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Bitcoin's Security Budget Issue: Problems, Solutions and Myths Debunked

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71–74 of 74 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Security Budget Issue: Problems, Solutions and Myths Debunked

#71

I like that no one brings up the question that Bitcoin is not really decentralized. Most of the Core devs are paid by a company (iirc it was Blockstream but might've changed), and ultimately, the paycheck they receive dictates which direction the most used Bitcoin wallet should go, which dictates the direction of the project as a whole. There were several attempts of merging important BIPs, which were rejected becaus…

the issue you are talking about just came up where core basically just did what mining companies want. The result was 14% of nodes now use bitcoin knots a fork of core that doesn't allow that. Core is just 1 github repo it only matters until it doesn't.

Re: Bitcoin's Security Budget Issue: Problems, Solutions and Myths Debunked

#72

The whole point of restricting the block size was to ensure space in the blockchain was scarce to drive the price of fees up, better securing the network. Well, that and keeping the blockchain total size small enough to be processed on an regular user's PC for decentralization sake. While a loss of some decentralization is non-ideal, increasing the block size dynamically, similarly to how difficulty is handled, would…

That wasn't the reason to restrict block size. There is no way to scale the number of transactions on the main layer to anywhere near the level required to cover daily transactions. The bitcoin main layer was always destined to be for settlements between financial institutions anyway. Making any accommodations for use cases that are fundamentally unsustainable never made sense. Buying coffee was always going to have to be on a second or third layer, so restricting the block size introduces an incentive to develop those layers that are needed anyway.

Re: Bitcoin's Security Budget Issue: Problems, Solutions and Myths Debunked

#73
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be great if each tracked event was linked to a section of the project 2025 language. as it stands, to someone unfamiliar, it is just a list of initiatives the trump admin has completed.

the 'view sources' dropdown on each initiative links to the page in the project 2025 pdf, is this what you'd want?

wow i completely missed that. thank you

Re: Bitcoin's Security Budget Issue: Problems, Solutions and Myths Debunked

#74
If you receive btc in a transaction, the question is, when you consider it to be settled. In other words, how much energy is enough for you to consider it infeasible for an attacker to rewrite recent blocks so that you no longer are the recipient of some btc.

One way to think about it is to relate the total fees to the value of your transaction. If fees in blocks with a block height above the block with your transaction total $10000 (the security budget) then an attacker might be willing to spend that amount on energy to rewrite the chain. Another way to think about it is to relate the security budget to all recent transactions, assuming the attacker is the counter party to all of them (worst case).

In either case, there is no obviously correct answer to how high the security budget has to be on a per-block basis. The question is how long you're willing to wait for the security budget to accumulate and cover your transaction. If the block subsidy decreases and fees don't rise to replace them, then settlement time increases. Don't hand out goods to a counter party if the value of your transaction hasn't at least been met by the security budget. No need to wait longer than the point at which the value of all transactions of the block which includes your transaction has been exceeded by the security budget. An attacker would be losing money at that point if they tried to scam you.

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