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> Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins. Of course it can. The only thing capping the supply of bitco

by kibwen 4y ago

> Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins. Of course it can. The only thing capping the supply of bitcoin is a variable in a C++ source file. The only thing preventing a modified version of that variable from being deployed as the dominant protocol on the network is countervailing hashrate. The government knows exactly where all the major bitcoin mines are, both because the power draw makes them obvious to local grid operators and the immense waste heat makes them obvious to anyone with aerial surveillance imagery. Governments have plenty of funds to spend on ASICs and cruise missiles to hard-fork the network whenever they feel like it. At least the goldbugs are correct that there's only a finite amount of gold in the Earth's crust. Bitcoin's limits, by comparison, are entirely arbitrary. (Of course, both of these ignore that fact that inflation is not solely caused by increases to the money supply, so it's unclear what trying to hard-cap the money supply actually achieves.)

MichaelZuo 4y ago
That's definitely an aspect I never got. Cutting edge ASICs production, and their associated supply chains, are in fact even more centralized then the Federal Reserves + 9 next largest central banks. And a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
kinghajj 4y ago
Hashrate doesn't matter if nodes don't accept their blocks. So while you're right that a powerful government could severely strike Bitcoin by taking down miners, they can't force the community to accept invalid blocks, no matter how much hash power they could amass.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.
  - x-complexity 4y ago
    > Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it. The economic costs of performing such an attack is extremely expensive: It's why despite the "Oh, they can just double-spend & make it go to 0" rhetoric, this attack is too costly to launch against BTC - The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of *valid* blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. https://www.crypto51.app/coins/BTC.html https://www.crypto51.app/coins/BTC.html
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not.
      - x-complexity 4y ago
        > > The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. > You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not. It isn't, especially with a country that has access to their own effectively bottomless currency like the USD. However, such an expenditure on such a large scale would be noticeable in terms of power draw & cutting-edge ASIC/silicon manufacturing purchases, the latter of which is currently booked to the brim by Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and others.
        vlovich123 4y ago
        You realize that the US government has many supercomputer clusters it owns directly to support its own data collection and analysis needs right? If the US decided BTC was a meaningful security threat, they have a lot of power they can bring to bear and anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves. This is the country that deployed a very sophisticated worldwide Trojan to make an attack on a nuclear reactor in a hostile country. The key here is if they can take over a huge swath of available worldwide compute no problem, they wouldn’t even need to touch their sufficient in house and commercial compute resources available to them. Bitcoin proponents love to pretend it’s undefeatable and confuse IT in government with offensive capabilities. They also liked to think it was anonymous until researchers put in a modicum of effort to show how it’s not. They get the strategy of the attack fundamentally wrong. They think it’s to take over Bitcoin. It’s not. Driving value to zero is sufficient. And that is a much different case (making transactions take longer and longer, disrupting on-ramps and off-ramps, doing hostile take overs of data centers running mining operations, perhaps in conjunction with other governments, having spies infiltrate these groups, etc etc etc). As the xkcd joke goes, your super duper cryptography is no match for a guy with a $5 wrench.
scotty79 4y ago
It's not about what government can do because it can literally do everything. If we are talking about USA it can literally end the world. What's important is what the government can do cheaply, kinda quietly and without stepping on toes of the rich people. And in that book bitcoin is fairly safe so far.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  It’s really not that safe. All US needs to do is tighten the screws a bit more on US crypto exchanges (hint: like they did today). BTC isn’t useful for someone residing in US if you can’t get your dollars into or out of it. Centralized exchanges have been the main means of that. They could make it progressively more costly & difficult to do so or shut it down entirely. Remember predictions markets were dubiously illegal right up until they got shutdown. Average Joe consumer and businesses aren’t going to go to the hassle of wallet setup to trade BTC for goods & services, so again it leaves speculation and exiting to USD as the main things to do with a BTC holding.

by kibwen 4y ago

MichaelZuo 4y ago

That's definitely an aspect I never got. Cutting edge ASICs production, and their associated supply chains, are in fact even more centralized then the Federal Reserves + 9 next largest central banks. And a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

kinghajj 4y ago

Hashrate doesn't matter if nodes don't accept their blocks. So while you're right that a powerful government could severely strike Bitcoin by taking down miners, they can't force the community to accept invalid blocks, no matter how much hash power they could amass.

EGreg 4y ago
Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.
- x-complexity 4y ago
  > Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it. The economic costs of performing such an attack is extremely expensive: It's why despite the "Oh, they can just double-spend & make it go to 0" rhetoric, this attack is too costly to launch against BTC - The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of *valid* blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. https://www.crypto51.app/coins/BTC.html https://www.crypto51.app/coins/BTC.html
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not.
    - x-complexity 4y ago
      > > The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. > You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not. It isn't, especially with a country that has access to their own effectively bottomless currency like the USD. However, such an expenditure on such a large scale would be noticeable in terms of power draw & cutting-edge ASIC/silicon manufacturing purchases, the latter of which is currently booked to the brim by Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and others.
      - vlovich123 4y ago
        You realize that the US government has many supercomputer clusters it owns directly to support its own data collection and analysis needs right? If the US decided BTC was a meaningful security threat, they have a lot of power they can bring to bear and anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves. This is the country that deployed a very sophisticated worldwide Trojan to make an attack on a nuclear reactor in a hostile country. The key here is if they can take over a huge swath of available worldwide compute no problem, they wouldn’t even need to touch their sufficient in house and commercial compute resources available to them. Bitcoin proponents love to pretend it’s undefeatable and confuse IT in government with offensive capabilities. They also liked to think it was anonymous until researchers put in a modicum of effort to show how it’s not. They get the strategy of the attack fundamentally wrong. They think it’s to take over Bitcoin. It’s not. Driving value to zero is sufficient. And that is a much different case (making transactions take longer and longer, disrupting on-ramps and off-ramps, doing hostile take overs of data centers running mining operations, perhaps in conjunction with other governments, having spies infiltrate these groups, etc etc etc). As the xkcd joke goes, your super duper cryptography is no match for a guy with a $5 wrench.

scotty79 4y ago

It's not about what government can do because it can literally do everything. If we are talking about USA it can literally end the world. What's important is what the government can do cheaply, kinda quietly and without stepping on toes of the rich people. And in that book bitcoin is fairly safe so far.

steveBK123 4y ago
It’s really not that safe. All US needs to do is tighten the screws a bit more on US crypto exchanges (hint: like they did today). BTC isn’t useful for someone residing in US if you can’t get your dollars into or out of it. Centralized exchanges have been the main means of that. They could make it progressively more costly & difficult to do so or shut it down entirely. Remember predictions markets were dubiously illegal right up until they got shutdown. Average Joe consumer and businesses aren’t going to go to the hassle of wallet setup to trade BTC for goods & services, so again it leaves speculation and exiting to USD as the main things to do with a BTC holding.