First of all, Trump is an extremely poor businessman who inherited his wealth and lost the majority of it because of his foolishness.

Secondly, Trump is a criminal, not a "businessman", and criminals don't make "business decisions", the way real, honest businesses do.

Third, Trump does not care about you, me, or your Bitcoin. He has shown repeatedly that he will sacrifice the American people in order to enrich himself.

That's why my assumption would be, were he to be president again, that Trump will kill Bitcoin so he could replace it with something he owns, instantly making him the richest person who ever lived. And his voters have shown that the don't care if he enriches himself or breaks the law. In fact they seem to actually like it when he does that.

Bitcoin went up 500% under President Biden.

Don't mess with success. Don't take a chance on somebody who could literally bring the price of Bitcoin to zero if it made him money.

The attackers nodes are going to "run the original Bitcoin rules" as far as everybody is concerned. There would be no way, pragmatically in real time, to tell the difference between a "good" node and an "evil" node.



Again, how on earth would you know if the sever is "Chinese"? The IP address? That's not reliable at all.

And guess what: the Chinese nodes would reject the non-Chinese ones, which would result in a dispute, wherein the majority consensus prevails. In other words, it would be the non-Chinese servers who would be considered the attackers, and the Chinese ones considered the defenders of the network.


If the majority of the miners did this, then... their rewards would be inflated and that would be the new law of the land. (Moreover, I would posit that

For the umpteenth time here: THERE IS NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY.

You keep inventing one here out of thin air. But there isn't one, and because of that, the only thing you are left with is majority rule, which necessarily must be enforced lest the network be completely useless since everybody could otherwise simply choose their own authority.


Correct, but the 49% would be the irrelevant ones, not the 51%. Control of Bitcoin would automatically revert to the 51%.

You seem to be stuck on two false notions:

1. That there exists a central authority controlling Bitcoin. There isn't one.

2. That you could pragmatically tell the difference between a "good" node and an "evil" node in real time. You can't.

Individual human outsiders could identify could, after the fact, identify nodes that were doing the wrong things, and they could, for instance, complain about it here on bitcointalk.org. But they could not affect the real-time operation of the network, which is governed by an algorithm, not a central authority, not "scientists", not "concerned citizens", not "smart people", etc. etc. It's just an algorithm, and it's proof-of-work.

"Considered" by what??

You keep inventing a central authority out of thin air.


Obviously any sort of "bad" node would use the same exact protocol. Do you think an attacker would include a header that said, "hey, I'm a bad actor" on every packet?


Yep, and any network of bad actors would use the same protocol. Obviously.

Maybe I should have made that clear in the beginning here but I assumed that was obvious.



Yep, and consensus is a majority vote, and in the context of Bitcoin nodes, that is a major vote of hashrate. There are no people involved in this consensus.


Yes, the 49% can object all it wants to the actions of the 51%. But that doesn't matter. The majority wins. That's what consensus means.

The scheme Satoshi came up with is to ask the network and get it to effectively vote, using their hashrate, against the "bad" actors. But the "bad actors" are only defined by what the majority thinks is "bad". If the 51% says the 49% is "bad", then the 49% is bad. End of story.

Yep, and the way you verify a node is the work it performs. If it performs the work, it's a good node. If it doesn't, it's not. That's all the software knows.

Therefore there would be no way of telling what is a "good" node and a "bad" node. They are all just nodes, and it somebody takes over 51% of them, they win.



Quite the contrary, you continue to demonstrate that you simply don't understand how Bitcoin even works. You continue to reference a central authority that is going to "disagree" with bad nodes that does. not. exist.

Anybody can create a Bitcoin node and join the network. Anybody. Anybody. Not join the "Bitcoin 2.0" network, join the currently operational "Bitcoin 1.0" network.

How do you suppose Bitcoin's current nodes got there in the first place? Did they ask permission of that central authority you keep saying exists somewhere?


How would any software, in real time, know they are altering the rules?

And for the umpteenth time here, nodes on a network don't have different-colored skin, do not speak with an accent, do not have a red flag with a star on them, and so on. There is no way of knowing what is a "Chinese" node or an "Iranian" node or whatever country is trying to do this.


How would the "rest of the world" actually ignore servers they thought were bad? What actual technical mechanism would be employed. Please show me the source code of the algorithm that wallets would employ in order to bypass the "bad" nodes in favor of the "good" nodes.

This is simply not how Bitcoin works. People do not decide for themselves which nodes they will talk to, because if they did, the system would not work.

And this bears repeating because it's crystal clear that Satoshi himself understood the risk of the network very, very well:


"The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes."

Yes, but how would you know which one is which? A node is a node. You couldn't just say, "I trust those node but not these nodes". There is no notion of known identity in the Bitcoin network, which is the whole point.

Again, you simply don't seem to understand the implications of a decentralized network. There is no "middle". There is no "community" that "decides".

And the situation with Bitcoin Cash was not even remotely comparable.



Really? How? Is every single wallet going to do the mining themselves? And why would you trust that wallet? Remember that in this situation, there would be millions of the "evil" mixed in with the "good". The only way to tell the difference is proof-of-work. Every single wallet, every single node, and every single actor in this situation is going to say they are on the "good" side. This isn't as simple as saying, "everybody will just ignore the bad guys", because there's absolutely no way to tell, in real time, who the bad guys are--and the software doesn't have any sort of notion of "opinions" in it in any case.



No, I'm positing here a situation wherein China or some other central entity inserts nodes into the network amounting to 51% of the hashrate. China (and probably about 10 other countries across the world) have plenty of money and computing power to do it.

And of course the assumption here would be that they would distribute their attack, e.g. coordinate servers in many countries, or even take over servers.

You keep assuming that the network "just knows" what the "right thing" is. That's not how it works. Bitcoin is an algorithm and nothing else. And if it were anything else, it would be... centralized!

Sure, you may no longer want to buy Bitcoin after China has taken over the network, but there are millions of current holders of Bitcoin who would want to protect their investment. They would be stuck using the Bitcoin network, which will have been taken over by China.

(By the way, this who thread of conversation presumes one could even know which servers were "evil" and which were not--but in practicality that could be easily obscured by the attacker).


But not running "their" software is akin to throwing your Bitcoin away. Your blocks would be worthless. (And again, how would any individual know who "they" are in real-time?)

And why exactly would one want to create an alternative "Bitcoin2" in that situation anyhow, since China could just take over that one as well?

The reality is that if this happened, major holders of Bitcoin would make peace with either: a) make peace with the attacker to protect their investment; and/or b) appeal to the only military power in the world capable of protecting them. e.g. the US government, in order to forcibly make the attacker relinquish control of the network.

***

Understanding the implications of a truly decentralized network is hard to wrap your head around .

Satoshi invented a scheme that no central authority would ordinarily control, but the only way to do that is by majority vote, e.g. democracy (in this case, democracy of computing power). In other words, a truly decentralized system cannot be governed by people it must only be governed by an algorithm. If individuals were able to simply choose their own servers to store their data, then bad actors could commit fraud and the network would be untrustworthy. In a decentralized network governed by proof-of-work, there can be no concept of identifying a node in the network because the only thing you can trust is the work, not the IP address, not the alleged owner, not anything else.

***

By the way, from the second paragraph of the Introduction in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, there is this line:

"The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes."

Good. You are starting to understand. Now ask yourself, what if servers representing 51% of the hashrate adopted some changes that, say, the other 49% vehemently objected to? They would "win the argument", correct?

Now imagine that the 51% were operating under orders from the Chinese government, and thus adopted the fork that the CCP created for their own purposes, which included software changes that inserted their own blocks in place of other people's blocks.

There wouldn't be anything anybody could do about this, short of an act of war. American Bitcoin owners, ironically, would appeal to the US government to have their (eeek!) government pressure or otherwise make war on China for essentially stealing billions of dollars in American property.

Again, there's no reason to believe the China or any other major country with the kind of money to pull this off (figure, the top 20 economies in the world) are planning on doing so anytime soon, but it's absolutely incorrect to say that Bitcoin is "government-proof" or that it cannot be toppled by any government. Bitcoin exists along side every single product humans use on a daily basis that can be eliminated by government decree in a millisecond should the majority or the dictator favor it.

Trump got fiercely booed and heckled at that speech today. I guess the Libertarians know BS when they hear it.

So who do you suppose dictates the "consensus rules"? What are their names? Where do they live? Who has this "authority" you keep talking about?

See, if they are identifiable individuals who could simply decide not to let certain servers join the network because they allege them to be unfriendly for the cause, then Bitcoin is by that definition absolutely, positively centralized. In other words, China (or whatever government) could locate and subpoena them and make them do their bidding.

But Bitcoin is not centralized. It's a proof-of-work model, and any server, owned by whomever, and plugged in for whatever purpose, can join the network and have a vote in the hashrate, which gives them a vote on control of the network itself.


Convincing whom?? Who are these "people" you keep saying need to be "convinced"? And what are they "convinced" by?

You don't seem to understand how Bitcoin--or any decentralized network--actually works. There is no "authority" who would "do the right thing" according to what "the people" want. There are no people involved in the decision at all.



Who is to say what is "honest" and "dishonest"? It's a majority vote. In that context Satoshi was talking about individual attackers or small factions that would do "bad" (as defined by the majority) things.

If the majority accepts a payment, then that's the law of the land. There's no person anywhere in this decision making process. It's entirely algorithmic. There are no "China servers" and "non-China servers". There are no "good servers" and "evil severs". Just... servers--servers that run software that can decide what is true and what is false. What is a valid chain and what is invalid.

And if people here on Bitcointalk said, "how terrible, this group of nodes is doing the calculations all wrong because they changed the software", you know what we, collectively, could do about it? Absolutely nothing. (Although, again, major holders of Bitcoin would fall over themselves to make peace with the new owners lest they lose their investments).

Well, as we've discussed on another thread at length, it's absolutely possible for the US, China or some other major country to take over 51% of the hashrate and thus control the network, thereby controlling Bitcoin. There's no evidence any country wants to do this, but they absolutely could.



If the US did that, something much worse would happen: the price of Bitcoin would plummet by 99% or more .


Like money laundering in general, governments will never be able to shut it down completely, but they can certainly make it something only serious criminals would want to do. Few would risk federal prison just as a hobby.

Almost all holders of Bitcoin do so in a centralized way with a broker or an app that does KYC. Most average consumers don't want go to all of this trouble just to evade the government, they just want a safe investment that gives them a profit.

Um, Satoshi doesn't control Bitcoin. Satoshi hasn't even been heard from in over a decade. He has as much to say about Bitcoin as George Washington does about the US elections in November.

The Bitcoin system is a proof-of-work model, meaning that the majority of the hash rate resolves disputes between nodes. If you control the majority, you control Bitcoin. It's as simple as that.


I completely agree, and I would summarize the consensus of this threads answers to be:

1. Yes, it's completely possible that China or some other major country like them could take control of Bitcoin.

2. There's no evidence today that they would want to do this, and there's even evidence that they wouldn't want to.


But if somebody says, "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by any government", they are not saying the truth...

Um, I guarantee Ethereum has far more programmers than Haypenny does . They could require KYC much easier than Haypenny could. And Ethereum could do whatever it wanted with Ether. Our servers are "decentralized" too in multiple geographical locations, but that's just a technical detail that doesn't matter. Ether is in the exact same boat.

Haypenny does not gather any personal information of any kind, not even an email address, for transactions themselves. The model doesn't allow that, which is why it is so easy to use (much easier than a crypto wallet in fact).


So anybody who is against criminals robbing children's hospitals is a "statist". Maybe go back and read your Ayn Rand some more because she made it clear that's not what it means .

If you think you can live your life without the protection of the police, then more power to you, but you don't get to call anybody when somebody parks their car on your lawn .

If miners representing 51% of the hashrate all decided to do something, then that would be the reality of Bitcoin.

Again, what is stopping them? What central authority can you point to who would stop them from doing anything they wanted?

Now imagine an entity like China either directly or indirectly controlled those miners. Now China controls Bitcoin. It's as simple as that. The "community" here on Bitcointalk or whatever could scream as loud as they want, but they don't control the hashrate, the nodes do. What "we" decided doesn't mean anything at all. It's a proof-of-work model, not a proof-of-how-cool-you-are-on-social-media model.




How I see things is closely tied to the evidence.


Well, in the case of Bitcoin, control over protocol rules is solely determined by possession of computational power. That's how Bitcoin works. It's called a Proof-of-Work model.

I wouldn't say that factor by itself centralizes the network, but the network is absolutely, positively able to be centralized by a single entity controlling 51% of the computing power. That's always been a risk for Bitcoin. Today it's arguably a small risk, but it is absolutely not zero. A Bitcoin takeover by a large entity is technically possible and even financially plausible, at least on the first order of things. Ironically, the entity who would actually defend Bitcoin against this sort of attack from a state actor would almost undoubtedly have to be... the US government.

Governments can do whatever they want. The only magic power you have as an individual is voting, and even that assumes you live in a democracy.

Do you even understand how software works? Code can be changed.

And China would absolutely "persuade others to follow them" because they would be "persuading" a bunch of servers running in computer room. There are no people involved in the Bitcoin system, which is the whole point. You have this wrong-headed notion that Bitcoin is some kind of "community", which, while on a daily basis it is in places like here, that "community" could be overridden by an entity with more servers. Bitcoin's "consensus" is not among human beings, it's among anonymous servers. Plug in a majority of those to the network, and whoever or whatever controls those systems controls Bitcoin.

If there was a "central governing body" of Bitcoin, like you keep implying there is, then Bitcoin would not be decentralized in the way it's advertised to be. That committee could simply be compelled to do whatever governments wanted them to do.

And yes, if China (or whomever or whatever) took over Bitcoin, people would grumble a lot, but most would be so terrified of losing their holdings that they'd do anything the entity wanted. The price would surely go down, but every major holder of Bitcoin would be running advertisements 24/7 saying, "everything is okay". (So in a way, Bitcoin is a PoS model after all ).





Yes, but at some level China comes down to one controlling entity, and even one man. Think of their nuclear weapons, for instance. There's not some rogue faction somewhere in China who could launch some of those.


Yes, I get that such an attack would be an extremely complicated operation, which is why it's implausible that some "small" country could pull this off. But China's GDP is $18T, their military budget is $230B, and they have over one million personnel in their army, some of whom would surely be pretty good at reading Bitcointalk to see what would need to be done . (Of course in reality they'd probably recruit a major Bitcoin mining company or maybe a few of them to go along, using bribery or extortion or whatever).


As I said above, if something like this were to happen to Bitcoin, the first thing an average investor would hear is, "remain calm and HODL". Nobody would want the price of their Bitcoin to go down, so they would live whatever fiction they'd need to live in order for its price to stay up. Major holders would buy TV ads and stuff.

Again, in a way, Bitcoin is a PoS model, too .

Or it could drop by 80% like it did 18 months ago .

We can all hope, but Bitcoin remains a very volatile investment...

Last I checked a bunch of governments are going after Monera in various ways.

And I surely wouldn't use market price to determine an actual fact about something . The bottom could fall out of Monera at any minute (I sure as heck wouldn't invest in it!).


No, you're not.  You're similar to a mixer, with the key difference that you would cooperate with authorities if they ask.  Your customers can use Haypenny anonymously (through Tor), but it may not be long before authorities request you to enforce Know Your Customer (KYC) during user registration.  
[/quote]

How are we different than a centralized crypto like Ether? There are just a few entities who necessarily (PoS model) create the product. The government hasn't decided to shut them down even though they could very easily.

And of course, major governments could shut down Bitcoin too, and even effectively so, by reducing the price of Bitcoin by 99% by a simple government decree (we discussed in another thread how just a few words of threat for Donald Trump could absolutely sink the price of Bitcoin).

Of course if they went after Ether and the other centralized cryptos, the Ethereum lawyers would probably point out how unfair it is to target them exclusively, and not all of the other cryptos including Bitcoin. It would be selected prosecution (and pointless since there are other products that criminals are using instead).


Because I don't love criminals? Seriously?

Also, what makes you think I'm "not into Bitcoin"? Just because I have a product that's better doesn't mean I hate the old one or something. Would you say that Elon Musk "hated Toyotas" when he started Tesla?

And the more you associate Bitcoin with criminality, like you did above, the lower it's prospects are for long-term survival. You've clearly never been hit by a cyber-extortion attack, or some other crypto-enabled crime, or know somebody who has, but if you did you sentiments would definitely change. And people are hit by these crimes every single day now. Fighting for the rights of criminals to do crime is a losing battle in the long run, because criminals will just get worse and worse.

Closely cooperating with China is very different than controlling China.

I closely cooperate with my local police when I obey their traffic signs. That doesn't mean I run the police department.


Why exactly would they need to buy a single machine? They could simply appropriate the hardware already sitting within their borders. Servers in China once accounted for far more than 51% of the Bitcoin hashrate. They could do so again with a single executive order from Xi.

Regardless, what seems like a lot of money to us civilians is pennies to a major government like China. $20 trillion buys you a lot of computers (again, that's assuming a country with a 1M strong army needs to "buy" anything).

And presumably the prize would not be the mining fees, but rather a percentage of the 1.5 trillion in Bitcoin.

It depends on what you mean by, "privacy".

If you mean privacy from criminals, from companies, from marketers, and from other citizens, then most governments aren't against that, and many governments are putting more and more privacy protections for consumers on the books e.g. Europe's GDPR and recent US regulations.

If you mean "privacy" from valid government subpoenas, then yes, governments are against that since that kind of "privacy" enables terrorism, cyber-extortion, and all kinds of very bad things.

And yes, they make these people "look evil" because they are, well, evil . Ask any victim of cyber-extortion how it felt to have their money, privacy, hospital care, and so on stolen from them. There are, unfortunately, some very bad people in the world, and governments need to do things to protect citizens from those people.

LOL, because Donald Trump doesn't play the game that way.

Trump won't pump Bitcoin because Trump doesn't own Bitcoin. He would make far more money by destroying Bitcoin and forcing everybody to use his thing instead. Trump could make trillions doing this, which is far more than he could make with almost any other sort of corruption.

And with the full power of the US presidency--and his absolute control of Congress which he seems to have--he could very easily "push the button" on Bitcoin in favor of "TrumpCoin" or whatever.

Bitcoin went up 500% under President Biden. The safe bet here is to stick with the stable state, not take a chance on somebody erratic and corrupt like Trump.


That's not how blockchain works. The network is effectively a majority vote. There is no "center" of the network ("decentralized"). There is no "person" in charge, no committee, no non-profit group, no "community" who would "object" to this takeover. That's not how it works. If it worked that way, then Bitcoin would be effectively centralized.

Bitcoin is simply an algorithm that holds a vote on hashrate. Anybody with 51% could hard-fork Bitcoin, holding everybody's blocks hostage.

And in a hostage situation, most people would simply want their money to be safe, and they would bow to the new owner.

As others have discussed here, there's no evidence that any major government would want to do this, but they absolutely could do it.

Uh, that is an... entirely different subject.

Bitcoin lost investors billions and billions about two years ago... then it made them money. Maybe it will make them more money in the future, or maybe they will lose. Who knows.



"Everything they need" refers to Know Your Customer, which you don't require currently.  If governments could somehow enforce this requirement on cryptocurrencies, rest assured they would have done so.  It's just that cryptocurrencies are decentralized and thus beyond their reach, unlike Haypenny, which is precisely the point I'm emphasizing.  You can be easily shut down, whereas cryptocurrencies cannot.  It's as straightforward as that. 
[/quote]

Bitcoin (itself) doesn't require KYC either. Neither does any crypto or digital currency. They are only going after mixers and things like Monera. Why? Because with Bitcoin they have everything they need to track transactions.

It would be just as easy for the US to effectively shut down Bitcoin by making it illegal, which would drop the price of Bitcoin by about 99%. And the US could absolutely take over the hashrate of Bitcoin if it wanted to as well, as could any major world government.

We are in the same boat as any other digital currency, decentralized cryptos, centralized cryptos, and centralized digital currencies.

It's as straightforward as that. 

We're talking about theory here, since there's no evidence "the government" is planning on shutting anybody down. Bitcoin just got it's ETF approved for chrissakes . If anything, governments are going in the opposite direction.