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BTC Endgame

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Re: BTC Endgame

#221

Post by ruined »

Retric wrote: post #168
inopinatus wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, China is not a person with a single will. The assumption/assertion that the mining equipment may as well all be sitting under MSS guard in Beijing is horsecrap.

For small scale miners in China it might be a different story. However, if Xi Jinping decided to crush Bitcoin for whatever reason large scale mining in China, which is well past 50%, would quickly do what he wanted. As such he has de facto control over Bitcoin, though I personally doubt it’s something he would do.

why do you expect that? you're talking about tens of thousands of individuals and companies, all themselves invested in bitcoin, being asked (through no existing command or enforcement mechanism) to essentially destroy their own personal wealth. even assuming the chinese state could achieve compliance from 77% of the existing hardware, it would optimistically take several days. the only way around that stumbling block would be to mandate centralized control of the miners, which would be impossible to keep secret and would also inspire some sort of reaction.

the idea that every miner in china will jump when xi says is pure fantasy.

Re: BTC Endgame

#222

Post by strogonoff »

eloff wrote: post #176
inopinatus wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese government is not China any more than the US government is America or the Kremlin is Russia. Having a go at authoritarian demagoguery and secret police is one thing, have at it. But doubling down on the casual false equivalence between a people, a country, a government, and a person, just reinforces the point. Oh, and when you find a free country, do let me know. I haven’t seen one yet. So far, from Austr…

The OP was not taking about the Chinese people, he was taking about China the Chinese government. It was very clear to me reading that, I'm not sure why you're all confused.

Too often it seems like the more precision matters, the easier it is to choose the wrong word.

In this context IMHO the choice of words matters quite a bit. I do my best to never write “China” if I’m in fact referring to the entity commonly identified as “CCP”.

(I understood OP’s point though, probably because I used to make the same mistake—perhaps still inadvertently do with some other countries.)

Re: BTC Endgame

#223

Post by [deleted] »

3np wrote: post #152
generalizations wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away". Neither mining pools (who practically have the actual power over transaction inclusion an ordering) nor the miners are cooperating. I'm also certain the CCP wouldn't be practically able to locate and control all of them that easily.

[deleted]

Re: BTC Endgame

#224

Post by kasparkallas »

Geee wrote: post #102

The defense is that there are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that would take Bitcoin's place. So the attackers wouldn't gain anything in the end.

What if the attacker is invested in other cryptocurrencies? Think outside the box.

Re: BTC Endgame

#225

Post by habitue »

x1000 wrote: post #220

An interesting aspect of these cryptocurrencies is the aspect of consensus, not through the intended mechanisms like PoW, but through societal acceptance. Look at BTC and BTG (bitcoin and bitcoin gold). One has the suffix of "gold" while the other maintains the (arguably?) superior lack of any such embellishments/augmentations. Was it the miner's decision to call it that? Was it the users? Look at Ethereum v Ethereum…

I take the point you're making (in principle, there is some off-chain consensus at work here), but for these particular examples I believe society didn't decide these names as much as the people deciding to do the forks did.

Re: BTC Endgame

#226

Post by trevelyan »

nine_k wrote: post #81
trevelyan wrote: post #39

Distributed Proof-of-Work is not vulnerable to this: https://org.saito.tech/eliminating-51-attacks-in-proof-of-wo... The community of users simply attaches harder cryptographic proofs to their transactions, forcing up the cost of producing empty blocks. The approach is capable of bankrupting nation-states as a side-effect of eliminating 51% attacks.

Why won't it make transactions prohibitively expensive? Each transaction needs a trustless agreement of many, many nodes.

You don't need a transaction to be routed by many nodes: how quickly it propagates (and thus how quickly it gets included/confirmed) just depends on how much hashing you do before sending it.

The halving penalty on work just forces attackers (who have +1 routing hop compared to honest nodes) to double the work of those honest nodes if they wish to outcompete them in producing a longer chain (i.e. no 51% attack).

It also allows users to respond to attacks in real-time by affixing harder proofs to their transactions, increasing the attack-cost on the network in minutes should anyone try to pull off the sort of gambit described in the linked page.

Re: BTC Endgame

#227

Post by Animats »

kmonsen wrote: post #184
fny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US monetary dominance is up for grabs. This doesn't mean the US is necessarily supplanted as the world reserve currency, but it does mean lots of trade may dedollarize to some extent. My bet is there will be two major currency zones. Dollar/Euro in the West + Middle East + India, Renmimbi in the East + Australia + Africa. Given the explosion of debt to GDP in the west vs the east, I see no way the Renmimbi will not c…

This is just silly, US military dominance is not anywhere close to up for grabs. They US might not have total dominance anywhere on earth anymore due to asymmetric weapons, but in a big fight the US is far and away the biggest dog still. It is not that it is not close, it is not even close to being close.

This is less true than it used to be. The US is unlikely to sail a carrier through the Taiwan strait again to intimidate China.

Re: BTC Endgame

#228

Post by FridgeSeal »

shadowgovt wrote: post #101
Laforet wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> How would a hyperinflation on the US dollar cause civilization to stop? The dollar is the value used to denominate world debt via the IMF. It's also (partially related to this fact) the "mattress currency" of a lot of nations... Nations hoard US dollars to back-stop their own economies, since if their currency starts to tank, they can use dollars to pay their international debts. A worthless US dollar would have wi…

Every now and then I get the impression that crypto currency advocates have seriously and repeatedly underestimated and/or misunderstood the complexity and scale of real-world economics.

Re: BTC Endgame

#229

Post by FridgeSeal »

mshumi wrote: post #155

BTC fork using Algorand consensus. Same bitcoin, same LEDGER, but the consensus technology is vastly superior. Why willfully ignore 10 years of advances in cryptography and distributed computing.

For presumably the same reason the crypto-currency community in general will fully disregards decades on decades of economic theory and experience to pursue a libertarian wet dream?

Re: BTC Endgame

#230

Post by FridgeSeal »

Geee wrote: post #102

The defense is that there are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that would take Bitcoin's place. So the attackers wouldn't gain anything in the end.

Oh cool so my magical internet money that I’m meant to use as my main currency is essentially untrustworthy as an actual store of value, because I’m supposed to keep migrating to whatever the hasn’t-had-a-51%-attack-yet flavour of the month currency is?
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