Bitcoin Forum

Although highly unlikely to me it's some hidden flaw in the algorithm that would allow cheating somehow and there would be no way to fix it. what do you think?

Most likely way btc would die.

The input costs required to make new btc exceed the price of btc in the marketplace for an extended period of time.
As such the miners go bankrupt and can no longer afford to mine, this kills the btc network.
No Profit, No Miners , No btc

Example: https://btcmanager.com/u-s-mining-pioneer-gigawatt-files-for-bankruptcy-in-washington/

If too many miners can't make a profit btc dies.
It is one of the major flaws in PoW design. (Insane Input Costs to maintain it's network.)

While I think that it's quite unlikely now for bitcoin to "fail", I personally think that what would cause bitcoin to fail completely is if a certain person finds a catastrophic bug and abuses it instead of reporting it to the devs. Probably a bug that can make people steal bitcoin from certain addresses or something along those lines.

I don't think so. As long as a few full nodes are running then bitcoin is fine. I also think having zero miners is very unlikely, as there's always money to be made regardless of price. Worst case scenario is just that the number of miners will significantly drop, but probably not necessarily comes down to zero miners.

If no one makes a profit , then it becomes zero miners and btc dies,

If a few can make a profit of course btc lives on, but more centralized than it already is.

The Possibility no miner makes a profit depends on the marketplace.

After all how many New atari consoles do you see made nowadays or 8 track tapes, no profit and these companies quit producing more.

Worst case scenario is that No miners can make a profit.

Anything else is painful for the miners, but survivable for btc.

FYI:
It takes Millions of Fiat Dollars per month to sustain the btc network,
otherwise the 51% attack becomes a greater possibility and it finishes off any support for btc.

Many btc fanatics don't like Proof of Stake, but those insane input costs are not a danger to a proof of stake network.
As it is not geometrically wasting more energy like a PoW network is, with no real benefit to show for it.

That would be counterproductive, if/when such a flaw is discovered and made public it would create a great panic and crash the value of Bitcoin in a very short space of time.

Complete centralization is a factor that may not crash the price but would squelch my interest in the technology.

don't confuse failure with a bug that can damage bitcoin's reputation. what you described is a bug and like any bug can be fixed but depending on the scale of the bug it can be damaging. for example if it is a flaw in ECC then it will be damaging but won't make bitcoin fail. not to mention that these things are highly unlikely. for instance ECC wasn't invented yesterday. it has been around much longer than bitcoin.

I agree. My example was probably bad and while it's not a bug to laugh about and a bug that's surely going to cause people to not touch bitcoin for a while, it's definitely not enough to sort of "kill" bitcoin. Also, looks like I need to do research on that ECC thing. Thanks.

Lastly, yes it's really quite unlikely but the chances are non-zero.

Bitcoin cannot fail according to Warren Buffet which i quote ,Bitcoin is here to stay "  and there is nothing like bug or bot on the bitcoin algorithm. bitcoin was design as a traditional currecny like the fiat currency we have today . we live in a world of literacy and illitracy , not every body understand how bitcoin price action movement changes per time . although the current market is bearish and is getting stronger every day does not mean that bitcoin will fails, bear market also affect other fiat currency too if you take a close look at your local currency with other foreign currecny

Anything can happen.
Maybe BTC will go to $0 (Not going to be quick for sure) or maybe BTC can go over $100.000++.
Because there is still a lot (Like seriously A LOT) of people who never try using BTC before, and if those bunch of people come and buy..
Well the rest is about supply & demand, think about it yourself. :)

P.S: I'm a BTC holder myself, but i'm not going to say that BTC will rise over ATH again or anything, its just that i believe in the technology.  :)

I don't think this will be the one and only way to kill bitcoin.All the issues in the bitcoin code can be solved by the dev team.A global crypto ban(of both mining and trading) will kill bitcoin and all the altcoins for sure(perhaps they might survive in the darkweb,but with way lower prices).  

Although Bitcoin is now much more expensive than any altcoin, Bitcoin is still the most promising of all cryptocurrencies. Since the birth of Bitcoin, the altcoins around it have died one after another, but Bitcoin has been Keeping its crypto king, if bitcoin fails, crypto will no longer exist.

How does a miner overspending millions have anything to do with what OP asked?

He didn't go bankrupt because he was earning to little from mining, he overspent. Read the article.


If mining a chain isn't profitable enough for someone, they move onto a different chain. That leaves less miners trying to solve the next block and more opportunity for the existing miners to earn the reward... this is basic stuff.

Bitcoin is too big to fail now, but if miners switch to more profitable coins instead then the pow algorithm will make btc fail, it would have to switch to pos in order to survive

Bitcoin in the near future won't fail unless a newer technology is there to replace it and I think it may take at least 30-50 years before this might happen. Look at the Internet for example, it is still serving us today as it was 30 years ago but new stuff has come along, new operating systems etc, blockchain technology will be here well into the future I reckon and Bitcoin may one day be very valuable or just a keepsake for those early believers in the tech. Let's see what the institutions will say in 20 years down the line if Bitcoin will be valuable or not.

It further Centralizes Control of said chain, however if the majority of miners can not meet their energy bill or pay off their creditors, a death spiral can occur.

No one can ascertain whether Bitcoin will fail as a cryptocurrency or not, but should in case it failed, the technology itself will surely remain as it encompasses more use case and avenue for other coins to be born.

anything can fail! the earth that we are living on can also fail as in explode and we can all die this instant but it is about the possibility of these things happening.
a flaw in "algorithm" is not something that can happen out of nowhere. there is a strong math behind bitcoin that has existed before bitcoin and is used and tested by many mathematicians.

I really don't understand what you mean by fail. Is it the price going up or the price going down or any other else? If you're gonna compare bitcoin before and bitcoin today, I don't think you can just call it as a failure. And I doubt it will ever fail.

There is a hidden flaw. It is called a "Quantum Computer" that can be used to crack the ECDSA algorithm that bitcoin uses.

There is no easy solution to the threat QC creates.
Yes, we can make a new address format that is quantum safe, but we CANNOT protect the coins in old "lost" addresses, because to protect them, the owner would have to move the coins to a new kind of address, and it cant be done, because those coins are lost.

Everything is possible and nothing lasts forever but if this question is because of the current situation on the market, I'm not worried. We've seen similar situations before and Bitcoin has survived but volatility and risk are something we always have to have on our minds.
Bitcoin will exist as long as their users support it and as long as the market is alive. Besides it can't just vanish out of the blue, many factors are influencing it.

It's $5mil a day miners earn in fee's, same as July 2017 when bitcoin was $2600

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue?timespan=all

Now work out the math to see how many mining pools would have to leave to centralize the chain.

https://www.blockchain.com/pools


We know you have to post that bitcoin is dead and everyone should get out, your statements don't have any resemblance of understanding how this works though.

Based on the current situation, we had already experience bitcoin fall but I believe this is just a temporary fall and would probably recover in the months to come. People should not panic as btc will no longer dive further and after this major adjustment would mean a progressive btc market that investors would be expecting soon. Patience should be extended and hold your btc instead of doing panic selling.

in my opinion, bitcoin will not be a failed product because this currency has been circulating for more than 9 years and currently bitcoin has become the most dominant digital currency and attracted by all investors. Bitcoin has gone through all circumstances and is able to survive until now. even though the price of bitcoin is volatile but this currency is still able to survive in various situations.

I think if some critical error had been found we would have found out about it already.I think the biggest threat to bitcoin can only be a quantum computer.

   Bitcoin price value nose dive to a year low as posted on the market thread. But it is not the end of it, remember that there are a lot of Factors affecting the crypto market now a days, The in fight on the status on the market really affects the confidence level of the consumer's, plus the negative news posted on social media all of these contribute to the drops on the price value resulting to massive sell off. But i am confident that the market will recover soon.