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BTC Endgame

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Re: BTC Endgame

#51

Post by generalizations »

pvarangot wrote: post #37
nostrademons wrote: post #17

You don't need a DoS attack under the assumptions of this project. It's already assumed that you control ~80% of hash rate, so you execute a 51% attack that mass double-spends coins and destroy all confidence in the integrity of the currency. Poof, nobody uses it. Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could. That they haven't is one reas…

> Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could. When you say "China" do you mean like an actor that can make coordinated decisions? Or just a geographic region? I'm asking out of curiosity because yeah there's a lot of miners in China across many geographic regions but I never saw any evidence that they even talking to each other, even le…

I'd make a wild guess that when parent is talking about 'control', they mean that if a miner is located within China, the Chinese government has the ability to put a gun to that miners head and tell them what to do.

Re: BTC Endgame

#52

Post by PragmaticPulp »

tshaddox wrote: post #42
WJW wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China gains no benefit from destroying Bitcoin; Citation needed on this one I'm afraid. If nothing else, a currency that the Party cannot control would be A Problem. China did not have much economic benefit in halting the ANT IPO, yet it did not go through all the same. There _might_ be a benefit in allowing bitcoin to continue to exist of course, if they think it advances their cause more than it hurts it. But as…

Why haven’t they destroyed it then?

Frankly, because it’s not as much of a threat as the popular narrative suggests. They may actually benefit from being able to use cryptocurrency for their own ends, either by using it directly or using the public ledger nature combined with their surveillance powers to get insight into transactions.

Regardless, the attacks described here require large concentrations of mining power. In theory, the best way to attack it would be to wait for (or even encourage/subsidize) your country to become the geographical leader in mining operations.

Or even better: Wait for companies in competing countries to start holding BTC on their balance sheets and consumers to put their investments in BTC. Now you have a kill switch for part of the balance sheets of competing countries.

I personally doubt this is happening, but I’m sure it’s being considered as an attack scenario.

Re: BTC Endgame

#53

Post by Laforet »

nostrademons wrote: post #17

You don't need a DoS attack under the assumptions of this project. It's already assumed that you control ~80% of hash rate, so you execute a 51% attack that mass double-spends coins and destroy all confidence in the integrity of the currency. Poof, nobody uses it. Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could. That they haven't is one reas…

How would a hyperinflation on the US dollar cause civilization to stop?

In any case, crypto trading since 2017 has been nothing but people buying and selling imaginary ticker symbols on unregulated exchanges.

For example, XVG and ETC has been subject to successful 51% attacks more than once and every time the price was hardly affected. And each time the "solution" to deep chain reorg involved the exchanges freezing all trading while developers rushed to add a hardcoded checkpoint. Once the "correct" version of history has been manually restored, everybody sing kumbaya and goes back to paying real cash for monopoly money.

Crypto need no proof of anything (PoS is still vaporware - debate me if you want), other than a shared delusion of value headed by the bucket shops.

Re: BTC Endgame

#54

Post by cloudhead »

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…

There are a couple answers to this question, but the truth is we have ~100 years to figure this out, and the world will be a very different place then.

Re: BTC Endgame

#55

Post by nostrademons »

AffableSpatula wrote: post #33
nostrademons wrote: post #17

You don't need a DoS attack under the assumptions of this project. It's already assumed that you control ~80% of hash rate, so you execute a 51% attack that mass double-spends coins and destroy all confidence in the integrity of the currency. Poof, nobody uses it. Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could. That they haven't is one reas…

I'm not so sure. If you don't need proof of work to secure a blockchain, then why is the free market of Bitcoin consensus continuing to expend huge amounts of capital to stick with it as its sybil resistance mechanism? If it wasn't considered a value destroying move, the transition away from PoW would've happened already no?

It has, in new cryptocurrencies. Virtually all cryptocurrencies launched since 2017 are proof-of-stake: Cardano, EOS, Stellar, Polkadot, Tezos, TRON. Ethereum is in the process of a very expensive and painful transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

The reason you haven't seen this in the global cryptocurrency industry is because of network effects and adoption curves. Most programmers would probably agree that C++ is archaic and that the software industry has moved on to newer languages like Rust, Go, Kotlin, ES6, etc. Why then do Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. all rely on large quantities of C++ code? Because they were founded in the last millennia, when C++ was basically the only alternative for what they were trying to do, and have deeply enmeshed ecosystems and value chains that are all dependent on their existing C++ codebase. Throw it out and you throw out the $5T+ in value they've built. They couldn't have built that up without the 20 year head start they have, but if you're founding a tech company now, you're pretty dumb to use C++.

Similarly, Bitcoin has built a whole ecosystem of miners, speculators, traders, exchanges, payment systems, wallets, etc. Throw proof-of-work out and you throw all that out, and along with it your advantage over Ethereum, Cardano, Stellar, etc.

Re: BTC Endgame

#56

Post by stale2002 »

AffableSpatula wrote: post #48
stale2002 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China being a dictatorship is much of a conspiracy. But china enacting authoritarian measures isn't good enough. The blog post did not suggest that the attack vector to worry about was a single country banning crypto. Instead, the blog post said that the attacks would only happen if every major country in the world colluded together, to all being authoritarian, and banning crypto everywhere. If only C…

Changing the hash function doesn't solve the problem. The mining game doesn't remonitise becuase everyone knows where it ends (denial of service and collapse, rendering mining hardware valueless).

> (denial of service and collapse, rendering mining hardware valueless).

No, actually. China being able to DDOS every internet service that it does not like is already something that they provably are unable to do in the current day world.

There are lots of things that China would like to DDOS off the internet, right now, and yet they aren't able to succeed at doing that.

A crypto service isn't any different than anything else that China is attempting to, and failing at, DDOSing off of the internet right now.

What is china going to do? Take out cloudfare and aws and any other major web hosting platform in the world? C'mon. Lets enter back into the real world. If the US is refusing to cooperate with china, then there are many ways of defending against something as simple as a DDOS attack.

Re: BTC Endgame

#57

Post by dingus9 »

xur17 wrote: post #14
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #3

>There is currently no defense for this attack in Bitcoin, as the simulation demonstrates. The entire Bitcoin miner reward model is the defense for this attack. Nation states have powerful computers... but nowhere near as powerful as the decentralized Bitcoin mining network combined. Even if they did currently, the endgame for Bitcoin as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto was for everyone on the planet to be mining Bitco…

I also imagine that after a few days of the network being jammed up, getting social consensus to fork the network to use a different hashing function would be fairly viable.

Right. And now this theoretical actor that controls 10x the hashrate of the rest of the world has lost 10x the amount of capital invested compared to the rest of the mining world.

It's the equivalent of shooting a bullet through your chest to shoot your enemy in the finger.

Re: BTC Endgame

#58

Post by afavour »

nostrademons wrote: post #17

You don't need a DoS attack under the assumptions of this project. It's already assumed that you control ~80% of hash rate, so you execute a 51% attack that mass double-spends coins and destroy all confidence in the integrity of the currency. Poof, nobody uses it. Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could. That they haven't is one reas…

> China gains no benefit from destroying Bitcoin

Right now they don't, no. But to my mind Bitcoin being subject to the whims of a major world power is a big knock against it, given that it aims to be a currency alternative. I don't want such an alternative to subject to any kind of geopolitical mood.

Re: BTC Endgame

#59

Post by AffableSpatula »

dingus9 wrote: post #50
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #3

>There is currently no defense for this attack in Bitcoin, as the simulation demonstrates. The entire Bitcoin miner reward model is the defense for this attack. Nation states have powerful computers... but nowhere near as powerful as the decentralized Bitcoin mining network combined. Even if they did currently, the endgame for Bitcoin as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto was for everyone on the planet to be mining Bitco…

Right. The protections against this are already baked into the protocol. 51% attacks don't make sense because you're hurting yourself 51% and hurting everyone else 49%. And for this theoretical attack you'd probably need to sustain 90%+ hash power for a long time. Your first hurdle will be producing enough ASICs to surpass current hashrate by nearly 10x. Solve that problem and you'll need a massive amount of energy a…

The protections aren't baked into the protocol because they don't account for external real world motives of nations states which could incent them to act in a "non-economic" way according to the internal rules of the Bitcoin game.

Re: BTC Endgame

#60

Post by AffableSpatula »

tshaddox wrote: post #42
WJW wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China gains no benefit from destroying Bitcoin; Citation needed on this one I'm afraid. If nothing else, a currency that the Party cannot control would be A Problem. China did not have much economic benefit in halting the ANT IPO, yet it did not go through all the same. There _might_ be a benefit in allowing bitcoin to continue to exist of course, if they think it advances their cause more than it hurts it. But as…

Why haven’t they destroyed it then?

This is the Turkey Fallacy.
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