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A fun way to spend $600 million that you cannot launder anyway would be to put it in a smart contract and release it in portions to anyone who could solve a pro
by ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
A fun way to spend $600 million that you cannot launder anyway would be to put it in a smart contract and release it in portions to anyone who could solve a proof of work problem. Incidentally, the PoW problem would result in empty blocks being mined on Bitcoin, effectively executing a denial of service attack. The incentives should be adjusted so it becomes at least twice as profitable for a miner to mine empty blocks for the smart contract than to mine real blocks on the Bitcoin main network.
Edit: It should probably be designed as a contract which pays out only once a predetermined number of fake blocks have been mined, and the payout to the solvers will be proportional to the number of blocks they have in the final solution chain (wallet addresses of solvers should be encoded in the empty blocks they mine to prevent front-running, which will destroy the incentives). It should be possible to submit any solution to the contract so that everyone competes. This includes solutions that are mined by actual bitcoin miners, effectively pitting the miners mining real blocks against the miners mining empty blocks. Someone who is more skilled than me should design such a contract and put it on Ethereum, ready to receive Ether that someone "finds".
- doomroot 5y agoBitcoin fees would simply double if that? Also one of the benefits to a mature proof of work system is that miners incentives align with the success of that currency. Imagine spending thousands of dollars on special purpose hardware only to attack the only system where they are useful. Bitcoin miners are bitcoiners, people seem to forget that.
- ulrikrasmussen 5y agoAren't most of the rewards due to the generation of new coins? Currently 6.5 per block as far as I know. I haven't done the math to know if the fees are substantial compared to that. Edit: Recent block 695416 generates about 6.5 BTC to miners and has only 0.0748 BTC in total fees. Fees would have to increase by more than a factor of 64 to make up for the difference. https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/block/00000000000000000001cca1ecf8bf467ba97bd4e319e152e633f90464beb606/ https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/block/00000000000000000001c...
- ohhhhhh 5y agoDont you think the incentive to find a double spend flaw in bitcoin is large enough due to it's ever-increasing market cap?
- ulrikrasmussen 5y agoThis would not be a double spend attack, but a denial of service attack. If you spend $600 million worth of mining work, you can prevent any transactions from executing for two weeks (although in this scheme where you pay twice the block reward to defectors, only one week).
- ohhhhhh 5y agoOkay, sorry, I mean to find ANY flaw in bitcoin's protocol there is the weight of the entire market's worth hanging in the jeopardy. The incentive is to always be trying to crack it. So far, unsuccessfully.