why wouldnt a government create its own asic to 51% bitcoin?

[gentlemand]

that could work, definitely would hurt it. but wouldnt they need to do that for every country?

Banking is far more interlinked than politics when it comes to cross border movements. Most national banking chains would quake in their boots if the biggest operations threatened to cut them off. I doubt very many of them actually want crypto business at this point in time anyway.

[1715615154]

1715615154

[digaran]

Attacking the system how? do you know if a government attacks Bitcoin then we have the possibility to fork the blockchain and have a coin without the government control? then what, they will have to attack the new chain but how long could they keep burning cash just to hit a wall? there is no way for any gov to destroy a decentralized network, that's the whole point, unless they start killing every body running a node and mining, beauty of crypto currency is the same immutability. destroy one chain and another chain will pop up.

[vapourminer]

Attacking the system how? do you know if a government attacks Bitcoin then we have the possibility to fork the blockchain and have a coin without the government control? then what, they will have to attack the new chain but how long could they keep burning cash just to hit a wall? there is no way for any gov to destroy a decentralized network, that's the whole point, unless they start killing every body running a node and mining, beauty of crypto currency is the same immutability. destroy one chain and another chain will pop up.

fork it how? if you change the algo so the government asics dont work the existing ones will stop working also.

[Andromaque]

No one as of today is rich enough to create create enough ASICs to control 51% of the network. Moreover in fact you need a bit more than that.

[lombok]

Yes hopefully our government does not give a negative response to bitcoin so they can do things that can make bitcoin deleted.

[Tanaka Osato]

No one as of today is rich enough to create create enough ASICs to control 51% of the network. Moreover in fact you need a bit more than that.

A Government could do it quite easily. Or as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the Chinese government could march in to mines in its country and take over more than 75% of the hashrate anyway, which is a risk with bitcoin.

My view is that most Governments are simply not interested enough to do this.

[wilwxk]

No one as of today is rich enough to create create enough ASICs to control 51% of the network. Moreover in fact you need a bit more than that.

A Government could do it quite easily. Or as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the Chinese government could march in to mines in its country and take over more than 75% of the hashrate anyway, which is a risk with bitcoin.

My view is that most Governments are simply not interested enough to do this.

I dont think its easy as you say. If you think abot the enery to be wate in this hashrate and the atual "enery crise"(coal...) the govern will not incentive/force this expensive activity only to destroy a cryptocurrency.

[Tanaka Osato]

No one as of today is rich enough to create create enough ASICs to control 51% of the network. Moreover in fact you need a bit more than that.

A Government could do it quite easily. Or as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the Chinese government could march in to mines in its country and take over more than 75% of the hashrate anyway, which is a risk with bitcoin.

My view is that most Governments are simply not interested enough to do this.

I dont think its easy as you say. If you think abot the enery to be wate in this hashrate and the atual "enery crise"(coal...) the govern will not incentive/force this expensive activity only to destroy a cryptocurrency.

I said they could do it quite easily. I qualified that at the end of my post with the point that you make that they are not interested enough. Lets look at facts. The European bank is printing 60 billion euros a month - and its currency is strengthening, that means they are printing more than the entire value of bitcoin every 3 weeks or so. So why would they want to do this? But IF they did, then they would more than have the resources to do so.

[Hydrogen]

According to this the US bureau of engraving and printing minted $40 billion dollars a month in 2013.

https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-much-money-does-FED-print-in-a-month

Its been said that 90% of that is to replace currency in circulation.

Governments owning machines that can print bitcoin's entire net worth inside a month may not have much reason to be concerned.

[Tanaka Osato]

According to this the US bureau of engraving and printing minted $40 billion dollars a month in 2013.

https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-much-money-does-FED-print-in-a-month

Its been said that 90% of that is to replace currency in circulation.

Governments owning machines that can print bitcoin's entire net worth inside a month may not have much reason to be concerned.

Yes this is spot on.

For me the main risk is that so much of the network is under the jurisdiction of one government. I would like to see the spread more decentralised across countries.

[audaciousbeing]

as per the title.. whats to prevent the government of a large country to designing and using an asic purely for itself? they have the resources, the amount of money is trivial (for a government), power would not be a problem as they could build a power plant just for the mine to use. ultimate goal would be to control bitcoin. and make some money but that would be trivial. they wouldnt recap the investment but thats not the goal anyway.

sure lots of up front money and time but again, a government wouldnt care, and the long term gain in controlling btc might be worth it.

only bottleneck would be fab capacity. maybe buy or build one?

the fact that no government is trying this means my thinking is flawed somehow. so whats the catch?

EDIT:  goal is to for a 51% attack on bitcoin to cause people to lose faith in crypto, thus destroying it.

The same reason why they cannot stop bitcoin because when they do that, then their currency will be limited to their own country which will not be valuable for international trade in which we all know play a dominant role in the development of any country. Aside that going that route would then mean that government is approving crypto currency which might therefore means overhauling the whole financial system. Also, the next issue of concern would be the privacy in which majority of the already exposed to bitcoin will not trade for anything else.

[SvenBomvolen]

I think that it would devalue the currency of the country. People could see it as "This is better than our fiat". From the countries stand point, I think it would do more harm then good.

That's right. The price of the national currency would fall down towards other currencies and became cheaper and cheaper. Add to that nobody can even predict that this insider would be popular among citizens. And only the demand is that instrument that make the price of the new crypto-currency. What if people would prefer to stay with expansive Bitcoin rather to move on cheap national crypto? Too many if.

[Iranus]

Your logic relies on the public losing faith in cryptocurrencies just because a government has over 51% of hashrate.

However, having 51% of hashrate certainly does not mean you can destroy the network.  An attacker can only reverse their own transactions or prevent new transactions from being confirmed.  All of people's transactions with a reasonable number of confirmations would be perfectly fine.

If a government wanted to break consensus rules, they couldn't do that either.  They'd have to fork off while the ordinary BTC users stayed on the minority chain.

Why mess around building warehouses full of hardware when it can be done with a few threatening phone calls?

I agree.  That would pretty much destroy clearnet use and the darknet wouldn't even have much faith after the price drop.

[Juggy777]

as per the title.. whats to prevent the government of a large country to designing and using an asic purely for itself? they have the resources, the amount of money is trivial (for a government), power would not be a problem as they could build a power plant just for the mine to use. ultimate goal would be to control bitcoin. and make some money but that would be trivial. they wouldnt recap the investment but thats not the goal anyway.

sure lots of up front money and time but again, a government wouldnt care, and the long term gain in controlling btc might be worth it.

only bottleneck would be fab capacity. maybe buy or build one?

the fact that no government is trying this means my thinking is flawed somehow. so whats the catch?

EDIT:  goal is to for a 51% attack on bitcoin to cause people to lose faith in crypto, thus destroying it.

I don't really know what to say to your mindset either you don't own Bitcoins or simply say you know nothing op. If government were to do that, it would be regulated and one would have to pay taxes, what's the point of using such thing. Then again government would have full record of this and it would be suicidal to use it, what if they suspected you of cheat and they could take away all your coins.

[anon4250158]

It would be stupid for anyone to try and get control of bitcoin.  Once that happened, it would no longer be of value to people because they know they can be screwed out of their money if they use it. If people aren't using bitcoin, it's of no value to the 51% people either.

[Tanaka Osato]

as per the title.. whats to prevent the government of a large country to designing and using an asic purely for itself? they have the resources, the amount of money is trivial (for a government), power would not be a problem as they could build a power plant just for the mine to use. ultimate goal would be to control bitcoin. and make some money but that would be trivial. they wouldnt recap the investment but thats not the goal anyway.

sure lots of up front money and time but again, a government wouldnt care, and the long term gain in controlling btc might be worth it.

only bottleneck would be fab capacity. maybe buy or build one?

the fact that no government is trying this means my thinking is flawed somehow. so whats the catch?

EDIT:  goal is to for a 51% attack on bitcoin to cause people to lose faith in crypto, thus destroying it.

I don't really know what to say to your mindset either you don't own Bitcoins or simply say you know nothing op. If government were to do that, it would be regulated and one would have to pay taxes, what's the point of using such thing. Then again government would have full record of this and it would be suicidal to use it, what if they suspected you of cheat and they could take away all your coins.

Realistically if a government REALLY wanted to take away our coins they could, they would just arrest you and torture you for the private key. Thats why some level of constitutional protection is a good thing.

Having said that this is all theoretical. I very much doubt that this would happen.

[giantrobot]

No one as of today is rich enough to create create enough ASICs to control 51% of the network. Moreover in fact you need a bit more than that.

Yes, the bitcoin market is really huge. Its market capitalization reaches billions of dollars. No one is able to dominate the entire bitcoin market, the rise of bitcoin is due to the demand of the market, which is something we can not stop.

[Hoganye]

No one as of today is rich enough to create create enough ASICs to control 51% of the network. Moreover in fact you need a bit more than that.

A Government could do it quite easily. Or as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the Chinese government could march in to mines in its country and take over more than 75% of the hashrate anyway, which is a risk with bitcoin.

My view is that most Governments are simply not interested enough to do this.

I dont think its easy as you say. If you think abot the enery to be wate in this hashrate and the atual "enery crise"(coal...) the govern will not incentive/force this expensive activity only to destroy a cryptocurrency.

I said they could do it quite easily. I qualified that at the end of my post with the point that you make that they are not interested enough. Lets look at facts. The European bank is printing 60 billion euros a month - and its currency is strengthening, that means they are printing more than the entire value of bitcoin every 3 weeks or so. So why would they want to do this? But IF they did, then they would more than have the resources to do so.

But as per my knowledge, in recently have some rumor about Russia government has spend $100 million for support community miner Bitcoin in their country for compete miner in China. This is positive signal about government in some country still interested Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

[DooMAD]

There still seem to be a lot of misconceptions about the misnomer that is the 51% attack.  You do not necessarily need 51% of the hashrate to carry one out.  But at the same time, the infinitesimally small benefits gleaned from it, compared to the enormous effort required to successfully perform such an attack on Bitcoin (altcoins with considerably less hashrate are another matter entirely), generally don't make it worthwhile.  If an attacker were successful, they could, for a very short period of time, block or double-spend transactions.  But only until the rest of the network noticed that happening, then immediately forking away to a new algorithm as a result.  The attacker would have to start again, which gets costly with so much hashing power involved.  It would only be a temporary hiccup.

Maybe 3 or more years ago, this attack method might have been viable, but I think we're well beyond that point now.  I'd be prepared to revisit that assessment if someone managed to devise something an order of magnitude more powerful than ASICs and also managed to keep it to themselves, though.  Technology should never be underestimated.

For altcoins that don't have the same sort of hashing power behind them, however, it's a different story.  When it's easier to obtain the lower thresholds of hashrate required to interfere with less secure chains, the attack can be carried out more often and more cheaply, causing a continued and harassing nuisance that it may not be possible to recover from if the attacker is sufficiently determined.  But seemingly it's still not that common an occurrence despite the relative ease.  Again, this is likely due to limited incentives, with the ability to block transactions and double-spend really not being all that appealing in the grand scheme of things.

[vapourminer]

EDIT:  goal is to for a 51% attack on bitcoin to cause people to lose faith in crypto, thus destroying it.

The same reason why they cannot stop bitcoin because when they do that, then their currency will be limited to their own country which will not be valuable for international trade in which we all know play a dominant role in the development of any country. Aside that going that route would then mean that government is approving crypto currency which might therefore means overhauling the whole financial system. Also, the next issue of concern would be the privacy in which majority of the already exposed to bitcoin will not trade for anything else.

the goal of such a plan is to destroy faith in crypto, not approve it. thus preserving the existing fiat currency.

destroy crypto from the inside so to speak.