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One disadvantage of gold I can think of is you cannot hide it in your head.
by pingec 9y ago
One disadvantage of gold I can think of is you cannot hide it in your head.
- loceng 9y agoNo one can steal it from you with 50%+1 CPU resources though.
- chrisco255 9y agoThe 51% attack allows you to double spend. It doesn't allow you to steal other people's coin.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoBy allowing you to double spend, it reduces confidence in coins you buy to zero, which reduces the value of all coins to zero. You still have your coins, but they aren't worth anything.
- Rmilb 9y agoThis is false, you just have to wait for more confirmations. And if miners are censoring transactions there will be a fork where you can use your coins.
- chrisco255 9y agoWhich is exactly why no one would spend the crazy amounts of money it takes to execute a 51% attack. It would be like self-immolation. Billions of dollars in equipment and energy and you'd have 51% of a worthless network. In practice, you would have to control much more than 51% of the network, because you'd have to catch up to the 49% that are still hashing away.
- loceng 9y agoJust like why no one would spend $100s of billions on wars that just perpetuate violence.. surely there's no incentive or gain they'd have by causing such disruption.
- Retric 9y agoUnless they are a government, shorted bitcoins, or own a massive stake in a competitor etc. PS: Remember the value of Bitcoin is limited as a function of the cost of that 51% attack. If the price increases by 10x the transaction fees need to also increase by 10x or Bitcoin becomes less secure.
- joering2 9y agoThis idea comes back many times... but I don't see a reason why government would want to short bitcoins or disturb the market to get their hands in it. 1. They have BEP printing press; instead of stealing or brute forcing into bitcoin and then selling the loot for $, the might as well ask Bernanke to print few thousands more sheets of 100 dollar bills (of course not legally but i'm sure there is some overprint like in any business). 2. screwing people out of bitcoins would mean screwing US citizens as well. Why would any part of government do that just to upset Congress and get themselves in front of bunch of congresspeople for grilling? Doesn't make sense.
- Retric 9y agoGovernment is unrelated to shorting, Governments may chose to destroy Bitcoin for the same reason the may ban it. Basically, currency controls etc. Someone shorting Bitcoin on the other hand has an economic incentive to destroy it. The cost benefit of doing so scales with the size of their short vs the current hashing power. But, a malware writer may have access to a 51% attack briefly without owning any equipment.
- joering2 9y ago> Which is exactly why no one would spend the crazy amounts of money it takes to execute a 51% attack. There was a recent paper shared here on an article about new type of currency or exchange system. Although I don't understand details, it explained that since 51% of coins are already mined by just a few pools, if these pools orchestrate together, then can break the chain. But unsure how true this is (cannot find the post anymore, sorry)
- johnhenry 9y agoTechnically, a 51% attack would allow one to confirm non-standard transactions and pretty much do anything. Granted, this would immediately be apparent to any of the other 49% of nodes and cause a fork, but still...
- option_greek 9y agoWhats the point of that ? A miner can confirm non-standard transactions right now when he mines a block but no one would accept it. Point of 51% attack is to surreptitiously double spend and nothing else.
- tuxxy 9y agoHave you seen how much processing power is in the Bitcoin network? Do you know how expensive an attack like this would be? By the way, you can only double spend with the 51% attack.
- wellboy 9y agoHow expensive, $100M?
- jhall1468 9y agoYou're off by a factor of 20. The current hash rate is 17.5 million terahashes per second. Ant Antminer S9 goes for $2800 and produces 13.5 terahashes per second. In order to get to 51%, you'd need a $2 billion dollar investment.
- loceng 9y agoHow much is spent on war directly (that we know about) every year globally?
- jhall1468 9y agoThe US military budget is $600B. Not sure what your point is though. A 51% attack doesn't give a government control, it just allows it to double spend. And that's until a hot patch to increase the required number of confirmations resolves the issue. Besides there's a huge supply problem here. ASICs need to be manufactured. You can't just buy several hundred thousand of them. The whole point of Bitcoin is that it's prohibitively expensive to just perform a 51% attack and impossible to entirely regulate.
- once_inc 9y agoA simple fork invalidating coins originating from the double spend would be enough. You've just spent $2B to achieve something that the network can invalidate with a dozen lines of code. It would set a bad precedent, but it did cost you a lot of money.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- keypress 9y agoTeeth?
- dmichulke 9y agoRather inconvenient for bigger stacks. Might be popular with the ladies, though.
- akhatri_aus 9y agoYou can hide the keys to it in your head. You can store it in a passworded safe.
- 15155 9y agoThe key difference is that those physical assets do not die with you. They exist in that safe until someone with a plasma cutter or a Hilti coring rig takes it from you.
- QAPereo 9y agoRubber hose...