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Doesn't the FBI already own one of the largest wallets after seizing Silk Roak assets?
by sidyom 9y ago
Doesn't the FBI already own one of the largest wallets after seizing Silk Roak assets?
- foobarbecue 9y agoThey were rushing to sell it a few weeks ago, hopefully they managed before the decline
- Franciscouzo 9y agoAnd? It doesn't matters how many coins you've got to perform a 51% attack, only thing that matters is how many hashes you can perform per second.
- heatmiser 9y agoI think they’re asking: why destroy value of an asset that they currently hold/own?
- sillysaurus3 9y agoWell, it's a relatively small sum. And if it grows into a large and valuable asset relative to the government's budget, that's a bad sign: it means the government-backed dollar is losing steam relative to crypto. It's in the government's interest to lop off the head of its biggest existential threat. Also, Satoshi presumably passed his coins to his heirs. Who controls 6% of all wealth? I wonder.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoYes, but that simply raises the price and encourages BTC adoption. Governments will need to become active miners to destroy it. And unlike miners, they won't care whether they can mine faster than everybody else. Their objective is to ruin BTC.
- EGreg 9y agoCan someone please explain how exactly a 51% attack would actually cause double-spends to be accepted? All the miners do is accept transactions into a block. We don't trust any given machine to validate that there were no double-spends. For that, each client would have to check the entire history before accepting payment. So, how would mining the blocks cause double spending to take place? Don't bitcoin miners have to SIGN their blocks? If so, then broadcasting two different histories would quickly be discovered. I guess the only thing they can do is make a bitcoin fork, something that is possible anyway, by enough miners agreeing. Perhaps they can alternate the two forks length growth, making the clients thrash and re download the two forks over and over.
- sillysaurus3 9y agohttps://notehub.org/nz8d0 https://notehub.org/nz8d0 Basically, the longest chain is considered correct. And it has to work that way. It's why BTC is sybil-resistant. So the attack is to get >51% of the hash power together, then mine in secret, creating a perfectly valid longer chain with a different tx history. Publish it, and watch the world burn.
- mavdi 9y agoI wonder what would be needed to gain 51% hash power? How many super computers would that be?
- gruez 9y ago>How many super computers would that be? you're asking the wrong question. mainly because bitcoin mining is done with ASICs and not general purpose computers. I would be surprised if the bitcoin network hashrate isn't higher than all the general purpose computing power in the world combined (converted to double SHA256 hash rate).
- KamelAufAbwegen 9y agoBulgaria has a 3 billion wallet. What's the reason then to attack bitcoin. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-08/bulgaria-government-shocked-discover-it-owns-3-billion-bitcoin http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-08/bulgaria-government...
- nawtacawp 9y agoThey should sell those.