Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BTC Endgame

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 278 posts

Re: BTC Endgame

#141

Post by nyolfen »

inopinatus wrote: post #139
jacksnipe wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no, other countries don’t have 65% of the hashing capacity. The USA could put a gun to miners heads, but it wouldn’t give them 51%, so there’s no point.

Uh-huh. The agencies of, let’s say, the US federal government, or the Kremlin, or similarly those of governments in the UK, France, Germany, all have no history of overseas intervention or onshore direct action to preserve economic interests. Got it.

if 51% of hash power were located in the US, the statement would have been about the US. it is not something special about china that makes this the case, only the fact that it is a sovereign state with the means and will to control activity in its territory, just like every other functioning state. one could also make the case that china might be more likely to intervene in such a way in the economic affairs of its subjects than a liberal democracy, but that is a secondary argument.

Re: BTC Endgame

#142

Post by hanniabu »

Laforet wrote: post #53
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 a…

> For example, XVG and ETC

Try using projects that aren't "shitcoins" as an example

Re: BTC Endgame

#143

Post by hanniabu »

shawnz wrote: post #123
DSMan195276 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it wasn't considered a value destroying move, the transition away from PoW would've happened already no? I think there's a conflict of interest issue here that would prevent such a move even if it would be worth it - the miners clearly have an incentive to keep the current PoW mechanism, as without it they're left holding a bunch of expensive useless tech. And without the miners willing to go along with a move f…

Miners don't control the price. If a PoS coin became valued, they'd be leaving free money on the table to ignore it. And if Bitcoin became devalued, the mining rate would drop to match (otherwise they'd be spending in excess of the reward on electricity)

Miners don't control the price but they control the upgrade. Why would the miner vote (with their hashpower) to upgrade to a PoS consensus and kill their business?

Re: BTC Endgame

#144

Post by inopinatus »

nyolfen wrote: post #141
inopinatus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh-huh. The agencies of, let’s say, the US federal government, or the Kremlin, or similarly those of governments in the UK, France, Germany, all have no history of overseas intervention or onshore direct action to preserve economic interests. Got it.

if 51% of hash power were located in the US, the statement would have been about the US. it is not something special about china that makes this the case, only the fact that it is a sovereign state with the means and will to control activity in its territory, just like every other functioning state. one could also make the case that china might be more likely to intervene in such a way in the economic affairs of its…

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.

Re: BTC Endgame

#145

Post by hanniabu »

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…

Bitcoin holders will probably migrate their funds to wBTC and live on Ethereum.

Re: BTC Endgame

#146

Post by Laforet »

StavrosK wrote: post #124
Laforet wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No PoS algorithm has yet managed to solve the Nothing-at-stake problem, nor are they any more resistant to the abovementioned kind of hostile takeover by the nation state player compared to PoW. I can't speak for every PoS coin out there but Cardano/Ouroborous explicitly assumes partial synchrony which is arguably never a good idea for a supposedly permissionless blockchain.

So PoS is vaporware because it hasn't solved a problem where the miners can act against their economic best interests and mine a fork? How does "there's a theoretical issue, and also it shares a problem with PoW" follow from "PoS is vaporware"?

There are no miners in a PoS chain, and PoS participants technically have nothing to lose through double forging. There are myriad different ways to find and punish the bad actors in such a situation. I don't claim to know about all of them, however they all make the same assumption you made that staked validators are rational people who look after their interest on the blockchain. But what if they are not rational, or worse, could make gains by disrupting the chain?

This is far from a solved problem, and this is the reason why PoS coins exist mostly on the fringe and ETH is taking very slow baby steps towards a ETH2. Nobody is certain that PoS will stand the test of time and my prediction is that it never will.

One might argue that they don't have to worry about anything judging from how well exchanges has been able to coordinate with the developers to pick a side whenever a major fork is spotted. But then it calls into the question whether we actually need a blockchain when a couple of interested party are the ones who gets to decide which fork is valid.

Re: BTC Endgame

#148

Post by byset »

mumblemumble wrote: post #31
treve wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would assume that the author meant to mean "growth in the supply of bitcoin." Which seems like a reasonable error to make, because printing money typically has an inflationary effect, even if it isn't technically synonymous with inflation. Maybe dilution is a better term? If all other factors could be held equal, then the real value of the ~6BTC reward for mining a block would, in effect, come from a tiny reduction…

It's not an error, it's a different (yet common) usage of the word "inflation" to mean expansion of the money supply, rather than the more common usage meaning a decrease in the purchasing power of money.

Re: BTC Endgame

#149

Post by StavrosK »

gruez wrote: post #140
StavrosK wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So PoS is vaporware because it hasn't solved a problem where the miners can act against their economic best interests and mine a fork? How does "there's a theoretical issue, and also it shares a problem with PoW" follow from "PoS is vaporware"?

> So PoS is vaporware because it hasn't solved a problem where the miners can act against their economic best interests and mine a fork? Not exactly. The point of "nothing as stake" attack is that you can pull off the attack while having... "nothing a stake".

Except the trust of the currency itself, as if you're attacking a currency you have a lot of stake in, you reduce the value of your stake because you attacked it.

Re: BTC Endgame

#150

Post by hanniabu »

pjfin123 wrote: post #67
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?

Yeah it seems like the real defense of an obvious attack is "This Ethereum proof of stake chain with all of the wallets from right before the attack is the new Bitcoin".

Ethereum doesn't store Bitcoin wallets. I'm assuming you mean tokenized BTC (wBTC/rBTC)?
Post reply on HN