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I mean, buying a bunch of miners in order to 51% attack a network is significantly more difficult than making a phone call to a Visa or MasterCard executive. I
by stale2002 8y ago
I mean, buying a bunch of miners in order to 51% attack a network is significantly more difficult than making a phone call to a Visa or MasterCard executive.
It is also not enough to censor a singular Blockchain. You'd have to get the hardware to attack all the chains, because then people would just move to the other ones.
This is still not impossible. That's why I used the words "censorship resistant". But it is certainly much more difficult than a phone call to 2 or 3 executives who control the major financial companies.
This is proven by the fact that censorship just isn't happening on most Blockchains. The actual state of the network proves that it is difficult, because it isn't happening.
You can talk all you want about theoretical attacks, but those attacks aren't happening, so it works. Whereas there are many examples of the "phone call to Visa" that are happening right now.
- arcticbull 8y agoMy understanding is 2 or 3 miners in the PRC have all that 51%, and in China, when Beijing says jump you say how high or you may end up escorted from your penthouse at the four seasons in Hong Kong to seek medical treatment on the mainland and never be heard from again (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/world/asia/xiao-jianhua-china-hong-kong-billionaire.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/worl...)
- arcticbull 8y agoTo circle back 80% of all hashpower is concentrated in 6 pools, 5 of which (>70%) are in the PRC. (https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-mining-threatens-bitcoin/ https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-mining-threatens-bitcoin/)
- stale2002 8y agoAnd yet, those pools aren't censoring anything. They aren't stopping any transactions, and have never done so, in the 10 years that crypto has been around. This is in comparison to visa and mastercard which censor people all of the time. So for whatever reason that those pools aren't censoring anything, and have never done so, but the major finance companies are censoring transactions, is the reason why crypto is valuable.