3 ms·

The more electricity is used to secure it, the more electricity is required to attack it

woodruffw 5y ago
I think that fits more into "ridiculous economic Chinese finger trap" than "security feature." It's similar to calling gold's physical weight a security feature, but at least there's a consistent and non-economic relationship between how much gold you have and how hard it is for someone to pick it up and walk away with it. (It's also not immediately obvious that "more electricity" is needed to attack it, since a handful of extant larger pools could just conspire as-is.)
- thebean11 5y ago
  Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side, so the logic still holds
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    > Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side Why would that be the case? It isn't necessarily zero-sum; the more realistic scenario is that the remaining honest participants ramp up their energy consumption in an attempt to prevent the attack. But that's still only the most boring of the many, many latent threats to Bitcoin. Solar flares and electronic warfare strike me as more interesting.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      To be fair, most human technology is vulnerable to these. The nice thing about a distributed ledger is that as long as one copy remains it can be bootstrapped back to full form. One Pi sitting in Africa could do it. Try that with your banks SQL db backups, which all tapes disks and ssds were erased in the solar storm.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        “Technology” is the operative word. Cash works just fine. Once again: the bar for cryptocurrencies to clear isn’t to be “as good as” traditional finance. They have to do better, given the additional middlemen and costs they shoulder on all of us. You’ve failed to demonstrate that they clear that bar: a single surviving backup of a distributed ledger isn’t distributed in either the trust or failure senses, and is thus no better (and possibly worse!) than us trying to piece the world’s financial system back together from everybody’s paper receipts. Oh, and the whole “cash” thing continues to work.

I think that fits more into "ridiculous economic Chinese finger trap" than "security feature." It's similar to calling gold's physical weight a security feature, but at least there's a consistent and non-economic relationship between how much gold you have and how hard it is for someone to pick it up and walk away with it. (It's also not immediately obvious that "more electricity" is needed to attack it, since a handful of extant larger pools could just conspire as-is.)

thebean11 5y ago
Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side, so the logic still holds
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > Larger pools doing that would be subtracting energy from the honest side, and adding it to the dishonest side Why would that be the case? It isn't necessarily zero-sum; the more realistic scenario is that the remaining honest participants ramp up their energy consumption in an attempt to prevent the attack. But that's still only the most boring of the many, many latent threats to Bitcoin. Solar flares and electronic warfare strike me as more interesting.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    To be fair, most human technology is vulnerable to these. The nice thing about a distributed ledger is that as long as one copy remains it can be bootstrapped back to full form. One Pi sitting in Africa could do it. Try that with your banks SQL db backups, which all tapes disks and ssds were erased in the solar storm.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      “Technology” is the operative word. Cash works just fine. Once again: the bar for cryptocurrencies to clear isn’t to be “as good as” traditional finance. They have to do better, given the additional middlemen and costs they shoulder on all of us. You’ve failed to demonstrate that they clear that bar: a single surviving backup of a distributed ledger isn’t distributed in either the trust or failure senses, and is thus no better (and possibly worse!) than us trying to piece the world’s financial system back together from everybody’s paper receipts. Oh, and the whole “cash” thing continues to work.