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Sabotaging Bitcoin

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Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#211

Post by palata »

copirate wrote: post #208
palata wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that at this point, you would have to learn more about probabilities. You're stuck at "I don't understand how having 51% chances to win is better than having 49%, because you cannot know the result in advance and there is a 49% chance that you lose, in which case you have lost".

No, I'm saying it's not clear at all who is in a better position. I'd even argue that the miner hiding his block is in a worse position. But I'll stop discussing that with you. It's pointless and you're way too condescending.

> I'd even argue that the miner hiding his block is in a worse position.

That's just an intuition. You keep saying "having a headstart doesn't help, because those are independent probabilities". Which is wrong: having a headstart does help. How much does it help, and is it worth it? That's the whole question. And it would require more work to answer it.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#212

Post by thesz »

Bootvis wrote: post #153
jcfrei wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at the recently mined blocks. there are some miners that very frequently mine two blocks within quick succession, like just now for example: Block 930256: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/930256 Followed by block 930257: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/930257 The second block is usually almost empty.

This can have another explanation as well: the moment a block is found, the miner starts building on top of the previous block but hasn't constructed a new full block of transactions yet as that costs a bit of time to calculate and distribute. In this period, a new block could be found.

Blocks are Merkle trees, only the head transaction contains global seed. So, for one to mine block, one needs to walk Merkle tree up from head and then finish work with small amount of data in the block header.

Thus, the time spent mining block is directly dependent on the logarithm of number of transactions in the block.

If one can mine a block with 3000 transactions (11-12 hashes to the header) in 10 minutes, one can mine a block with one transaction (1 hash to header) about ten times as fast.

The construction of the block is negligible if we talk about complete block mining time.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#213

Post by rcxdude »

_heimdall wrote: post #161
rcxdude wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a store of value that requires a significant fraction of it be eaten up by transaction fees to maintain security going to be actually useful in the long term?

With regards to transaction fees, bitcoin is already not particularly useful today. It can make sense to be used as an alternative to wire transfers where you only occasionally send a transaction, but it isn't useful as a currency and any day to day transactions have to happen off chain and not use bitcoin at all.

Right, which is why one has to wonder who's going to want to pay enough transaction fees to secure the network.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#214

Post by UltraSane »

pawelduda wrote: post #131
UltraSane wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? BTC is not just worthless, it has negative value due to how much electricity it takes to securely mine new blocks.

It's worth around 85k USD at the time you wrote the comment

Only because it is being subsidized by 20 to 40 gigawatts of electricity. It is basically a ponzi scheme where the increasing difficulty transfers wealth from new comers to early adopters.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#215

Post by Zaskoda »

bb88 wrote: post #26
Zaskoda wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> We can't know how much power AI uses. I call shenanigans on this statement. We can and most certainly can tell how much power AI is using. The upper bound is the total datacenter usage.

Might I point out this instance of Elon's company using gas powered generators to boost power at their data center:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk...

We have no idea what's happening in private data centers around the world.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#216

Post by bb88 »

Zaskoda wrote: post #215
bb88 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can't know how much power AI uses. I call shenanigans on this statement. We can and most certainly can tell how much power AI is using. The upper bound is the total datacenter usage.

Might I point out this instance of Elon's company using gas powered generators to boost power at their data center: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk... We have no idea what's happening in private data centers around the world.

Again shenanigans. This is an arguing technique from the bitcoin maximalists who would proclaim something to be false when a google search would show otherwise.

You've drank some kind of kool-aid. You've been gaslit. Don't do it to the rest of us.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564#

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#217

Post by basilikum »

palata wrote: post #210
basilikum wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. Your advancement is that of exhausting a part of the search space of SHA256 inputs for a given output. We would be in deep trouble if you made any significant advancements there or even got close to it by multiple orders of magnitude off.

> We would be in deep trouble if you made any significant advancements there Not necessarily. The whole idea is that it maybe more profitable to withhold a block for some time. "More profitable" means that you make more money at the end. Not that you make billions in a second.

I'm not commenting on the Bitcoin economics, but on the specific problem of a partial hash inversion which Bitcoin uses. If any amount of compute you can bring up would grant you any significant amount of information about the likelihood of a (partial) hash inversion for an untested input in your search space by means of having searched a significant amount of the search space, SHA256 would be broken.

In hopefully simpler words; You want to find a hash with all zeroes. So you start trying inputs from your search space and hash them to see if they match that criterion. Every single input you try has the same probability of matching. After trying a lot of inputs you have exhausted a part of the search space. You have already tried many incorrect inputs. At some point if you keep only trying incorrect inputs you should have exhausted the whole search space and the last remaining possible input has to be the correct one resulting in an all zeroes hash. So the probability of the next hash being the correct one should go up during your search as you learn information about the remaining candidates in the search space. If this information is in any way significant in practice with any feasible amount of computing power, the cryptographic hash function is insecure. Of course with Bitcoin you aren't searching for a full hash inversion with all zeroes but only for a partial one starting with some zeroes, but that does not change the fundamentals. It should be infeasible to learn any significant information about the output of untried inputs by trying other inputs.

If SHA256 was to be broken in that way, we'd be in big trouble and Bitcoin would be the least of our worries.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#218

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Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#219

Post by monerozcash »

thesz wrote: post #212
Bootvis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can have another explanation as well: the moment a block is found, the miner starts building on top of the previous block but hasn't constructed a new full block of transactions yet as that costs a bit of time to calculate and distribute. In this period, a new block could be found.

Blocks are Merkle trees, only the head transaction contains global seed. So, for one to mine block, one needs to walk Merkle tree up from head and then finish work with small amount of data in the block header. Thus, the time spent mining block is directly dependent on the logarithm of number of transactions in the block. If one can mine a block with 3000 transactions (11-12 hashes to the header) in 10 minutes, one c…

>If one can mine a block with 3000 transactions (11-12 hashes to the header) in 10 minutes, one can mine a block with one transaction (1 hash to header) about ten times as fast.

Huh? Surely the attempts for both take exactly the same amount of time after you've initially constructed the block, you're calculating only a single hash for each attempt.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#220

Post by Bootvis »

thesz wrote: post #212
Bootvis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can have another explanation as well: the moment a block is found, the miner starts building on top of the previous block but hasn't constructed a new full block of transactions yet as that costs a bit of time to calculate and distribute. In this period, a new block could be found.

Blocks are Merkle trees, only the head transaction contains global seed. So, for one to mine block, one needs to walk Merkle tree up from head and then finish work with small amount of data in the block header. Thus, the time spent mining block is directly dependent on the logarithm of number of transactions in the block. If one can mine a block with 3000 transactions (11-12 hashes to the header) in 10 minutes, one c…

This is incorrect. The miner just changes the header of the block and rehashes. The transaction set is fixed for many tries.
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