4 ms·
> One feature that cryptocurrencies gain from their decentralised computing design is that they become very robust to potential attacks from national government
by cejast 5y ago
> One feature that cryptocurrencies gain from their decentralised computing design is that they become very robust to potential attacks from national governments.
I was always under the impression that they would be more susceptible to attacks from national governments, since they'll have greater access to the resources needed for a 51% attack.
- gopalv 5y ago> more susceptible to attacks from national governments The attacks don't need to be on the currency, it can be on the privacy. The ledger is like a giant warrantless paper-trail of who paid whom. As a side-note, how would I reject a payment that came through bitcoin? If I were an unscrupulous government who wanted to target an individual, I'd just send them some money from a suspicious account and then bring them in for questioning over that payment.
- TchoBeer 5y agoI think both parties have to sign a transaction.
- sauwan 5y agoMaybe my wallet does that automatically, but that has not been my experience.
- jacoblambda 5y agoThis is not the case at least on most major networks. On UTxO (Unspent Transaction Output) based networks the transaction is signed by the sender and generates new UTxO for each recipient. The UTxO aren't signed by the recipient but they can be redeemed by the recipient using their private keys (as the UTxO is either signed by or derived from the recipient's public key/address). If you wanted to "return" the funds you'd just create a transaction containing the received UTxO as an input and deduct whatever fees that are used in the Tx from said UTxO. This "returns" the Tx without you spending any funds or having "kept" any amount of their funds. On the Account/Balance model I believe the way it works is similar. The sender signs the Tx with their private key and the receiver signs the Tx with their public key. In this case the "return" Tx is just going to involve sending the fund amount back to the sender since there isn't any separation of Tx outputs in the account balance.
- jacoblambda 5y agoSo to my knowledge you can't choose to not accept a transaction but you can always send the transaction back to the sender.
- mort96 5y agoYeah, China accounts for around 65% of Bitcoin mining globally. If they ever wanted to, I assume they could coerce many of their biggest miners to cooperate on a 51% attack.
- bitcoinmonger 5y agoAre you suggesting that the energy usage of Bitcoin prevents attack, and that more energy usage would prevent government-scale attacks? This seems to insinuate that the energy usage is justifiable in the act of securing a global currency.