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Sabotaging Bitcoin

blog.dshr.org

11–20 of 224 posts

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#11
post #2

TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

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Wait till you find out how much fossil fuel energy the US burns via its military to defend the dollar.

Burning firewood actually immediately releases an extensive set of carcinogens, also causing depression.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#13
post #2

TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

[flagged]

Unless your intent isn't making the world a better place in some sort of meaningful way, learn about things and find something to care about that you can affect that actually matters. Bitcoin or AI or whatever is not worth your time. Do something real.

If we ever get to the point where bitcoin or what people are doing on servers is the most pressing problem in the world worthy of our outrage, I will cheer you on.

"Anon yells at cloud" isn't worth anyone's effort or time.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#14
post #2

TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.

Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.

AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#16
post #3

Is it illegal to attack cryptocurrency?

IANAL, but from my understanding, the primary law used to prosecute hacking is the CFAA's broad "without authorization" and "exceeding authorized access" clauses.

That said, authorization implies an entity with ownership rights granting some kind of limited license to others to interact with the owner's property.

For a permissionless decentralized network with no owner, where the attack is against the consensus of which chain is valid, I'd have a hard time arguing that "authorization" as a concept is even applicable or relevant.

As wmf suggested, market manipulation laws may still apply, but I'm not sure traditional CFAA "without authorization" / "exceeding authorized access" hacking charges could apply, though I'd be willing to bet a prosecutor could make a case for wire fraud - a scheme to defraud using interstate communications.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#17

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Top Tip: If you find the orange site's conversation on crypto to be repetitive you can change the top bar. Conversation stays the same but the colour can be changed!

Readers will want to note that this delightful feature is only available to users above 251 karma, or a knack for UserCSS.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#18

[flagged]

Top Tip: If you find the orange site's conversation on crypto to be repetitive you can change the top bar. Conversation stays the same but the colour can be changed!

Yeah, always takes me a minute when people say 'the orange site' (especially elsewhere) - it's green if I'm logged in, so I rarely see it orange, and then it's 'wuh, I'm logged out, [logs in]'.

Fortunately I'm not prone to refer to the green site.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#19
The answer to this problem is in the original Bitcoin whitepaper itself. It gives the formula for the required number of confirmations.

The Monero PoW community has had to deal with such nonsense, as have other smaller PoW coins.

With ε=1e-3, the expected number of 6 confirmations works only so long as the largest pool size does not exceed 12%. For a pool size of 30%, at least 24 confirmations should be required in Bitcoin, but 49 in Monero with its stricter ε=1e-6. You can see the table and the math at https://gist.github.com/impredicative/0907e1699f5ff97a9fed5d... and again it's all cleanly reproducible from the whitepaper. Anyone who is still requiring only 6 confirmations then will be setting themselves up for a risk of reversal.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#20
Before the AI bubble, Bitmain was only worth ~$1 billion. Now they are worth ~15, because they make chips for AI also. Either way, you could buy bitmain for the budget mentioned in the attack if it were for sale. Or bitmain could pull off the attack, if indeed they do "control ... all the major mining pools" as the article alleges.

But who ultimately controls Bitmain? The Chinese state.

So, by extension, bitcoin is controlled by the CCP.

What a shitshow. Crypto needs to move on from bitcoin already, pick something better... anything better. There are so many options, and bitcoin is the worst of all of them.

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