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A little math: 50BTC*6/h*24h/day*20$/BTC*30day/month = 4.320.000$/month (dimensions check). This is the total size of the monthly mining pie until 2013, at current BTC prices.
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Assuming one entity does control more than half of the hashing speed, it's anyone guess what might happen. Common sense suggest it will not use it's new double spend capabilities for it will drive people off Bitcoin and endanger it's substantial mining revenue. In any case, the security model of Bitcoin will no longer work.
Why would the price stay stable? If it does - why wouldn't more than one group be pursuing this at the same time? I don't see that it follows that the security model would be broken. A big stack of confirmations is still a big stack of confirmations... Unless you're talking about this ASIC entity keeping a whole other blockchain in the wings to swap in at some point... Perhaps I have an inordinate amount of free market in my eyes. |
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A superficial game theoretical analysis suggests it can't, the most efficient miner will drive everybody else off the market because hashing is perfectly fungible and there's no way to compete on product differentiation, just on scale and efficiency.
So, let's extrapolate that out - ASIC comes along and drinks the GPU milkshake... He's getting block after block a day, how soon before that person(s) can start naming the price? How long before that (as I understand it) million+ dollar investment gets paid back? Am I missing something? "Bad" for GPU miners, but not all that apocalyptic to the Bitcoin economy as a whole. I realize you're not saying it'll be bad for bitcoin - just thinking it through out loud. |
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too unstable, sell
now so stable i panic
OMFG
difficulty change
"other" gets spanked by the pools
now i am so hot
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What a perfect illustration of the Tragedy of the Commons.
How? Hint: narrowly define "Commons". This is economics, not a Tragedy. The miners chase the Red Queen -- it's not like they don't know the game's rules beforehand. |
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This attitude is in its own way as savage as the corruption that has driven so many of us to distrust our own governments.
No, not when these authorities commit massive amounts of holocaust and malice against its people and never cease. There is a very real difference between the revolutionary spirit and the thirst for revenge. I maintain that animosity towards one's own government is just as bad as a government's animosity towards its own people. Either of those things is a sign of deep social sickness. I want change, but I have no use for harm or havoc in themselves. Two names in the compounding list - just in the last year or so: Jose Guerena. Erik Scott. Had the Japanese got as far as India, Gandhi's theories of "passive resistance" would have floated down the Ganges River with his bayoneted, beheaded carcass. -- Mike Vanderboegh. |
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But if the attack were sprung right away like that, wouldn't it hit folk's radar pretty quick? As I understand it, you can't simultaneously wrest control of the network AND dodge the difficulty increase.
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Schumer co-authored the AWB. Do yours. |
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seems like a couple public write-once block databases would sew this up - in a total OMFG freak out the clients could go into quorum mode... freenet, maybe?
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FTA: "The problem is that BitCoins aren’t issued by a government" Aww... Who's the sad statist? It's okay little buddy - there's still time to wrap your head around the idea of scarcity. We'll be right here with the bucket of crow everyone seems to be trying to force feed us. |
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Except that's not how legislatures work. Other people in the Senate have to take him seriously for him to get anything done. And they don't.
Try selling that to the three percenters. In a perfect world, I'd agree. |
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you can't easily go back that far even with massive hashing power. satoshi's original paper shows this numerically.
i believe the whitepaper covers the case of trying to undo a transaction, whereas - as i understand it, trippy was speaking of maintaining a "shadow" fork that would suddenly emerge and attempt to usurp the block chain since the fork. perhaps the maths cover that case as well, and i'm ignorant of their full implications. |
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Once somebody has more computing power than everybody else put together, they should go about 1,000 blocks back and try to build a new chain building off that, in secret. (This would take a week.) However their chain will not include any of the transactions from the last 1,000 legitimate blocks. Once it becomes longer than the existing chain, they publish it and instantaneously a whole week of transactions un-happen, i.e. they are reversed and the money (including mining fees) returns to the hands of the original owner, whereas the 50,000 BTC legitimately mined disappear, and the new 50,000 BTC generated are owned by one bitcoin address, the attacker's.
As I understand the code, clients running after the fork and before the merge won't pay any attention to that new block chain. Newly booting ones may have to decide which to believe, but no one is going to rewind past the last few blocks. I'd love to hear anyone that's deeper into the code than I correct me on that. |
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Chuck Schumer is the biggest blowhard in the U.S. Senate. No one takes him seriously and he doesn't stay focused on much long.
Unfortunately, being taken seriously and setting policy that gets people shot are two different things in the states at this point. |
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I will to do what I can to help the police catch scammers and crooks who want to steal from people. The police might use those same tools and techniques to help catch people who use bitcoin to pay for drugs; I can't stop them from doing that.
Maybe it's too Libertarian Hipster of me, but man, I don't like the idea of giving succor to the guy with the stick. Why help law enforcement when you could help the community do its own policing? I would rather the market solve this, than the BTC community have its own Jose Guerena. |
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You might even offer to help law enforcement better understand bitcoin so they can develop tools and techniques to catch criminals who use it.
Best rebuttal: And when governments world-wide make bitcoin illegal because of the threat it represents to central banking, will your head explode from the irony?
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Obviously with enough time, manpower, and resources, it is possible for a government to track down anyone doing anything.
Let's round up everyone thinking of the color blue. |
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