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Sabotaging Bitcoin
- bellajbadr 10mo agoyou can wipe out Russia with thousands of nuclear bomb
- gerdesj 10mo agoTIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.co.uk/
- candiddevmike 10mo ago[flagged]
- OutOfHere 10mo agoWait till you find out how much fossil fuel energy the US burns via its military to defend the dollar. Burning firewood actually immediately releases an extensive set of carcinogens, also causing depression.
- observationist 10mo agoUnless your intent isn't making the world a better place in some sort of meaningful way, learn about things and find something to care about that you can affect that actually matters. Bitcoin or AI or whatever is not worth your time. Do something real. If we ever get to the point where bitcoin or what people are doing on servers is the most pressing problem in the world worthy of our outrage, I will cheer you on. "Anon yells at cloud" isn't worth anyone's effort or time.
- kfrzcode 10mo agoMeanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin. "Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively." [0]: https://hedera.com/blog/going-carbon-negative-at-hedera-hashgraph/ https://hedera.com/blog/going-carbon-negative-at-hedera-hash... [1]: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160701/ https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160701/
- wslh 10mo agoDatabases either?
- ShowalkKama 10mo agoI find extremely funny that I came across this spammy comment while sitting on a vulnerability in their code because my attempts of contacting them have been unsuccessful
- kfrzcode 10mo agoHere you go! https://hedera.com/bug-bounty/ https://hedera.com/bug-bounty/
- oofbey 10mo agoEverything is orders of magnitude more efficient than bitcoin.
- npoc 10mo agoNo money is more efficient than bitcoin.
- Zaskoda 10mo agoWhat this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste. Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine. AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.
- fragmede 10mo ago> gas that's normally burned off at the well site Funny thing about that. Civilized governments put a stop to that, by fining flare-offs to make it economical to not do that.
- zoklet-enjoyer 10mo agoThey still do it in North Dakota
- krupan 10mo agoI hadn't heard of this. Do they just allow the gas to go into the atmosphere instead? I've always heard that's worse than burning it
- UltraSane 10mo agoflare-offs are much better than releasing raw methane into the atmosphere because methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2
- nativeit 10mo agoDid they require the methane be captured? I thought flare-offs were done because the methane gas is something like 1000x worse than the CO2.
- roenxi 10mo ago[flagged]
- bujkopl 10mo agoSince when is incentivizing low cost renewable energy horrifying?
- gerdesj 10mo agoMy first link shows that Bitcoin consumes roughly 40GW and my second link shows that the UK roughly does too. There are a lot of ifs and buts here ... but the amount of power used to support the BT mechanism worldwide is roughly the same as the power consumption of the entirety of the UK.
- hn_ninny 10mo ago[flagged]
- D13Fd 10mo agoBecause every unit of electricity causes climate change and burns resources (even renewable sources of electricity - they just burn them slower). From a societal point of view we are dumping huge amounts of electricity and resources into a hole to accomplish nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a database and a trusted third party at a billionth of the cost (or less). The vast majority of transactions are speculation on what other people might pay for a bitcoin (i.e., a line on a spreadsheet). And even then, that speculation and trading often occurs on secondary markets which rely on trusted third parties - thus rendering the entire ordeal even more pointless.
- bujkopl 10mo agoBetter shoot down the sun then.
- comradesmith 10mo agoYou’re right. I’ll setup the database. Everyone can trust me, honest!
- beenBoutIT 10mo agoIn the long run BTC as a universal digital global currency will be more efficient than the fiat currencies it replaces.
- utopiah 10mo agoWell what's arguably even more horrifying is according to "Estimated average energy efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware" no significant changed happened since 2014. I imagine we went from CPU to GPU to ASIC in couple of years and now for more than a decade, no change, just more.
- tenuousemphasis 10mo agoI'm not sure what data you looking at but we went from 8300 J/TH in 2014 to 33.4 J/TH in 2023. So... what are you talking about?
- utopiah 10mo agoThey have a graph at the bottom with the name I provided "Estimated average energy efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware"
- tenuousemphasis 10mo agoYou're reading the graph wrong, but I still have no idea how you are. Joules per terahash has declined from 8297 in 2014 to 33 in 2023 (the latest year they have data), a 99.996% reduction, or a 250x improvement in efficiency.
- rcxdude 10mo agoWell, improved energy efficiency just means more hashes/s and the difficulty adjusting. There's nothing to be gained in terms of the security or efficiency of the network as a whole by making the hardware faster, it's only good for whoever makes and uses that hardware.
- will5421 10mo agoIs it illegal to attack cryptocurrency?
- wmf 10mo agoThe attack described in this article might violate CFTC market manipulation regulations.
- qgin 10mo agoIf crypto needs legal protection from attacks, I think that would invalidate most of its value proposition.
- dboreham 10mo agoDefinitely reduces the cost of consensus though.
- Lerc 10mo agoThat seems to be a reasonable position. I'm kind-of comfortable with the position of bitcoin as being large enough to attract significant attacks, but not so dominant that a catestrophic failure of the system would have significant global impact. I have nothing against bitcoin being the money of the future, but if it is to become that, this is the sort of trial by fire that it should endure.
- anonym29 10mo agoIANAL, but from my understanding, the primary law used to prosecute hacking is the CFAA's broad "without authorization" and "exceeding authorized access" clauses. That said, authorization implies an entity with ownership rights granting some kind of limited license to others to interact with the owner's property. For a permissionless decentralized network with no owner, where the attack is against the consensus of which chain is valid, I'd have a hard time arguing that "authorization" as a concept is even applicable or relevant. As wmf suggested, market manipulation laws may still apply, but I'm not sure traditional CFAA "without authorization" / "exceeding authorized access" hacking charges could apply, though I'd be willing to bet a prosecutor could make a case for wire fraud - a scheme to defraud using interstate communications.
- DJBunnies 10mo ago[flagged]
- fancyfredbot 10mo agoTop Tip: If you find the orange site's conversation on crypto to be repetitive you can change the top bar. Conversation stays the same but the colour can be changed!
- mzajc 10mo agoReaders will want to note that this delightful feature is only available to users above 251 karma, or a knack for UserCSS.
- OJFord 10mo agoYeah, always takes me a minute when people say 'the orange site' (especially elsewhere) - it's green if I'm logged in, so I rarely see it orange, and then it's 'wuh, I'm logged out, [logs in]'. Fortunately I'm not prone to refer to the green site.
- Mistletoe 10mo agoWow thank you, I'm about to be on the blue site. I never knew this and really don't like the orange. 0000FF gang, unite!
- bujkopl 10mo ago[flagged]
- DonHopkins 10mo ago[flagged]
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- troglo-byte 10mo ago[flagged]
- OutOfHere 10mo agoSanctions are just a political tool to oppress people and freedom. The real trojan horse is the 3% inflation each year that the government subjects us to with their moneyprinting. It compounds one's savings into nothingness. That's before it ultimately blows up altogether with hyperinflation which is its only possible long-term outcome given the exponential debt that doesn't scale with GDP.
- OutOfHere 10mo agoThe answer to this problem is in the original Bitcoin whitepaper itself. It gives the formula for the required number of confirmations. The Monero PoW community has had to deal with such nonsense, as have other smaller PoW coins. With ε=1e-3, the expected number of 6 confirmations works only so long as the largest pool size does not exceed 12%. For a pool size of 30%, at least 24 confirmations should be required in Bitcoin, but 49 in Monero with its stricter ε=1e-6. You can see the table and the math at https://gist.github.com/impredicative/0907e1699f5ff97a9fed5dee20393266#file-confirmations-md https://gist.github.com/impredicative/0907e1699f5ff97a9fed5d... and again it's all cleanly reproducible from the whitepaper. Anyone who is still requiring only 6 confirmations then will be setting themselves up for a risk of reversal.
- dmurray 10mo agoTFA observes that it would be disruptive and socially difficult to move systems to expect requiring 24 confirmations, and expresses relief that other responses are possible. Perhaps this is more suitable as a response over months or years to a long-term shift in the composition of Bitcoin miners than as a short-term measure when it appears that someone has suddenly acquired 30% of mining capacity today.
- OutOfHere 10mo agoYes: "Not aligning with reality is disruptive." Some lessons have to be learned the hard way if they're not learned the soft way. The problem is not reality.
- rationalist 10mo agoBitcoin has a block/confirmation approximately every 10 minutes, and Monero every 2 minutes. So 240 minutes for Bitcoin, and 98 minutes for Monero. So even though Monero is more strict, it is still "faster".
- Stevvo 10mo agoBefore the AI bubble, Bitmain was only worth ~$1 billion. Now they are worth ~15, because they make chips for AI also. Either way, you could buy bitmain for the budget mentioned in the attack if it were for sale. Or bitmain could pull off the attack, if indeed they do "control ... all the major mining pools" as the article alleges. But who ultimately controls Bitmain? The Chinese state. So, by extension, bitcoin is controlled by the CCP. What a shitshow. Crypto needs to move on from bitcoin already, pick something better... anything better. There are so many options, and bitcoin is the worst of all of them.
- TheAmazingRace 10mo agoToo many people have a vested interest in keeping Bitcoin going for as long as possible, sadly. It's going to take a massive black swan of some kind to shake their faith. Heck, they can embed CSAM into the Bitcoin blockchain and that won't stop anyone from using it, because above all else, line must go up.
- beenBoutIT 10mo agoLike it or not in the end it will just be BTC. China will stop exporting Bitcoin mining tech. Nation States will dump money into proprietary BTC mining tech and keep it to themselves just like military tech. The US needs to see this reality and focus on domestic BTC mining tech like the future depends on it.
- hackernudes 10mo agoIt comes down to semiconductor manufacturing, not ASIC design. Taiwan, Korea, USA are still on top.
- oblio 10mo agoLOL. The Sam Altman plan. Or the US could just put Bitcoin on the Entities List and forbid any US citizen and any US owned entity from investing or trading Bitcoin and Bitcoin derived financial instruments, probably force 25% or more of the Bitcoin money to pull out, crater Bitcoin value, and not perpetuate this atrocity against nature and humanity. "Democratizing finance" my a**.
- roenxi 10mo agoThe Eyal & Sirer paper is pretty interesting - they basically point out that there is actually some game theory involved in when miners should reveal that they mined a block to compete most effectively with their fellows. If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage. It looks like a result with complex implications - eg, maybe making it impossible for new miners to set up unless they have a meaningful advantage in operating costs instead of just parity with the entrenched players. It is hard to tell because market reality is a mess but if there is a meaningful strategic choice to be made beyond simply announcing a block when it is mined then there is a lot of room for weird equilibriums even if the paper's specific analysis turns out to have flaws.
- mvkel 10mo agoIsn't this the same thing as saying "if everyone just agrees that a dollar bill is actually just a piece of paper, USD becomes worthless"? Albeit at a smaller scale
- ycombinatrix 10mo agoI don't think it is the same thing. Everyone agrees that mining the next block is valuable.
- spir 10mo agoThis is good analysis. The main longitudinal aspect omitted is that the profitability of the attack goes up as long as the price of BTC doesn't double or more each halving. In ~6 more years, Bitcoin will undergo two more halvings, so if the price of BTC is not ~400k by then, then attack will have become more feasible.
- beenBoutIT 10mo agoIn the near future every nation state will be vying for the largest stake of the BTC mining pie and the BTC race will be bigger than the Space Race and the Nuclear Arms Race combined and adjusted for inflation.
- UltraSane 10mo agoWhy? BTC is not just worthless, it has negative value due to how much electricity it takes to securely mine new blocks.
- jksmith 10mo agoDid you read the paper? There exists a technology that has purely enforceable property rights. What is that actually worth? I don't know. Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments about liquidity issues, shutting down the rails, making it illegal to trade, etc. but that's beside the point and depends on a thousand future variables to play out. So I don't know if btc will make it or not, but I do know property rights mean everything to humans. They literally determine whether not one is a slave (I am my own property). So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.
- nradov 10mo agoProperty rights are enforced with guns.
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- bujkopl 10mo agoThis article is FUD. No one is spending $30B+ for an attack that gasp extends the required confirmations to a few hours until a re-org can be achieved and accounts settled. In fact, wiping out the derivative markets would be seen as a net-postive by most individual hodlers.
- comradesmith 10mo agoI believe the article reached the same conclusion you did
- nativeit 10mo agoYou forgot to do your own research and read the article.
- w10-1 10mo agoTIL the scale of bitcoin derivatives in 2020 (hence volatility): ~2T on 2B market activity. Jeepers! --- Starting in late 2020, as shown in The Economist's graphic, the spot market in Bitcoin became dwarfed by the derivatives markets. In the last month $1.7T of Bitcoin futures traded on unregulated exchanges, and $6.4B on regulated exchanges. Compare this with the $1.8B of the spot market in the same month. ---
- onion2k 10mo agoWhy would you expect the scale of the derivatives to be related to the scale of the spot market, especially if the derivatives are cash-settled futures? One is basically gambling on the price of BTC going up or down, and the other is trading the actual BTC, right?
- phonicwheel 10mo agoHow is trading the actual BTC not also gambling on the price of BTC going up or down?
- SiempreViernes 10mo agoYou might buy BTC to actually spend it, say on paying a ransomware vendor.
- tatersolid 10mo agoWe’re calling these organized criminals vendors now?
- onion2k 10mo agoIt's not really, but the difference is that I'm limited by the supply of BTC, and it requires that I actually have the money to make the 'bet' at the start. That restricts the size of the spot market. If I'm buying futures I can enter into a contract that says "I'll buy a contract for 1BTC that says BTC is going to go from $88.5k to $98.5k in 1 year." I don't actually hand over any money. In a year's time, if BTC is now $100k the person who agreed on the contract gives me $10k. If it doesn't go up then I owe the seller $10k. The futures contract is settled in cash - no BTC is involved. Right now though, I don't have a $88.5k to spend on BTC, so the spot market isn't an option. I probably could find $10k in a year's time so a bet on a BTC future might be viable. The actual derivative 'value' isn't real though. The only money changing hands is the delta of the change in value when the contract is settled. (Caveat: I am a total noob at finance stuff so this could be quite wrong. One of the many reasons I will not be buying that futures contract. :) )
- UltraSane 10mo agoBitcoin is the least efficient technology ever created. There is no limit to how much electricity it can consume just to handle 7 transactions per second. No matter HOW much electricity it uses this value will never increase.
- hggh 10mo agoThis solution to this issue is extremely simple, but I bet it will never be implemented in Bitcoin BTC. That's one of the reasons why it forked in 1 August 2017.
- rlpb 10mo agoThere is a limit. The cost of electricity required is bounded by the value of the reward (block reward plus transaction fees). The value of the reward is bounded too, since the "import" of electricity into the Bitcoin economy is inflationary.
- UltraSane 10mo agoThen making the block reward halve every 4 years is a pretty strange decision.
- sebbyBinx 10mo agoPart of this post addresses the economics of creating a 6 block re-org. This makes sense as 6-confimations is the standard for Bitcoin finality today. However, as Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC), I believe this "6-confimation" acceptance policy will change to include not only the number of confirmations, but the timing of those confirmations as well. Consider a scenario where an exchange deciding whether a tx with 6-confirmations that took 4 hours to arrive (this happens occasionally) is safe to consider finalized/settled. Even though 6-confimations may be considered safe by today's acceptance policies, this tx would still have a high probability of double spend due to the assumed 4-hour long wait for the 6 confirmations (as the attacker would have 4 hours to produce 7 blocks instead of the normal/expected 1 hour). Instead of ignoring block interarrival timing, it may make sense to include block timing as part of an acceptance policy. So, going forward Bitcoin acceptance policies may change from today's 6-confirmation standard to something more complicated that involves the amount of time those blocks took to arrive. This would significantly enhance Bitcoin's double spending resistance without adding/altering any code and may give the network a much needed security boost in the coming years to prevent the attack discussed in the post.
- mrb 10mo ago"Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC)" That's incorrect. Security scales with USD-denominated rewards, not BTC-denominated. And there are 16 years of real-world data showing they have been generally increasing, so a healthy sign that the Bitcoin experiment is working: https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/block-reward-per-block https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/block-reward-per-block And not only that, but rewards are still expected to stabilize even when measured in BTC (thereby not relying on an increase of BTC's price) as they are progressively composed more and more of tx fees instead of newly mined BTC. It's puzzling to me why some still don't understand the systemic incentives that make all this work as it has for 16 years and counting...
- free_bip 10mo agoHow are you so confident that it will never weaken? Especially since there will come a time when the block reward is literally 0.
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