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> Right except 70% of the hash power is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC. A strongly worded memo from Xi that unless you permit their compromise of

• arcticbull 6y ago
  They can nuke the currency by executing a 51% attack on anyone. There’s no fundamental value to Bitcoin except faith/trust. Kill the trust kill the chain.
  • shawnz 6y ago
    The "fair players" could simply coordinate to make a hard fork from before the attack.
    • arcticbull 6y ago
      They sure could, with the remaining 30% of the hash power. Thing is, continuously forking isn't a recipe for a store of value or currency or anything else.
      • shawnz 6y ago
        You are right that wouldn't make for a good store of value. But Bitcoin actually does not get attacked "continuously" so that is not an applicable criticism. It is conceivable that such a thing could happen but we can expect it to happen approximately never given the incentives in place.
        • arcticbull 6y ago
          Economic incentives sure, but if it becomes America's currency and it's mined by the Chinese, economic incentives no longer have primacy.
          • shawnz 6y ago
            Don't they? Then what does? I just don't see what the benefit of conducting such an attack would be. Coinholders would practically not be impacted: they could just take their existing keys and bring them into the hard-forked software and continue like normal. Mining might be disrupted for a short time, but is that so harmful to the enemy to be worth spending millions in electricity?
  • stale2002 6y ago
    I have been hearing this argument for over a decade now. In another decade, when this mythical attack on this scale l (as it applies to BTC. Some smaller coins have been attacked, but they are nowhere on the same scale) continues to fail to materialize, are you going to say the same thing? I just want to know how many decades from now of your position being falsified, that you need to wait for you to change your mind. Or will you never change you mind? Is you position truly unfalsifiable, no many how many decades go by?
    • arcticbull 6y ago
      > as it applies to BTC. Some smaller coins have been attacked, but they are nowhere on the same scale So what I'm hearing is everyone knows it can and does happen at a smaller scale but you just can't bring yourself to believe it could ever happen on a bigger scale. This seems like the creationism vs evolution argument. I find this particular criticism of the currency pretty weak too for what it's worth as It's got much bigger issues. Like the sheer magnitude of its waste. However, I do find the argument disqualifying when petitioning to make Bitcoin the "one world currency" when 70% of the hashpower is in a totalitarian ethnostate that can just screw it up at will. Conceptually it amounts to giving up sovereignty of your currency to the PRC.
      • stale2002 6y ago
        > but you just can't bring yourself to believe it could ever happen on a bigger scale What I asked was for what would make your position falsifiable, in terms of time that an attack does not happen. How many decades from now do we need to wait. My position is falsifiable, on the other hand. If a major attack, on the scale of the whole BTC network gets broken for weeks and weeks on end, then my position is falsified, as I do not think such attacks, on that large of a scale, are going to happen, therefore if one does I would be wrong. Yours, on the other hand, does not seem to be. It seems like there is no possible timeline, for attacks on that scale failing to materialize, for which you will admit that such attacks are not coming.
        • arcticbull 6y ago