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Ehh, this blog posts focuses way too much on technical tricks that are, in reality, not really the main risks to the bitcoin network. For example, the blog pos
by stale2002 6y ago
Ehh, this blog posts focuses way too much on technical tricks that are, in reality, not really the main risks to the bitcoin network.
For example, the blog posts focuses on things like 51% attacks to either reorg the chain, or prevent transactions from being published. This is not really as big of a deal. When 51% attacks happen, it certain disrupts crypto networks in the short term. But the defenders always have the nuclear option in their back pocket, which is to change the proof of work algorithm, and force the attackers to spend a bunch of money building their attack infrastructure up again.
Threats to change the POW algorithm, were thrown around during the 2017 blocksize debate, when things got really heated, and parties involved were threatened what amounted to 51% attacks. So it is already established that this is something that devs consider doing.
The only real avenue of attack against crypto networks, is simply the social one. You simply arrest anyone who does anything at all related to crypto, and hope the threat of government violence is enough to make it so most people dont use crypto.
Those social attacks would be the most likely to succeed, IMO, but they also have the problem of being difficult to implement. You know, because we living in a society, with a court system, and elections, and people that care about not living in a totalitarian hellscape, so any attempt by the government to simply arrest everyone, will likely be punished politically.
So sure. The blog post is correct that if the government simply arrests or kills everyone who has anything to do with bitcoin, then they could stop crypto. But the counter argument to that, is such recommendations are completely out there, and extreme, and society wouldn't let that happen and would punish the people doing that.
The actual attack vectors that matter, are not some fantasy land conspiracy, of every world government becoming a dictatorship. Instead, the attack vectors that matter would instead be every day bad actors, that seek to defraud people, in secret, and are not willing or able to kill/arrest everyone in the world who opposed it.
- AffableSpatula 6y agoI don't think China being a dictatorship is much of a conspiracy. That's where a lot of ASICs are deployed, as well as the majority of the fabrication of the hardware itself.
- stale2002 6y ago> I don't think China being a dictatorship is much of a conspiracy. But china enacting authoritarian measures isn't good enough. The blog post did not suggest that the attack vector to worry about was a single country banning crypto. Instead, the blog post said that the attacks would only happen if every major country in the world colluded together, to all being authoritarian, and banning crypto everywhere. If only China decides to take over crypto, the solution is relatively simple. The developers of bitcoin/whatever simply change the proof of world algorithm, and turn all of china's ASICs into space heaters. That would be disruptive to crypto, sure. But lots of disruptive things have happened in the space. People would move on. And if china spent another X billion dollars building even more asics, then the algorithm could be changed again.
- AffableSpatula 6y agoChanging the hash function doesn't solve the problem. The mining game doesn't remonitise becuase everyone knows where it ends (denial of service and collapse, rendering mining hardware valueless).
- stale2002 6y ago> (denial of service and collapse, rendering mining hardware valueless). No, actually. China being able to DDOS every internet service that it does not like is already something that they provably are unable to do in the current day world. There are lots of things that China would like to DDOS off the internet, right now, and yet they aren't able to succeed at doing that. A crypto service isn't any different than anything else that China is attempting to, and failing at, DDOSing off of the internet right now. What is china going to do? Take out cloudfare and aws and any other major web hosting platform in the world? C'mon. Lets enter back into the real world. If the US is refusing to cooperate with china, then there are many ways of defending against something as simple as a DDOS attack.