251–260 of 555 posts
Purely hypothetical and mostly stupid: could double spending attacks be a way to overcome the issue of a limited supply of coins and the fact the total number of coins tends to zero as old coins are lost?
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Nah, you could short-sell Bitcoin. Take out a sell option, crash the value, buy cheap, then exercise the option. Information is valuable, no matter which direction it predicts the market to go.
An interesting thought, but in practice, trading derivatives affects the value of the underlying pretty strongly. Whoever is selling you those puts is selling bitcoin (or futures) to hedge, which would drive the price down as you try to put on your position.
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Assuming you want to make money directly, sure. If you want to harm a community in which the currency is widely used, the incentives are different.
What kind of incentive does the attacker have to just harm a community of a distributed system?
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So it's ok if your currency becomes unreliable for many hours? It would immediately negate the trust of what happened during that period of time, affecting the trust of any balance in participating addresses.
This has already happened multiple times to BTC and it's still around. BTC is not a currency; that train left long ago.
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So it's ok if your currency becomes unreliable for many hours? It would immediately negate the trust of what happened during that period of time, affecting the trust of any balance in participating addresses.
Bitcoin hasn't been useful as a currency for a long time. I don't think that's a good measure for determining how an event might affect bitcoin price.
I have a shift card, bought tacobell with bitcoin.
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The same people arguing for trusting the Government for currency (the people that say "wasting electricity") are the same people that are also trusting the Government to solve the climate problem. They have obviously failed at the latter - no price on carbon, which ironically would resolve their complaint about the former since "wasting electricity" is code for "contributing to climate change" which is . not priced i…
Sort of. It does create an opportunity cost, in diverting electricity away from other, arguably more useful causes. The whole matter there is complicated by economies of scale and baseload demand etc though. It could also be seen in terms of finiteness of the source of energy.
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I think the argument is that by doing a 51% attack you undermine the market value so you never get the rewards. This makes sense, but only for the leading crypto coin. As we see here today, you can 51% attack smaller coins, which should imply an increase in the value of Bitcoin from consolidation.
The spooky thing that this made me realize, is that if anyone did find a vulnerability in bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) is that they would have a greater incentive to only slowly leech off the system, because they will be able to siphon out much more over time than if everyone panics over security. The weapon is no good unless it's secret.
If Bitcoin became the dominant currency of humanity, eventually we’d darken the galaxy by building Dyson shells in the ultimate energy arms race to prevent a 51% attack. Joking. Mostly.
How do you adjust the algorithm for the communication time between opposite nodes. Let's say earth distance, 16 minutes at speed of light direct.
I'm just waiting for the day when it's revealed that ~70% of miners on a top 5 cryptocurrency are compromised by a specialized worm or malware. We'll probably only find out after the double spending is discovered but this type of outcome seems almost inevitable. The people writing this type of software are definitely financially motivated, but I can easily imagine such a person throwing away millions of dollars in 0-…
attacks like this is harder to pull off than you think. miners constantly submit "shares" to the pool, which are then validated to credit them a share in the block reward[1]. depending on the difficulty threshold of the shares are, these could be submitted a few times a minute to every few minutes. if you hacked and gained control of the miners, sure you can redirect all the hashing power to you, but this will be detected quite quickly. with thousands of dollars on the line per minute, you can bet that everybody has monitoring in place to detect a dip in shares submission. also keep in mind that you have to keep this going for about 1 hour (for your initial transaction to confirm) without people noticing. moreover, the core problem stealing hash power to do a 50% attack is that block times will skyrocket on the main chain, which will let everybody (and not just the pool operator) know that something's up. plus after this attack, you can bet that exchanges will start requiring additional confirmations for large deposits, and instituting withholding times for cryptocurrency withdraws.
[1] I don't know whether large mining operators do this. Strictly speaking, they don't but I'd imagine they do this because it lets them know that their rigs are up and producing valid hashes (ie. not malfunctioning). It's almost certain that small mining operators use pools.
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I think the argument is that by doing a 51% attack you undermine the market value so you never get the rewards. This makes sense, but only for the leading crypto coin. As we see here today, you can 51% attack smaller coins, which should imply an increase in the value of Bitcoin from consolidation.
On certain exchanges you can short USD to cryptocurrency pairing.
In addition to this you have to do it on margin, and most exchanges have a history of dubious liquidation of margin positions.