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BTC Endgame

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Re: BTC Endgame

#91

Post by dontreact »

gavrif wrote: post #83
generalizations wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd make a wild guess that when parent is talking about 'control', they mean that if a miner is located within China, the Chinese government has the ability to put a gun to that miners head and tell them what to do.

With that kind of control, they could just put a gun to anyone's head and ask them to start mining bitcoin and do it the way they want them to. It wouldn't have to depend on how many bitcoin miners are in China at the moment.

Fortunately, it is immensely more difficult for the Chinese state to exercise its monopoly on force outside of Chinese borders.

Re: BTC Endgame

#92

Post by fanciestManimal »

tshaddox wrote: post #42
WJW wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China gains no benefit from destroying Bitcoin; Citation needed on this one I'm afraid. If nothing else, a currency that the Party cannot control would be A Problem. China did not have much economic benefit in halting the ANT IPO, yet it did not go through all the same. There _might_ be a benefit in allowing bitcoin to continue to exist of course, if they think it advances their cause more than it hurts it. But as…

Why haven’t they destroyed it then?

It's not inconceivable (to me at least) that at some point in the future it would be politically or personally beneficial for the leadership of a totalitarian government to do something that is economically costly to it's citizens (in this case we're talking about damaging bitcoin, but it could be anything).

Re: BTC Endgame

#93

Post by nostrademons »

gavrif wrote: post #83
generalizations wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd make a wild guess that when parent is talking about 'control', they mean that if a miner is located within China, the Chinese government has the ability to put a gun to that miners head and tell them what to do.

With that kind of control, they could just put a gun to anyone's head and ask them to start mining bitcoin and do it the way they want them to. It wouldn't have to depend on how many bitcoin miners are in China at the moment.

It's a lot easier to point a gun to someone's head and say "Switch your equipment over to the network pipe that we give you" rather than point a gun to someone's head and say "Build a datacenter, secure an extremely large source of power, buy a few thousand Bitcoin mining boards, hook them all up in this extremely technical way, and then switch it over to the network pipe we give you."

The gun in the head strategy works best when you're only asking your populace to do simple things. For complex, technical tasks, the usual response is "Oops, I can't concentrate while you've got a gun against my head", and then you can shoot them but that's not going to help your task get accomplished any quicker. (This is also why working conditions at say Google or Apple tend to be pretty good, and why Soviet scientists were treated relatively well even if the rest of the population wasn't.)

Re: BTC Endgame

#94

Post by AffableSpatula »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #80
AffableSpatula wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attack scenario is an adversarial nation state who is not motivated economically and is intent on sabotage of the network.

I don't understand what you're getting at, I was pointing out why Bitcoin hasn't moved to PoS even if it may actually be better.

You're right, I totally misread what you said.

I think the answer to what you actually said is; miners don't control consensus on the network - it's not up to them, it's up to fullnodes/users who can change the ruleset whenever they want.

Re: BTC Endgame

#95

Post by [deleted] »

gavrif wrote: post #83
generalizations wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd make a wild guess that when parent is talking about 'control', they mean that if a miner is located within China, the Chinese government has the ability to put a gun to that miners head and tell them what to do.

With that kind of control, they could just put a gun to anyone's head and ask them to start mining bitcoin and do it the way they want them to. It wouldn't have to depend on how many bitcoin miners are in China at the moment.

[deleted]

Re: BTC Endgame

#96

Post by latchkey »

mullingitover wrote: post #73

There's a much simpler endgame: China starts enacting export controls on ASICs.

Good thing Global Foundries, Samsung and TSMC have their fabs in many countries. I'd worry about them before I'd worry about a single country.

Re: BTC Endgame

#97

Post by mrits »

hertzrat wrote: post #84
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…

Will Bitcoin even be that decentralized in 50 years? The miners control the network, and most mining is done by big companies now and their data centres. If it’s like other companies, won’t they gradually acquire one another until there is only 1-2 companies controlling almost the entire future crypto economy? The scale of the computing power we are talking about is not something that individuals can compete with

I've posted here before about it. I'm of the opinion that it currently is not decentralized. There is such a shortage of hardware that can be competitive right now and there are only a few organizations that can get their hands on them. I think this problem is just going to get worse when the manufactures start to realize it doesn't make sense to sell any of their miners at all.

Re: BTC Endgame

#98

Post by darig »

I never understood why empty blocks is allowed... you can start immediately and get a head start over other mining pools. Granted it is just the time to load in transactions from the mempool and hash the result of appending them to the blockchain, but still... if you're in a race, why not take any advantage you can get?

I've monitored the chain for years, and empty blocks are very very common. I know there is a civil war of people that want to make the block size larger vs keep it the same... I think at this point it they would both agree that every block should at least be 90%+ full before it is accepted. That seems like a simple fix.

The attackers would then like just fill up the blocks passing a tiny amount of bitcoin between all their wallets, but at that point they might as well just use the mempool.

In the end, if you have mining dominance, you win. No point denying that. If you want to "ban" miners, or rewrite history, bitcoin is no longer decentralized.

Re: BTC Endgame

#99

Post by AffableSpatula »

dingus9 wrote: post #87
AffableSpatula wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a temporary speeedbump, it's a permanent end to proof of work mining as an investable activity (and viable sybil resistance mechanism for bitcoin).

Remember UASF? If incentives align amongst users, nodes, merchants and exchanges Bitcoin absolutely will switch to another mining algorithm and now the attacker has to start from 0. If the attacker attempts to keep up the game of cat-and-mouse long enough they will eventually go bankrupt and will no longer be able to participate. And this theoretical discussion completely dismisses the fact that it's nearly impossibl…

UASF effectively became a negotiation between honest miners and fullnodes. Honest miners are incentivised to close off conflicts because it risks devaluing their future rewards. In this scenario the attacking miner is acting "non-economically" so it's nothing like UASF.

Re: BTC Endgame

#100

Post by swader999 »

gavrif wrote: post #83
generalizations wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd make a wild guess that when parent is talking about 'control', they mean that if a miner is located within China, the Chinese government has the ability to put a gun to that miners head and tell them what to do.

With that kind of control, they could just put a gun to anyone's head and ask them to start mining bitcoin and do it the way they want them to. It wouldn't have to depend on how many bitcoin miners are in China at the moment.

I'd wager the way China would exert control on miners there would be to regulate their access to electricity.
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