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Halving day was an interesting test that the community passed, which is really cool. What I look forward to seeing next is how a malicious, distributed hijacki

by kogir 14y ago

Halving day was an interesting test that the community passed, which is really cool. What I look forward to seeing next is how a malicious, distributed hijacking of the block chain is handled once it's profitable to attempt.

nym 14y ago
It's already profitable... has been for at least a year now.
- kogir 14y ago
  I think you underestimate the volatility of bitcoin. Right now there's not enough you can do with them in their native form, and converting them to cash would make make the price crash. I also doubt there's any exchange with enough funds to actually support such a conversion.
  - nym 14y ago
    I don't underestimate the volatility... I watch the price very carefully, and understand how volatile it is. Bitcoins are converted to USD and back to BTC every day. If you were to try to sell ALL the bitcoins in one day that would clear out the order books, and would likely cause a crash and then rally, much like we saw when there was a bug in the blockchain. The price dropped to $37, and quickly went back to the original price due to the demand. The volume of MTGOX-USD is $69M for a 30 day period, which is about $2.3M a day. Source: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html
tlrobinson 14y ago
One of the neat things about mining is if you have enough hashing power to execute a 51% attack, you also have enough hashing power to mine a shitton of Bitcoin (50% * 6 blocks/hour * 24 hours * 25 BTC/block * 57 $/BTC = $100,000 per day), which might be more profitable (51% attacks only allow you to double spend what you have, not steal arbitrary Bitcoin), and is certainly far easier and less risky. I'd be more concerned about governments or corporations who want to sabotage Bitcoin, or bugs in the software like we saw last week with the blockchain fork. Right now it would only take a couple million dollars worth of ASICs to overwhelm the current hash rate. That should change as more ASIC manufacturers start shipping.
rmc 14y ago
It's kinda scary that important things like this are so up in the air and could have broken massively.

by kogir 14y ago

nym 14y ago

It's already profitable... has been for at least a year now.

kogir 14y ago
I think you underestimate the volatility of bitcoin. Right now there's not enough you can do with them in their native form, and converting them to cash would make make the price crash. I also doubt there's any exchange with enough funds to actually support such a conversion.
- nym 14y ago
  I don't underestimate the volatility... I watch the price very carefully, and understand how volatile it is. Bitcoins are converted to USD and back to BTC every day. If you were to try to sell ALL the bitcoins in one day that would clear out the order books, and would likely cause a crash and then rally, much like we saw when there was a bug in the blockchain. The price dropped to $37, and quickly went back to the original price due to the demand. The volume of MTGOX-USD is $69M for a 30 day period, which is about $2.3M a day. Source: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html

tlrobinson 14y ago

One of the neat things about mining is if you have enough hashing power to execute a 51% attack, you also have enough hashing power to mine a shitton of Bitcoin (50% * 6 blocks/hour * 24 hours * 25 BTC/block * 57 $/BTC = $100,000 per day), which might be more profitable (51% attacks only allow you to double spend what you have, not steal arbitrary Bitcoin), and is certainly far easier and less risky. I'd be more concerned about governments or corporations who want to sabotage Bitcoin, or bugs in the software like we saw last week with the blockchain fork. Right now it would only take a couple million dollars worth of ASICs to overwhelm the current hash rate. That should change as more ASIC manufacturers start shipping.

rmc 14y ago

It's kinda scary that important things like this are so up in the air and could have broken massively.