Bitcoin Forum

Been a HODLer since 2013. Still buying every single day.  Haven't sold a singe sat.  Admittedly, next bull run I'm gonna leverage my BTC or scrape some profits. Nothing makes me happier than dangling it in my friends faces who have been screaming "SELL THAT SHIT WHILE YOU CAN" for 9 years. Now that it might actually threaten the USD, I'm gonna ask what I hope is a stupid question. 

How difficult (expensive, realistic, etc) would it be for the US gubmint to buy up enough mining power to hijack the network, change the rules, and send it all to zero?

Admittedly I don't know much about the technical side.  I buy it because I saw / see the value from a financial perspective.  I understand the basics, but when you'll start talmbout hash rates, I get lost like a goose in tall weeds.

Once someone can explain to me why it should cost the same amount of money to wire funds between 2 banks next door to each other, as it does to mail a fckn brick from Miami to Maine, I might weaken my bullish outlook on BTC. Not to mention they don't process transactions on weekends?  Why? Because the ladies poking the keyboards are "off"?  Okay Flintstones...... Until then, I'm still a buyer baby.

And please, ELI5

An S19 Pro costs about $8k and has a hash rate of 110 TH/s. For a 51% attack, at least 200 million TH/s is needed, so about 1.8 million S19s, with a cost of about $15 billion. There is also the cost of the supporting infrastructure, labor and electricity.

As far as your concern about changing the rules -- it is not possible. Changing the rules would simply cause a fork, like BCH, BSV, and BTG, that can be ignored.

The most likely attack would be a denial of service. The government would prevent other miners from adding blocks to the chain and publish empty blocks for as long as needed in order to kill the network. In the end it would be expensive, but it is probably doable if there is sufficient political will behind it.

A 51% attack can't change the rules. All it can do is orphan existing blocks and create new ones.
The rules are enforced by consensus, and won't change until people accept the altered software.

In bitcoin history, no one has successfully done a 51% attack successfully being it an individual miner or group. Only if one has more than half percentage of the hash-rate the attack can probably be possible. It's not definite that you'll reverse the next block, but it's a matter of time until you attack successfully.
When a miner possesses 51% of the hashrate and having it mine in secret a second chain is close to impossible right now, because 20% of the hashrate is controlled by public companies (which is 100% likely to increase in the near future). This won’t be the only first bankruptcy but will also face lawsuits after lawsuit for this act.

I think it is time for you to switch focus.  From how easy it is for a government to 'hijack' Bitcoin to how difficult it would be for the same government to re-hijack Bitcoin once everybody forks to another algorithm.  I do not know how easy it is to switch to GPU mining, but I assume it would be one of the choices if possible and easy to apply.

Here is the hardest part of the hijacking thing.  Sure, let us say the government has enough resources and time to create the perfect mega mining rig to 'overtake' Bitcoin.  It would take HOURS at most for us to put everything back in place after which all their resources and effort become worthless and useless.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

I don't know much about the technical side either, but I followed a simple calculation based on this website (https://learn.eqonex.com/news/what-51-attack-and-how-much-would-it-cost) to get a rough estimate.

The current Target Hashrate on the Bitcoin network is 200,000,000.00 TH/s.
The most powerful hardware currently on the market (although not yet available) is BITMAIN AntMiner S19 XP Hyd. with Max. Hashrate of 255 TH/s (specified)
Required Equipment = Target Hashrate / Hardware Hashrate = 200,000,000.00 / 255 ≈ 784,300 Units.
Hardware Cost = 784,300 Units * USD 19,890.00 = USD 15,599,727,000.00
Assuming Electricity Price is USD 0.01 per kWh :
Electricity Cost = 784,300 circuits * 5.30 kWh * USD 0.01 = USD 41,567.90/hour or USD 1M/day

So, according to this rough calculation, to carry out a successful 51% attack on the Bitcoin network with said hardware would cost at least $ 15.6 billion in hardware and at least $ 1 million a day in electricity costs.

Thanks for the insight!  In regards to your second comment.  Could you elaborate a bit more about what you mean by "would take HOURS at most for us to put everything back in place after which all their resources and effort become worthless and useless."? Are you saying that enough people would see the fuckery taking place and produce an alternate means of securing the network?  Could you elaborate a little more?  And also for the record, explain it like I can barely use an iPhone. 

I know you guys are probably tired of these types of questions, so thanks for bearing with me.  Is there anything that could realistically thwart the protocol?  I don't think "banning it" is plausible at this point.  It kinda seems like that would infringe on our first amendment.  But I guess if we're being brutally honest that too isn't out of the realm.

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Would those 1.8 Million S19s be acting as one "node"?  (I'm using quotes because I don't even know if that's the right term).  In other words, would the other miners be able to see some giant stepping into the network trying to pull something squirrely and be able to defend it?  In reality $15 Bn is chump change to the government.  I could see them doing something like this and covering it up.  I mean....lots of people say we never landed on the moon. I'm just a little nervous because 1% of my net worth (in 2013) has now turned into 99% of it.hahaha.  I see the value, and don't trust the grimy politicians.

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Like whats said above, the 51% attack won't help. Even that 15Bn because it will just fork another chain and what they'd get is an altcoin. All the BTC holders will receive free money thanks to them.

There is no hijacking in BTC. This is why they'd rather be regulating BTC miners to hijack it and we have seen it coming already by the narrative that BTC waste so much energy.

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Like whats said above, the 51% attack won't help. Even that 15Bn because it will just fork another chain and what they'd get is an altcoin. All the BTC holders will receive free money thanks to them.

There is no hijacking in BTC. This is why they'd rather be regulating BTC miners to hijack it and we have seen it coming already by the narrative that BTC waste so much energy.

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Thanks for the info!  What's mind boggling to me is how they can push and subsidize the battery powered car narrative, which get charged via the exact same electric grid as BTC.  In your opinion, is there any exostnential threat to BTC?  As long as we have someone welcoming the miners I can't see regulating the mining as a realistic way to end it.  It sounds like plenty of third world countries would be in line to sell miners electricity if it got to that point.  Kenya is nice in December from what I hear.....

And as for your friend who keeps telling you to sell for over 9 years now, has he done the math and seen how much you have gained! The value of your btc now since 2013? That's insane.
You are a true holder and most certainly a diamond hand, instead of constantly tormenting you to sell he should be buying (if he hasn't bought before) with this opportunity the bear season has presented. Am surprised he is not desperately looking for money to buy the dip knowing how your investment appreciated.

I am not the best ELI-5 candidate but I can give this a try.

If the 'US gubmint' decides to take Bitcoin over, they would need a LOT of mining equipment.  All of this equipment they need obviously requires resources to be produced and there is of course an approximate or specific amount of such equipment that can be produced per day or year.

The government needs to own 51% of the hash rate in order to 'overtake' the network.  Since more and more and more powerful mining equipment is added every day, they need to have all this massive amount of equipment built, shipped and ready to be powered on in a reasonable time.  Otherwise, if all of this is done over years, the mining hash rate may increase enough so the government needs even more power to compensate and reach 51% again.

Now say they have everything planned so well they actually do get to own 51% of the network.  Now they 'control' Bitcoin.  What happens next?

Bitcoin developers, miners et cetera move on to another mining algorithm.  If the algorithm is changed and Bitcoin 'splits up' similarly to how Bitcoin split up into BTC and BCH years ago, the government's massive effort are redeemed worthless and useless immediately.  Because their massive amount of equipment now can not mine the real Bitcoin.  It can only continue to mine the old Bitcoin that they attacked.  But as soon as you and I find out there has been an attack, we will discard the attacked network in favor of the new one.

Let us say we get to change the algorithm so that this special mining equipment can not mine Bitcoin any more.  Let us say we get to change it so that computer graphic cards can be used for mining instead.  Now the government needs to purchase enough graphic cards to own 51% of the new, intact network.  If they can do this, we just move on to another algorithm.  And so on.

At the end of the day, it is just wasted time and efforts for them.  If someone has something to correct about my 'theory', please chime in and do.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

It feels good to be proved right, but showcasing your wealth publicly, even to close friends may not be a good idea. Your financial worth should be private as much as is possible.

The system operates on consensus, everyone has to accept any change to the system for it to be effective. After a 51% attack, other nodes and miners can identify the malicious player and choose to orphan blocks created during the attack and reject at protocol change.

This still requires a hard fork and a change of algorithm, right?  Or is there another easier way around?

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Regards,
PrivacyG

Considering that $15B then i could say that it is really that doable if they are really that serious on taking Bitcoin down but it seems no one or they arent getting that support on doing so in speaking on giving out

a network attack and minding off on how the hell they would really be spending out on something which it cant even assure if it would totally kill down the network or just giving out some temporal effects

but not totally a reason on making it dead? For sure there wont even how filthy rich are those people who do tend to support such agenda but well we dont know on whats coming though.

You seem to be trapped in a bubble, especially looking at America only. The banks in America are charging ridiculous fees to their customers and many of these don't exist in places like Europe. Bitcoin will always be competing with the fees charged to businesses by payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, that's what you should be focusing on and they are in the range of 1-3.5%. In hindsight it seems rather foolish to supposedly having held your Bitcoin all this time - if you had sold a chunk near the peak, or even as it slowly dropped down, you'd be able to buy in more as it continued to drop. but admittedly that gets into trading territory that some people avoid.

Miners don't set the rules, in fact no one sets the rules. Everyone is choosing for themselves which rules they want to follow, and a network forms from nodes that follow the same rules. If miners start mining blocks with incompatible rules, no one will validate their blocks.

Majority attack is insanely costly and can't truly stop Bitcoin, because the community can decide to change the mining algorithm and render attacker's resources useless.

However, Bitcoin can be hijacked from the inside. If someone would create a new version of Bitcoin and will start convincing other users to switch to it, then the network can be taken over. The original network will still exist, but it would be much smaller. There was already one such attack - SegWit2x, and it failed completely. But we should be vigilant for any new such attacks. Especially if prominent voices in community will start pushing for hard forks.

Do you feel safe when your friends and probably others know how much bitcoin you have? Do you feel safe to understand that they know you have been hodling for 9 years. Yes, you feel safe and that is why you dangle it in the faces of your friends.
Well, I don't know the part of the world you live, but generally it is not cool to make people understand you hold much about of bit for security purposes.

Bitcoin did not start threatening USD today, if they could not do it 10yrs ago when there aren't much people in the network, I don't think they can do it now that millions are into the network.

i don't think it is a smart move showing off to your friends about your BTC stash. because these days, you don't know who to trust anymore. better keep it to yourself. you will have more peace of mind if very few to none know about your BTC holdings. also, don't ever post it in your social media channels that you are holding it very long. you are just subjecting yourself to scamming, hacking and other fraudulent activities. but if you are so proud about this, then go on, but don't blame anyone if your computer starts acting strangely.

Thank you for taking the time to explain that.  I get it now!

I don't know how to do the calculation of the Hashrate power and how much it will cost the US to hijack the Bitcoin network but trust me if it is something they can do they would have done it a long time ago instead of some government saying negative things about Bitcoin and they also understand that crypto is inevitable.
With that being said, the US government has a lot on its plate in terms of debt and wasting some funds just to hijack innovative technology which has helped a lot of their citizen get a job will never be their next motive not even now that the institution is also an investor.

I think IF they did it, it would be a massive secret / cover up.  I mean, the plan was in place for the US military to shoot down a plane full of Americans over Cuba and blame it Russia.  The CDC administered syphilis to African Americans and told them it was a vaccine.  Lots of people can't be convinced we landed on the moon.  I guess one of my "unknowns" was - IF the network could be rendered worthless, COULD the culprit be anonymous?

BTC was invented partly to escape the control of the US government, which is presumably why lots of people who love power, hate BTC. 

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I guess I need to start writing with TONS more details. GEEEZ. I'm not "focused" on anything.  I realize the world is a big place.  I see the value in the ease of currency movement with BTC. I study economics for fun.  I have a degree in finance and a minor in economics.  I read The Wealth of Nations once a year for fun.  The only reason I mentioned the American government is because BTC threatens the USD, which is the de-facto global currency.  The USA would be the most motivated and most capable of deploying capital to end it IF IT WERE PLAUSIBLE. In hindsight we all make mistakes dude.  If you actually read my post you'd see that my future plans may include a different plan than the past.  Its a shame that some come here to exchange ideas and others treat it like the Twitter cesspool. Thanks to the people who actually engage in a meaningful way!

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I never thought I'd be lectured. LOL Everyone who came to shame me for bragging...It went like this:

2013 - Hey close friends, I bought this stuff called bitcoin. Paid like $500 a piece for them.  We'll see how it goes!
2104 - 2017 - Them "ya still got your Dungeons and Dragons money?  How's that workin out for ya?"
Me - fine. It'll either go to the moon or zero.  I'm fine with either. You should buy some too!
Dec 2017 - Them: DUUUDE SELL IT NOWWWWW!!
Me - Nah, I'm good.
Dec 2018 - We told you to sell it dumb ass.  Now look.
Me - I'm still up (shrugs) Actually I'm buying more, I can show you how.
2021 - THEM - DUUUDE SELL IT NOWWWWW!!
Me - ALL YALL CAN SUCK IT!!!!  JUST WAIT!  WE'VE BEEN THROUGH THIS OVER AND OVER AGAIN BOYS!

Them now: Hey man, is it too late to buy some of that bitcoin?
Me:  Dangles it in their face (the past, not my actual BTC balance)

Are we all clear now?  Can we stop acting like this is Twitter?  THANK YOU!


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Good lord, could you be any more immature and juvenile? I call BS on your story. If you've really been holding since 2013 you wouldn't be asking basic Bitcoin 101 questions like this, and you would have taken some (serious) profits by now and your "friends" wouldn't be chastising you for it. And please, chill on the cringy Reddit lingo.

Well to start with, building up a really huge mining operation is expensive - there's electricity costs, maintenance costs, leasing costs and of course you have to buy the actual equipment, and the total expenses will usually run into 6 figures a month for a large operation. Sure, they can just fund it with taxpayer money, but starve out their other funding projects? Most likely there will be disagreement between indivitual gubmint staff about that.

One of the advantages that the common person has related to some item the govt. wants to ban is that hardly anyone inside the government can agree with each other on *how* exactly to ban it - the result is a lack of consensus which then drowns in the water because as it turns out, their superiors are not interested in this endeavor.


On the technical side of things why this is not very feasible, is twofold.

First, it's freaking expensive to run your own mining operation as I've explained above (besides, the utilities and building owners and maintenance crews also need to get paid).

The second option would be to simply coerce some other mining group to do the dirty work for them. [This is exactly what they Marathon Group was doing when it tried to censor BTC addresses - but that movement largely failed to user outrage]. This presents two problems:

i) Miner is located in another country. In that case, good luck convincing the other gubmint to cooperate with you.
ii) They'd need to coerce many mining groups because no single mining pool has a majority hashrate. We are talking e.g. 5 different pools. The possibility of these pools colluding with each other is extremely low. In fact, it is lowered further for each additional pool that joins the conspiracy.


Wait, so Western Union is still a thing over there ::)

For the first time I think BTC cannot be hijacked, because community can decide on the minning algorithm and render attackers resources that are useless and so majority attack is incredibly costly and cannot stop Bitcion. But we need to be vigilant for any new such attacks cause Bitcion can be hijacked from the inside.

It is. In the whole history of Bitcoin since 2009, no single satoshi was ever hijacked from the network.

Now please do not get confused with wallets that do not let you have your private keys such as when you keep your BTC in casino, exchange, other third party wallets etc,,,

That is not hijacking from the inside, but from the outside. If I have a safe that cannot be destroyed unlocked or broken into but I leave the combination key lying around,,, the safe becomes worthless.

It is not that difficult to have a 51% attack. Foundary, AntPool, F2Pool and Poolin controls more than 51% of the network hashrate. How difficult would it be for an adversary to pay them a huge sum of money, or worse, an insider to attack the network? Difficult, but easier than purchasing or renting all those equipment yourself.

However, how much damage can it really make. Major governments are not really interested in attacking Bitcoin beyond just implementing stringent regulations against it. The reason is fairly simple; 51% is a known attack and it doesn't really come as much to the wider Crypto community. Such attacks are usually shortlived and unnecessarily expensive. A simple change of algorithm renders all of the mining oligopoly useless. There is that.

The other problem is possible vulnerabilities within Bitcoin, which has happened several times. Most of them were unexploited and patched early on and for the one time it was exploited, it didn't really amount to anything as the community recognizes those coins as illegitimate.

Are there any doubts? I think that doubts may be not so much in bitcoins, but in the wallet. This is more likely to commit such actions.

All you have to calculate is for how 51% attack is possible, check the present bitcoin mining hashrates and see the total. So, an addition of 50% of the hashrate coming from the attackers will make 51% attack possible on bitcoin mining hashrate. Presently the bitcoin mining hashrates is at 213 EH/s. Miners from all over the world are contributing to the total bitcoin mining hashrates but that is not stable but either increase or decrease over time, but the hashrate is so high and strong to the extent no one can ever as of now think he wants to provide half of such total bitcoin mining hashrates. Even if such happens, it would be difficult to maintain, which makes it not to worth wasting money, time and effort to carry out 51% attack on bitcoin blockchain.

I guess my thesis would be that the USGOV would be motivated to end it.  Not out of profit potential but just to protect the USD world reserve status. I could see them deciding that its well worth the cost to end it.  $15 Billion is a drop in the bucket to them.  Losing the status of global reserve currency would be far more costly in the long run.  My question wasn't would someone do it, my questions was CAN someone do it (technically speaking).....if that makes sense.

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Good Lord.
In all seriousness my wallet is on Mt Gox safe and sound. I've actually put in an order for a lambo, yacht and about to hop on opensea and buy another Bored Ape. You just hate me cause you ain't me.  All good bruv, haters make me famous!

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If you are a really an old hodler then you already answered your own question. How can you safely got this far if btc isn't safe from being hijacked? Because, if it did then it was being hijacked long time ago. They have a better chance doing it since the network that time is much weaker and the prices are less expensive than compared to today yet they still didn't do it. That simply means that btc is truly strong and cant be hijacked.

What the governments are only doing is they create their own kind of bitcoin/crypto which is centralized that they can fully control but no one is going to buy that. There is only one literal hijack that can happen you, that is if when you are not careful on securing your bitcoins.

And you're of the opinion that the Federal Reserve doesn't feel any bit threatened by the potential of replacement?

When it comes to bitcoins themselves, it wouldn't be possible because no computers today can do like the famous quantum computer that can actually do the trick according to the die-hard theorist out there. But what we are seeing right now is the exchanges getting hacked almost every year no matter how strict their securities are, hackers always find some way to get in. As for the bitcoins, there's nothing to worry about people are using them for more than 10 years and nothing has ever occurred about losing their bitcoins on their personal wallets caused by hackers' infiltration to the main wallet rather than the cause is always the 3rd party software.

Even with all the money in the world, the problem is acquiring enough hardware for such an attack. It's simply not there unless the government has or develops secret facilitates to build their own ASICs.   

Imagine you have billions of dollars and you go to Ferrari's headquarters and say: I want to buy 365 new Ferrari's right now, so I can drive a new one every day of the year. Here is the money, I need my cars on Monday. Guess what? You are not going to get them. They have waiting lists, and people wait for months maybe even a year or two for their brand-new Ferraris.

It's the same thing with ASIC miners. Despite your money, you can't just go and purchase 700.000 units because just like Ferrari, they have waiting lists, preorders, etc.     

I agree, there are too many people who are constantly afraid that they would not have the thing they are looking for and they keep fearing that one day they are going to end up losing it all. That anxiety over something that did not happen yet, is a psychological problem. I personally feel like talking to a professional would help.

If bitcoin came all this way without any problems, then why would it start to have any problems in the future suddenly? Of course it won't, but there will be some people who will always be afraid of this, they will always think that out of nowhere, suddenly the bitcoin price could crash because of some problems.

This guy has a point:
You're missing out on so much of "the Bitcoin experience" by not using it! Try it, send it, test some wallets, get the feel of how it really works. Fund a Lightning channel, make a few payments, see what works for you. If you ever want to use it (to buy a jet or something), it comes in handy if you know what to expect.

If I listened to the "idiot" advice from some of my friends and people from work, I would not have made a 800% profit on the first coins I bought. I do not know why some people think it is a good idea to give financial advice to someone else, if they are not even qualified to manage their own finances.  ::)

Some of these people are neck deep into debt and they have zero savings.... but they want to tell me what to do with my money. The only time when they are interested is when I sell and I buy something nice. (Then they ask me where I get all that money to buy all of these things)

Also, to answer your question..... No, the government cannot use a shitload of Tax payers money to perform a 51% attack on Bitcoin mining, because it will be a waste of money. (It will be incredibly expensive to sustain such an attack and the amount spend on it, will have to be explained)

When some government does that.... Bitcoin developers will change the Algorithm and then they have to start funding the next attack.... that will fail too...  ;D (Imagine some politician trying to explain to the voters, why they spend Billions on a 51% attack on Bitcoin and not on services to the the public)  ;D ;D ;D ;D

I will confidently believe that bitcoin can't be hijacked any longer since it has survived from the initial time it were created and introduce to the world. The people i sense from the beginning of introduction of bitcoin, it's the government who kicked against the existence of bitcoin from initial. Due to they taught that bitcoin is a systematic way of embezzlement of fund's. Right now I'm not condensing so low of such that bitcoin will can be hijacked from any body or any sector.

I've sent it around.  I guess the premise of my point wasn't "is my btc safe from _______". The point was - The US GOV has a very good reason to fear BTC.  IF money wasn't an object, COULD they kill it?  Luckily a few other people understood and answered it perfectly but thank you!  Lambo, Yacht and Jet on order.........

The good thing is, unlike Ferrari, if you spend enough money then you can build your own asic miners. Nobody, even if they have enough money to buy a million of them, could build a Ferrari warehouse and build something and then own it, because Ferrari has a trademark for it, and building a car company from ground up costs tens of billions of dollars easily, hence why it is such a horrible idea. However, building an asic mining equipment company wouldn't even cost a billion dollars.

Meaning, you could literally build a warehouse type of manufacturing plant, and then build your own asics, it is not really that much of a difficult thing to build, quite simple if you spend money for it.

You are forgetting that the ASIC miners aren't made up of grass and leaves you can find all over the ground. You would need hundreds of thousands of chips in a world plagued with chip shortage. You are going to need the best-quality silicone, and you need to purchase that from somewhere. And again, you are going to have to get those orders from suppliers and manufacturers who are already working as hard as they can. The raw materials simply aren't there in that quantity. Andreas Antonopoulos has many great videos on this issue.