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I 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 ha

I 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 ago
  Changing 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.

I 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 ago
Changing 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.