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Here's an advantage that no one seems to point out. "Longevity," crypto, like bitcoin, does not need a nation state to survive. True, it's value will fluctuate,

Here's an advantage that no one seems to point out. "Longevity," crypto, like bitcoin, does not need a nation state to survive. True, it's value will fluctuate, there is nothing stopping it from going to zero, but as long as there's group of people that want to mine it and use it, it will be here.

amluto 4y ago
Bitcoin is quite susceptible to its own form of death spiral: the point at which attacking it becomes more profitable or simply more amusing than to mine it honestly. There is a large amount of mining hardware out there, and the lower the price goes, the less profitable it is to mine with that hardware. But idle hardware still exists. Imagine if you could rent mining hardware, IaaS-style, and there was enough available to control a majority of the active hash rate. An attack that lasted a few hours would not be particularly expensive. It’s easy to assume that Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc are technologies that work as advertised and that the only interesting questions are weather the tokens on the respective blockchains are useful and/or valuable. But the blockchains themselves have critical requirements for proper functioning, and they can easily fail. (For Ethereum in particular, you can rent GPUs on fairly large numbers. A change in the economics could easily make it possible to rent a majority of mining power on AWS or similar platforms. At least Bitcoin hardware is mostly useless for anything other than Bitcoin mining.)
- mekster 4y ago
  How is attacking it more profitable? You need gigantic investment to accomplish it now and it's not even a sure return and by the time you're constantly successful with your attack, the market has figured the network is taken over for the price to go zero to move over to another coin. Then you're left with crazily invested factories, mining a worthless coin. Your assumptions are missing the simple idea that if there's a room to be profitable, they'll mine that themselves than somehow let them stay idle for someone else to rent and start a massive attack.
  - amluto 4y ago
    If the price of Bitcoin always goes up and the efficiency of mining hardware always goes down, then I probably agree with you. But this is not the case! There is plenty of mining hardware, right now, that cannot be used to profitably mine Bitcoin. The lower the price goes, the higher the fraction of hardware for with this becomes true. To me, mining hardware that can’t honestly mine for a profit is just asking to be used to dishonestly mine.
    - mekster 4y ago
      For one, where are the mining hardware that are unused? The hash rate is actually going up during this bear market. They should drop once they can't mine profitably for a while but so far not the case. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate You cannot possibly own half of that hash rate to yourself unless you're some state level actor wasting tax on it thinking wasting billions (even then, you can't just order million ASIC units overnight) today to kill Bitcoin is better than some future they see with Bitcoin but then again, people can fork Bitcoin to form another base cryptocurrency, and their effort could become a complete waste. The only few ways Bitcoin can kill itself is that either people fail to see its usefulness or that some severe unfixable security flaw is found.
mekster 4y ago
When will be the time no one wants an asset that's not centrally controlled? People say crypto has no intrinsic value but its uncontrollable existence is the value itself. But it's ok for those people to keep missing the boat to see bright friends make killings. When will they try to answer the simple question that how crypto is still around after 13 years with constant price increase?

amluto 4y ago

Bitcoin is quite susceptible to its own form of death spiral: the point at which attacking it becomes more profitable or simply more amusing than to mine it honestly. There is a large amount of mining hardware out there, and the lower the price goes, the less profitable it is to mine with that hardware. But idle hardware still exists. Imagine if you could rent mining hardware, IaaS-style, and there was enough available to control a majority of the active hash rate. An attack that lasted a few hours would not be particularly expensive. It’s easy to assume that Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc are technologies that work as advertised and that the only interesting questions are weather the tokens on the respective blockchains are useful and/or valuable. But the blockchains themselves have critical requirements for proper functioning, and they can easily fail. (For Ethereum in particular, you can rent GPUs on fairly large numbers. A change in the economics could easily make it possible to rent a majority of mining power on AWS or similar platforms. At least Bitcoin hardware is mostly useless for anything other than Bitcoin mining.)

mekster 4y ago
How is attacking it more profitable? You need gigantic investment to accomplish it now and it's not even a sure return and by the time you're constantly successful with your attack, the market has figured the network is taken over for the price to go zero to move over to another coin. Then you're left with crazily invested factories, mining a worthless coin. Your assumptions are missing the simple idea that if there's a room to be profitable, they'll mine that themselves than somehow let them stay idle for someone else to rent and start a massive attack.
- amluto 4y ago
  If the price of Bitcoin always goes up and the efficiency of mining hardware always goes down, then I probably agree with you. But this is not the case! There is plenty of mining hardware, right now, that cannot be used to profitably mine Bitcoin. The lower the price goes, the higher the fraction of hardware for with this becomes true. To me, mining hardware that can’t honestly mine for a profit is just asking to be used to dishonestly mine.
  - mekster 4y ago
    For one, where are the mining hardware that are unused? The hash rate is actually going up during this bear market. They should drop once they can't mine profitably for a while but so far not the case. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate You cannot possibly own half of that hash rate to yourself unless you're some state level actor wasting tax on it thinking wasting billions (even then, you can't just order million ASIC units overnight) today to kill Bitcoin is better than some future they see with Bitcoin but then again, people can fork Bitcoin to form another base cryptocurrency, and their effort could become a complete waste. The only few ways Bitcoin can kill itself is that either people fail to see its usefulness or that some severe unfixable security flaw is found.

mekster 4y ago

When will be the time no one wants an asset that's not centrally controlled? People say crypto has no intrinsic value but its uncontrollable existence is the value itself. But it's ok for those people to keep missing the boat to see bright friends make killings. When will they try to answer the simple question that how crypto is still around after 13 years with constant price increase?