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It's virtually indestructible. But global prohibition would limit its utility and likely cascade to diminished investment in mining. But it will likely never
by wyldfire 9y ago
It's virtually indestructible. But global prohibition would limit its utility and likely cascade to diminished investment in mining.
But it will likely never go away until/unless you could find an unfixable flaw. For example, a flaw in the hashing algorithm that permits you to double-spend. Unfortunately there's effectively an enormous bounty on that particular defect that no one has yet claimed. If someone did, another coin with another hashing algorithm would take bitcoin's place.
More importantly -- what is your motivation? Let's please enumerate the evils going on in the world and rank bitcoin appropriately. It's not worth your time.
If you are really in a huff over the energy consumption I think your consternation is poorly focused. Again, let's rank our concerns here. In any case, the best way to "destroy" proof-of-work coins is to invest and promote coins that are similarly effective without proof-of-work. e.g. proof-of-stake coins like Raiblocks.
- empath75 9y agoIf china decided to shut down the mining operations, that would have a massive impact on the block chain.
- wyldfire 9y agoYou're mistaken. The difficulty would re-calibrate and it's business as usual. However, if China or some other government compelled miners to sign invalid transactions, this would have a big impact. This is a weakness of proof-of-work secured coins (note that they also have many strengths that proof-of-stake coins lack). EDIT: I was unclear what I meant by "this is a weakness of PoW" -- the energy signature of concentrated mining operations make them easy for governments to find.
- option_greek 9y agoI don't think a transaction would just become valid if a miner (who mined a block) signs it. Each participating node will independently verify the chain for signatures of transactions before it accepts the latest block. So a miner who mines a block with invalid block will just waste his efforts on it. The chain length is used a proxy to find out a valid chain only when two competing chains have valid blocks throughout but have different lengths.
- empath75 9y agoDepends on how much the hashrate changed: http://bitcoinandtheblockchain.blogspot.com/2017/08/chain-death-spiral-fatal-bitcoin.html http://bitcoinandtheblockchain.blogspot.com/2017/08/chain-de...
- wyldfire 9y agoYou are correct, this seems like a defect that should be addressed.
- jes5199 9y agoit depends on what you mean by "invalid transactions". If you mine a block that doesn't follow the rules, the rest of the network will just ignore it, and so you've wasted your computation.