that computing power you're eluding to. Edit: There is also no evidence that the price would…
Wouldn't Bitcoin lose a lot of value if such an attack happened?
https://www.crypto51.app/ Bitcoin has long since passed the stage where you could 51%-attack it for piddly amounts of money. Most other altcoins, though...
Those numbers are pretty inaccurate, though, for cases where the NiceHash capacity is well below what is needed to mount an attack. I.e. the $768k for an hour of bitcoin attack actually vastly under estimates the cost, because to mount that attack you would need to purchase the hashing power large enough to mount that attack.
Yes. Also, an attack would be fairly obvious and miners invested in the future of the blockchain (i.e. everyone using ASICS, which is everyone that matters) would increase their hashrate to mount a defense, increasing the cost by some hard-to-predict but significant amount.
I can count maybe 5 people in the crypto space that would have that much BTC, but none of them would be dumb enough to put it all in one wallet. Most likely some large institutional investor decided to re-key their cold storage wallet.
It's probably the DOJ. They raided BTC-e and stole 2 billion during the Ukraine War. BTC-e was the longest running bitcoin exchange and the single most reliable. I had more money than I'd like to admit stolen from me. Their statement was only people who participate in tax evasion use btc-e.
You lent that money to a shady organization. Once you lent it, it was no longer your property. You then became a creditor of that organization and your coins became their assets. The organizations assets were seized due to systemic criminal activity and they could no longer repay their debts to their creditors. Just like any other financial institution.
Some quote about bitcoin enthusiasts rediscovering the reason for regulations in the financial markets one loss at a time.
Doesn't this instead just show the Realpolitik nature of currency, that it doesn't matter the technical implementation when a government can still just step in and seize the asset using traditional force?
Yes but the key difference is with cryptocurrency the person that owns the wallet still has to sign the transaction, there is no other way. It's a push model instead of pull. Compare this to traditional banking where a 3rd party (the bank) can aquiesce to a government request without your knowledge or approval.
That doesn't stop them from shutting things down. The result is the same: You no longer have it. An offline wallet would help, if you can avoid jail.
>He used it used to launder all of the stolen funds from the Mt. Gox hack (worth several billions, depending on when you measure the value), among other things. It was not. Coins going in and out of btc-e were labeled making laundering through btc-e difficult at best. >BTC-e was a cover to help criminals steal from Bitcoin exchanges and safely dilute the funds. BTC-e was around longer than those exchanges. The thing…
It was, though. Vinnik created it as a way to help people launder stolen / illicitly-gained cryptocurrency, perhaps in addition to providing standard exchange services. Cryptocurrency from large hacks appeared in Vinnik's personal BTC-e account on several occasions, for example. BTC-e was perhaps "safe" in that it seemed to be operated competently from a technical standpoint, and it didn't appear to attempt to scam i…
If either you or the posters above linked to primary sources it would help a lot. Anyone can make proclamations but where are the references??
I haven't heard of PirateChain. However, the state-level threat model includes things like taxes, where (e.g.) people in the US have to report every transaction they make. If most people report their PirateChain transactions, amount in, amount out, then the problem is that unreported transactions would stick out and would probably be associable with wallets. Am I getting this wrong?
What are the laws requiring reporting of every transaction? I know it's necessary to report transactions which establish the cost basis for capital gains, but doesn't mandate report of all transactions.
In the US, all transactions to/from a financial institution of $10,000 or higher (including cash) must be reported. Same applies if multiple transactions on the same day reach that limit. So all attempts to cash out will be hard to avoid tracking. Also, attempts to structure transactions to avoid this, like $9999 per day, is illegal with jail and fines applied.
> It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. I don't really agree with that statement. Yes, someone could mount a 51% attack to rewrite that block. However, it would be pretty straightforward to see what was happening (and which nodes were the malicious actors). If that did happen, the possible outcomes would be: 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to ba…
the amount of trivialization and conflation irks me 1. "51% attack" is not a thing as in "one has to have 51% of hashpower to perform it". it's just that with 51% of hashpower it becomes relatively cheap to perform such attack. one can throw enough money at the problem and get lucky to perform large reorg with just 10% of hashpower. the lower the number - the more lucky attacker has to get. 2. "rewriting a block" or…
Your math is off here. Block rewards are 12.5 BTC per 10 minutes and total fees per day are about 25-75 over last month. To get half of 94k BTC you'd be waiting quite a long time at 1,850 BTC per day total rewards + fees per day. 25 days, not 3.
Nice Szabo: "Such confidence in Bitcoin is splendid, but a 94,500 BTC tx tempts fate. If recipient can make that much from reversing the tx, they can afford to run a 51% attack for more than 40 days. Big if & very visible, but security here depends more on trust & less on the protocol itself."
https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1169848736819773440
the amount of trivialization and conflation irks me 1. "51% attack" is not a thing as in "one has to have 51% of hashpower to perform it". it's just that with 51% of hashpower it becomes relatively cheap to perform such attack. one can throw enough money at the problem and get lucky to perform large reorg with just 10% of hashpower. the lower the number - the more lucky attacker has to get. 2. "rewriting a block" or…
There is a danger of theft, and the risk is to everyone, not just the parties to this big transaction. The risk is this: 1. A malicious syndicate gathers a billion dollars of bitcoin and sends it to themselves 2. In a short period of time, like a few days, the syndicate exchanges that bitcoin for non-bitcoin assets 3. The syndicate spends tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to fork the chain, backing up the ledge…
If someone could fundraise a billion dollars, using it to steal another billion dollars (not great ROI considering all the security risks of bitcoin ecosystem) at the expense of shattering worldwide faith in Bitcoin (which also devalues the stolen coins), seems a really bad bet. It only makes sense if it was a government or some group spending a billion (semi illiquid because Bitcoin) dollars with the goal of destroying the Bitcoin ecosystem.
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)
The cost of mounting the attack with general-purpose computers would be orders of magnitude higher than the US$12B calculated above, just from the energy bill. Check out https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison ; the ASIC AntMiner S9 gets 10 billion hashes per joule, while on https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis... you can see that the most efficient GPUs get 2–3 million hashes pe…
Are ASICs totally useless for non Bitcoin computing?