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BTC Endgame

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Re: BTC Endgame

#21

Post by FabHK »

treve wrote: post #7
paulgb wrote: post #2

The linked Medium posts have a bit more content https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is... Note that this is from last July, when the price of BTC was significantly lower and thus the price of the attack is likely higher now. That said, this becomes more feasible in the long-run when mining is purely funded by transaction fees. Something I don’t see talked about much is the fact that, although Bi…

You probably mean deflation, right? In inflation the cost of goods and services are higher, because the currency is losing value.

GP might be referring to the fact that currently, 80-90% of the miners' reward is "coinbase", ie newly minted coins (which expand the money supply and could be considered inflationary), while only 10-20% of the mining reward is from fees, ie cut on the transactions.

Re: BTC Endgame

#22

Post by [deleted] »

AffableSpatula wrote: post #13
yrral wrote: post #6

I think under these circumstances, the economic majority of bitcoin users will fork to use, eg a new hash algorithm, rendering the seized mining farms useless. Remember, bitcoin is a collective trusted network based on agreement between users, miners and developers. If the miners turn, just switch to a set of new miners. You mention that this wouldn't work in your article. Can you explain why?

In order for change in hash function to work, it would require remonitising to a significant hash rate. Why would anyone invest in mining equipment on that new hash function if they already know how the game ends? (ie. their equipment being written off)

[deleted]

Re: BTC Endgame

#23

Post by stale2002 »

Ehh, this blog posts focuses way too much on technical tricks that are, in reality, not really the main risks to the bitcoin network.

For example, the blog posts focuses on things like 51% attacks to either reorg the chain, or prevent transactions from being published. This is not really as big of a deal. When 51% attacks happen, it certain disrupts crypto networks in the short term. But the defenders always have the nuclear option in their back pocket, which is to change the proof of work algorithm, and force the attackers to spend a bunch of money building their attack infrastructure up again.

Threats to change the POW algorithm, were thrown around during the 2017 blocksize debate, when things got really heated, and parties involved were threatened what amounted to 51% attacks. So it is already established that this is something that devs consider doing.

The only real avenue of attack against crypto networks, is simply the social one. You simply arrest anyone who does anything at all related to crypto, and hope the threat of government violence is enough to make it so most people dont use crypto.

Those social attacks would be the most likely to succeed, IMO, but they also have the problem of being difficult to implement. You know, because we living in a society, with a court system, and elections, and people that care about not living in a totalitarian hellscape, so any attempt by the government to simply arrest everyone, will likely be punished politically.

So sure. The blog post is correct that if the government simply arrests or kills everyone who has anything to do with bitcoin, then they could stop crypto. But the counter argument to that, is such recommendations are completely out there, and extreme, and society wouldn't let that happen and would punish the people doing that.

The actual attack vectors that matter, are not some fantasy land conspiracy, of every world government becoming a dictatorship. Instead, the attack vectors that matter would instead be every day bad actors, that seek to defraud people, in secret, and are not willing or able to kill/arrest everyone in the world who opposed it.

Re: BTC Endgame

#24

Post by yrral »

AffableSpatula wrote: post #13
yrral wrote: post #6

I think under these circumstances, the economic majority of bitcoin users will fork to use, eg a new hash algorithm, rendering the seized mining farms useless. Remember, bitcoin is a collective trusted network based on agreement between users, miners and developers. If the miners turn, just switch to a set of new miners. You mention that this wouldn't work in your article. Can you explain why?

In order for change in hash function to work, it would require remonitising to a significant hash rate. Why would anyone invest in mining equipment on that new hash function if they already know how the game ends? (ie. their equipment being written off)

Theres no need to start at a huge hash rate. You can fork and then reset/reduce the difficulty, or adjust the difficulty in the way BCH does. You can also use POW algorithms that can be done only on commodity hardware like GPUs or CPUs so that the community can do it in a more distributed way.

Re: BTC Endgame

#25

Post by esotericn »

safog wrote: post #16
esotericn wrote: post #8

In the general case I don't think that majority miner attacks can be defended against without changing the hash algorithm. Specific cases like "empty blocks" could be addressed via a hard fork. But there's nothing stopping miners from faking transactions in blocks, sending amounts to themselves, filling the block with OP_RETURNs, or just doing the minimum possible to get around your "fix". PoW absolutely relies on >5…

Can't you do worse things if you have >50% hash power? It seems like DoS is pretty mild all things considered.

It depends how rationally the market responds, I guess.

A reorg attack and a DoS are equivalent in my mind - anyone who's capable of pulling off a lengthy DoS is also capable of performing a reorg attack, whether they actually do or not is kind of irrelevant.

Re: BTC Endgame

#26

Post by AffableSpatula »

thysultan wrote: post #10

For the first attack listed you'd need to be the 99% of mining power at which point the 1% could also just fork and leave you to your endeavours.

The purpose of the project is to encourage people to be concrete in what their proposed ruleset changes are to defend the attack.

Re: BTC Endgame

#27

Post by nostrademons »

AffableSpatula wrote: post #13
yrral wrote: post #6

I think under these circumstances, the economic majority of bitcoin users will fork to use, eg a new hash algorithm, rendering the seized mining farms useless. Remember, bitcoin is a collective trusted network based on agreement between users, miners and developers. If the miners turn, just switch to a set of new miners. You mention that this wouldn't work in your article. Can you explain why?

In order for change in hash function to work, it would require remonitising to a significant hash rate. Why would anyone invest in mining equipment on that new hash function if they already know how the game ends? (ie. their equipment being written off)

Human beings already know how our game ends (we die), and yet we do all sorts of things on this earth in the ~80 years before that, even knowing that everything we do for ourselves becomes meaningless once we're gone.

Time preferences are a thing. Lots of folks do things with a time horizon much lower than their equipment being written off. Whole companies are destroyed for quarterly earnings, relationships are destroyed for a promo that lasts only for the ~2-5 years that you've got remaining at the company, people get married even knowing that 50% of them end in divorce, parents birth children knowing that they'll leave the nest and develop their own opinions and say they don't love you and eventually die.

Re: BTC Endgame

#28

Post by AffableSpatula »

stale2002 wrote: post #23

Ehh, this blog posts focuses way too much on technical tricks that are, in reality, not really the main risks to the bitcoin network. For example, the blog posts focuses on things like 51% attacks to either reorg the chain, or prevent transactions from being published. This is not really as big of a deal. When 51% attacks happen, it certain disrupts crypto networks in the short term. But the defenders always have the…

I don't think China being a dictatorship is much of a conspiracy. That's where a lot of ASICs are deployed, as well as the majority of the fabrication of the hardware itself.

Re: BTC Endgame

#29

Post by jpsalm »

AffableSpatula wrote: post #5
paulgb wrote: post #2

The linked Medium posts have a bit more content https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is... Note that this is from last July, when the price of BTC was significantly lower and thus the price of the attack is likely higher now. That said, this becomes more feasible in the long-run when mining is purely funded by transaction fees. Something I don’t see talked about much is the fact that, although Bi…

Hey, author here - I think you're absolutely right that there is a risk that demand for blockspace doens't generate sufficient block reward to provide useful security guarantees. If that is the case, it could cause the price of BTC to fall which could create a negative feedback loop. This would, at best, create an end of the 21m cap and at worst trigger a collapse of the game entirely.

Yea that's what I don't understand either.

Is the plan to secure a fully-mined chain just rampant value-inflation in a way that is completely detached from supply and demand? Today my 1e-1000 bitcoin is worth 10 carrots, tomorrow it is worth 20 everything else held equal? How does that even work in practice?

Alternatively you need transactions to pay entirely for the security of the chain. This doesn't seem feasible when chain security costs rise everyday as the cost of energy deceases. And if transaction fees increase to compensate and people transact less the whole thing blows up.

Re: BTC Endgame

#30

Post by pitaj »

WJW wrote: post #15
paulgb wrote: post #2

The linked Medium posts have a bit more content https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is... Note that this is from last July, when the price of BTC was significantly lower and thus the price of the attack is likely higher now. That said, this becomes more feasible in the long-run when mining is purely funded by transaction fees. Something I don’t see talked about much is the fact that, although Bi…

I always wondered about that and perhaps someone here can explain. After bitcoin reaches its "full" volume, mining rewards will go away and the only way miner income can stay the same is if transaction fees rise to match. Since the competition of miners basically converges to "block reward is equal to electricity cost equivalent", this would mean transaction costs increase to an insanely huge amount. Not paying the l…

BCH addresses this by increasing the number of transactions per block. This decreases the fee per transaction.
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