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Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

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Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#251

Post by ItsMonkk »

fouc wrote: post #51
paulmd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don’t touch your coins, no one can take them away from you. (A 51% attack can’t reassign coins.) it can't generate new unsigned transactions but it can roll back the network to a state when someone else owned those coins. from a practical perspective there is no difference, you no longer have those coins.

there's a limit to how far it can roll back the network, it probably wouldn't be able to roll back more than a few days..

I'm curious, has anyone done any back of the envelope calculations on this?

Let's say the US Government started a side-chain starting at the very first transaction and has kept it within it's own firewall, and has been mining for years at optimal difficulty levels so that they have to put in the least amount of work. Which now that I think about it, would just be difficulty 1, and the only reason to go above difficulty 1 would be because you started after the original chain, and you would only up the difficulty right before you were going to release it to the public.

Could they at any moment open it up and everyone would move over to their chain since it is the longest, where suddenly the US Gov owns every single coin and there's never been a single transaction?

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#252

Post by openfuture »

mratsim wrote: post #224
openfuture wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all I want to preface my comment with the disclaimer that proof of stake is nonsense in many ways (vulnerable to coordinated bribery attacks - we don't know how to coordinate well enough to execute them yet but the math checks out, also plutocracy..) However it is a pretty expedient way to get something out the door fast (it's literally the simplest form of anti-sybil you can make and a cryptocurrency is ant…

The bribery can be solved with slashing and making it economically unviable to cede to bribery. Regarding plutocracy, it depends on proof-of-stake vs delegated-proof-of-stake. In one, everyone can become a staker and earnings are spread to all, in the other, some stakers are elected and earnings will be concentrated to them. Proof-of-work has inequality issues: - economies of scale for those that have the capital to…

Slashing doesn't solve anything, I don't think you've studied how the attack would work.

Proof of work that doesn't solve second order byzantine fault tolerance cannot account for externalities and suffers from the issues you mention.

I agree that neither "solution" is all that great, my project is neither proof of work nor proof of stake.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#253

Post by openfuture »

jude- wrote: post #250
openfuture wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all I want to preface my comment with the disclaimer that proof of stake is nonsense in many ways (vulnerable to coordinated bribery attacks - we don't know how to coordinate well enough to execute them yet but the math checks out, also plutocracy..) However it is a pretty expedient way to get something out the door fast (it's literally the simplest form of anti-sybil you can make and a cryptocurrency is ant…

The "stochastic probability stuff" falls apart once ISPs discover they can profitably influence the consensus outcome by messing with packet arrival times between nodes.

Yeah that's an interesting angle. I believe the problem in the first place is forcing the network to come to global consensus. In my project the idea is to form "lazy consensus" (i.e. just enough consensus for everyone to have a consistent outlook on the world).

Datalisp is a data interchange format rather than a cryptocurrency though.. so it behaves a bit different.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#254

Post by mschuster91 »

lofi_lory wrote: post #234
bonestamp2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on ma…

> Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact.

For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#255

Post by nootropicat »

runeks wrote: post #170
bonestamp2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

That’s true. But it’s important to point out that proof-of-work (PoW) is more decentralized than e.g. proof-of-stake (PoS). For example, with PoW you only need a single honest node to arrive at the correct chain during initial sync. With PoS there is no such guarantee, since there’s no inherent way for a new node joining the network to decide which chain to pick when presented with two different, but equally valid, c…

>But it’s important to point out that proof-of-work (PoW) is more decentralized than e.g. proof-of-stake (PoS).

The opposite is true in multiple aspects. PoW has infinite economies of scale which inevitably leads to total centralization as all miners but the most efficient one have to shutdown.

PoS can stay decentralized forever because new stakers arriving aren't going to make existing staking unprofitable, forcing them to shutdown, as actual running costs are negligible.

Regarding resistance to government interference aspect PoS absolutely demolishes PoW. Overwhelming majority of mining is done in big industrial warehouses owned by registered companies. They're trivial to find, very hard to relocate and easy to take physical control of.

In contrast, staking only requires a node, which could conceivably even be on a satellite, on a ship, or anonymized using tor or other anonymity network.

>For example, with PoW you only need a single honest node to arrive at the correct chain during initial sync

This argument doesn't make sense, from the start the user has to choose some specific chain and has to download node software for it. Even soft forks starting from the same genesis block may require a manual choice, as it's possible for old nodes to diverge from the new if majority of miners ignores the soft fork. Chain names are not defined by code over medium to long term, but by dynamic social consensus.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#256

Post by CyberDildonics »

zoshi wrote: post #89

Bitcoin's hash rate has always been volatile, and it doesn't cause problems. Look at the raw values at https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate >.

Doesn't cause problems? The average cost of a single transaction is over $50 now.

The cost of a single transaction is the same as a hard drive that could store the entire bitcoin chain 4-5 times over.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#257

Post by _jal »

mschuster91 wrote: post #254
lofi_lory wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on ma…

> Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.

Yeah, except the days of mining bitcoin in your closet are long over, and a substantial part of the energy budget for the datacenters we're actually talking about is cooling.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#258

Post by EarthLaunch »

peteretep wrote: post #132
quickthrower2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nation state can’t ban it globally. A 51% attack undermines confidence globally.

“nation state” isn’t just a fancy word for country and has a specific meaning

Now let’s do “use case”!

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#259

Post by derefr »

papito wrote: post #242
jabbany wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that even remotely strategically good for China......? These miners are probably making USD or some other foreign fiat at the end of the day which adds to the supply of foreign reserves without needing to use trade... And if they're siphoning power to get around currency exchange limits moving wealth abroad then a traditional crackdown to confiscate their equipment would be much more effective (you can't exact…

Governments that are actually tech savvy will realize that the cons of an uncontrollable, non-taxable currency are absolutely epic.

But it is individuals, not governments, who mine Bitcoin. In fact, the people who mine Bitcoin don’t like governments very much, and wouldn’t cooperate with a government-imposed Sybil attack that would devalue their state-independent store of wealth, any more than they would cooperate with said government going to war with a country they’ve exported all their investments to. Such people would actively seek to use their wealth to oppose such a government.

If a government moved to confiscate all mining operations and run them itself to perform such an attack, the fight such people put up against that would be so obvious that it would be incredibly easy for parties external to the situation (Bitcoin devs + Node operators outside of China) to stop any ensuing Sybil attack. They’d just blacklist Chinese IPs from the network statically in the client code—effectively hard-forking the other 49% of the network in advance so it doesn’t later become confused.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#260

Post by paulgb »

ravenstine wrote: post #245
oefrha wrote: post #72

A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479

That may be true, but the toothpaste is out of the tube. If we can't abruptly stop the use of fossil fuels to stop climate change, I don't think any amount of pointing out how much energy BTC uses is going to change the fact that it's been well established.

Although I believe it is well-established, there's still a lot of people spreading industry talking points about how it's mostly renewables, in spite of stories like this to the contrary. Motivated reasoning is a helluva drug.
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