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94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

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Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if I were a hedge fund, I can effectively short Bitcoins and spend a piddly amount to build a datacenter to carry a 51% attack. If the attack fails, I can re-purpose my datacenter

Repurpose it how? You'd need ASICs to mount a 51% attack. Using a few quickly googled numbers, you'd need ~56EH/s to double the network and mount a 51% attack. An S9 does 14TH/s, so you'd need ~4 million, at $3k each. So around $12 billion (plus the datacenter, operations, etc). You'd pretty much send BTC to being worth $0...and then you're stuck with $12 billion in useless hardware.

Well aren't there BTC futures on CME?

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#644

Imagine how much money you could make by creating a bogeyman bitcoin wallet! Step 1, Consolidate 94,000 BTC into one single address the entire crypto world is now watching. Step 2, Send 1,000 BTC from bogeyman bitcoin wallet to exchange crypto wallet. Step 3, Freak the shit out of the market. Promptly sell the entire lot in one single market sell order. Meanwhile you've got another 50,000 BTC or whatever sitting on c…

I don't think there's enough liquidity for that to work, and buying 50,000 BTC x100 short contracts would already crash the price.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#646

Imagine how much money you could make by creating a bogeyman bitcoin wallet! Step 1, Consolidate 94,000 BTC into one single address the entire crypto world is now watching. Step 2, Send 1,000 BTC from bogeyman bitcoin wallet to exchange crypto wallet. Step 3, Freak the shit out of the market. Promptly sell the entire lot in one single market sell order. Meanwhile you've got another 50,000 BTC or whatever sitting on c…

I'm not a trading expert but I guess smarter and richer people/entities will probably also run bots and a whole lot more complex trade monitoring and market making strategies or algorithms.

In your example, somebody interested in keeping the price at or above a certain level and that has a couple of million to waste on that could potentially place a 900btc buy wall as soon as you managed to market sell the first 100 of your 1000 and so you'd sell the rest into the wall and not move the price as much as you'd wish. And market psychology is a strange thing that could actually even make the price move in the other direction as thousands of traders would see the huge buy wall and assume the price could only go up and therefore buy more to go long which would increase the price even more.

If that or similar happens then your "shorting at X while dumping at Y" strategy won't be as successful as you would expect and you might just end up dumping your 1000 btc at mostly the same price. 1000 btc is a lot of money for most people but not that much on a daily bitcoin trading day. Even the 1 billion dollars in bitcoin isn't really capable of damaging the market all that much as most alarmist articles made it seem once this transaction got noticed imho. Remember that there are/will be about 21 million bitcoins.

I'd say its safe to assume that whatever "big idea" one has to manipulate trading or financial markets has already been thought of, implemented, tried and failed or succeeded to some varying degrees, especially on deregulated crypto markets.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#648
post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0. The reason bitcoin has any value at all really has to do with trust - belief that the protocol is secure and can't be broken. In this case, an easily detectable spending "override" would cause faith in the protocol to evaporate. That seems a little out there. (1) There is something like 1 person who uses bitcoin to move billions of dollars around. The small-time us…

You’re not living in the real world, but whatever.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repurpose it how? You'd need ASICs to mount a 51% attack. Using a few quickly googled numbers, you'd need ~56EH/s to double the network and mount a 51% attack. An S9 does 14TH/s, so you'd need ~4 million, at $3k each. So around $12 billion (plus the datacenter, operations, etc). You'd pretty much send BTC to being worth $0...and then you're stuck with $12 billion in useless hardware.

Can anybody explain to me why would anybody try to make their alt-coin ASIC-resistant? They claim it is do decrease centralization but like parent says it just makes 51% attack possible with cloud computing and 0 investment in hardware or logistics.

The issue with ASIC mining is the the barrier to entry is extremely high so only a small number of people have the means to produce the chips. Economically it might not make sense to sell them and, to make the situation even worse, patents can prevent competitors being able to use the same innovations.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforcing illegal torrents failed. I think a cryptocurrency ban would be similar. Also, the US made it illegal to hold gold between 1933 and 1974 but almost nobody turned in gold to the feds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

They enforce it when you buy something real with the coins. A torrent is the thing you want, it isn't a currency to buy the thing you want.

Both are essentially electronic systems of information on a computing system, a format and a protocol of communication through the internet. In terms of technical difficulty to enforce them it would be very similar.
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