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Sabotaging Bitcoin

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Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#91

Post by logicchains »

nradov wrote: post #86
jksmith wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the paper? There exists a technology that has purely enforceable property rights. What is that actually worth? I don't know. Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments about liquidity issues, shutting down the rails, making it illegal to trade, etc. but that's beside the point and depends on a thousand future variables to play out. So I don't know if btc will make it or not, but I do know property rights mean ev…

Property rights are enforced with guns.

That's why Monero is superior; no amount of guns is going to help somebody steal property that they don't know you have.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#92

Post by pcthrowaway »

ravenstine wrote: post #89
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.

That's like saying cars have negative value because of how much oil it takes to run them.

Cars have the benefit of transporting humans and goods around.

It's more like saying a hypothetical car which moves itself by using gasoline as a propellant rather than fuel for its combustion engine would have negative value.

Sure, using fuel (of all things) for propulsion would be one way to move a vehicle, but it would be inefficient by design.

Bitcoin, at least, was created during a time where there was no alternative to security-by-inefficency, but PoS and other consensus mechanisms are pretty battle-tested now

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#93

Post by sebbyBinx »

Part of this post addresses the economics of creating a 6 block re-org. This makes sense as 6-confimations is the standard for Bitcoin finality today.

However, as Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC), I believe this "6-confimation" acceptance policy will change to include not only the number of confirmations, but the timing of those confirmations as well. Consider a scenario where an exchange deciding whether a tx with 6-confirmations that took 4 hours to arrive (this happens occasionally) is safe to consider finalized/settled. Even though 6-confimations may be considered safe by today's acceptance policies, this tx would still have a high probability of double spend due to the assumed 4-hour long wait for the 6 confirmations (as the attacker would have 4 hours to produce 7 blocks instead of the normal/expected 1 hour). Instead of ignoring block interarrival timing, it may make sense to include block timing as part of an acceptance policy.

So, going forward Bitcoin acceptance policies may change from today's 6-confirmation standard to something more complicated that involves the amount of time those blocks took to arrive. This would significantly enhance Bitcoin's double spending resistance without adding/altering any code and may give the network a much needed security boost in the coming years to prevent the attack discussed in the post.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#94

Post by oblio »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #60
Stevvo wrote: post #20

Before the AI bubble, Bitmain was only worth ~$1 billion. Now they are worth ~15, because they make chips for AI also. Either way, you could buy bitmain for the budget mentioned in the attack if it were for sale. Or bitmain could pull off the attack, if indeed they do "control ... all the major mining pools" as the article alleges. But who ultimately controls Bitmain? The Chinese state. So, by extension, bitcoin is c…

Like it or not in the end it will just be BTC. China will stop exporting Bitcoin mining tech. Nation States will dump money into proprietary BTC mining tech and keep it to themselves just like military tech. The US needs to see this reality and focus on domestic BTC mining tech like the future depends on it.

LOL. The Sam Altman plan. Or the US could just put Bitcoin on the Entities List and forbid any US citizen and any US owned entity from investing or trading Bitcoin and Bitcoin derived financial instruments, probably force 25% or more of the Bitcoin money to pull out, crater Bitcoin value, and not perpetuate this atrocity against nature and humanity.

"Democratizing finance" my a**.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#95

Post by onion2k »

w10-1 wrote: post #62

TIL the scale of bitcoin derivatives in 2020 (hence volatility): ~2T on 2B market activity. Jeepers! --- Starting in late 2020, as shown in The Economist's graphic, the spot market in Bitcoin became dwarfed by the derivatives markets. In the last month $1.7T of Bitcoin futures traded on unregulated exchanges, and $6.4B on regulated exchanges. Compare this with the $1.8B of the spot market in the same month. ---

Why would you expect the scale of the derivatives to be related to the scale of the spot market, especially if the derivatives are cash-settled futures? One is basically gambling on the price of BTC going up or down, and the other is trading the actual BTC, right?

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#96

Post by utopiah »

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.

Out of curiosity, do you have an estimate on that?

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#97

Post by utopiah »

gerdesj wrote: post #2

TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Well what's arguably even more horrifying is according to "Estimated average energy efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware" no significant changed happened since 2014. I imagine we went from CPU to GPU to ASIC in couple of years and now for more than a decade, no change, just more.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#98

Post by phonicwheel »

onion2k wrote: post #95
w10-1 wrote: post #62

TIL the scale of bitcoin derivatives in 2020 (hence volatility): ~2T on 2B market activity. Jeepers! --- Starting in late 2020, as shown in The Economist's graphic, the spot market in Bitcoin became dwarfed by the derivatives markets. In the last month $1.7T of Bitcoin futures traded on unregulated exchanges, and $6.4B on regulated exchanges. Compare this with the $1.8B of the spot market in the same month. ---

Why would you expect the scale of the derivatives to be related to the scale of the spot market, especially if the derivatives are cash-settled futures? One is basically gambling on the price of BTC going up or down, and the other is trading the actual BTC, right?

How is trading the actual BTC not also gambling on the price of BTC going up or down?

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#99

Post by SiempreViernes »

phonicwheel wrote: post #98
onion2k wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect the scale of the derivatives to be related to the scale of the spot market, especially if the derivatives are cash-settled futures? One is basically gambling on the price of BTC going up or down, and the other is trading the actual BTC, right?

How is trading the actual BTC not also gambling on the price of BTC going up or down?

You might buy BTC to actually spend it, say on paying a ransomware vendor.

Re: Sabotaging Bitcoin

#100

Post by copirate »

roenxi wrote: post #28

The Eyal & Sirer paper is pretty interesting - they basically point out that there is actually some game theory involved in when miners should reveal that they mined a block to compete most effectively with their fellows. If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage. It looks like a result wi…

> If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage.

How is it wasted if they work on the current chain? If they find a block during those X seconds, they'll propagate it before the waiting pool does. The waiting pool will then just lose the revenue from the block they put on hold. They're the ones wasting mining time when that happens, while the others never do.

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