For how long will be economically viable for miners to mine at a loss? (B2Xcoin)

[cellard]

As we all know, there is a lot of hashrate with an intention to mine Jeff Garzik's coin, also known as Segwit2x, B2X, S2X, or any of the different flavors.

We know that this 95%, 90%, 80%, or whatever percentage number of intention of miner is total bullshit and will be exposed once the market starts talking. But we also know that there is bribing going on, in order to incentivize miners to keep mining at a loss, probably covering their losses + an extra profit for the effort. Obviously their goal is to kick "Core" and establish themselves as the main branch developers.

The question is, how much money can they waste on bribing miners to cover their losses? If this is an operation funded by US Government, PBOC, or whatever other similar institution, they can print a lot of fiat to keep miners mining at a loss. This could be a problem. Don't forget that none of these NYA signers care about Bitcoin's sovereignty, they just want more fiat.

[geac.xraekhurcoe]

They will always be an altcoin, miners have an incentive but it halves periodically and altcoin competition for miners will settle the market on PoW based currencies

[cellard]

They will always be an altcoin, miners have an incentive but it halves periodically and altcoin competition for miners will settle the market on PoW based currencies

But their goal is to potentially launch an attack on bitcoin, forcing the legacy chain to change the PoW hashing algorithm into something else so the attack isn't effective. This is a disaster in itself, so im not sure what we could call "real Bitcoin" anymore if we reach that point. The question is: how much money can the attackers spend on bribing miners to mine at a loss? Since Coinbase and Gemini talked about 48 hours approximately, it seems they have to spend for 2 days at least in order for Coinbase and Gemini to list B2X as BTC.

[OmegaStarScream]

I wouldn't worry much about these details honestly. We do know that bitcoin is being attacked and IMO it really doesn't matter who is doing it. Hashrate is irrelevant, It's up to the people to decide what they want and the fact that most exchanges announced that they will be listing it as B2X will only cause people to get their new coins and dump them, the price will go down too fast that no one will even think about making it the new bitcoin anymore.

[cellard]

I wouldn't worry much about these details honestly. We do know that bitcoin is being attacked and IMO it really doesn't matter who is doing it. Hashrate is irrelevant, It's up to the people to decide what they want and the fact that most exchanges announced that they will be listing it as B2X will only cause people to get their new coins and dump them, the price will go down too fast that no one will even think about making it the new bitcoin anymore.

Hashrate matters because in order to dump the shitcoin (B2X in this case) for the real bitcoin (BTC) you need SOME hashrate in order to do these transactions. I've heard experts claiming that 20% of hashrate is enough to survive and make these transactions viable. Even if it takes 100 blocks to get them confirmed, the market will find it's way to dump the shitcoin and put miners into a position where they have to either keep mining at a loss while the bribe money keeps coming, or stop being an idiot and go mine the real BTC because it will be more valuable.

It depends on how much they trust their bribers in keeping delivering money, how much they got, and how much of an idiot they are in general. When the bribing money is over, they will be facing bankruptcy, the question is again, how much money do bribers have to keep sustaining the attack?

And I have no doubt Brian Armstrong and co are going to get their asses sued after this.

[Iranus]

But we also know that there is bribing going on

We don't know that.  There is no evidence of that.  They also haven't been mining at a loss at all yet, they've just been signalling their intention to mine the SegWit2x chain.

It will most likely involve mining at a loss if the current percentage of hashrate support stays the same and the current cost of futures matches the price when the chain is created, but you need to point out these assumptions to make a reasoned argument.

If this is an operation funded by US Government, PBOC, or whatever other similar institution, they can print a lot of fiat to keep miners mining at a loss.

So you think that there's a non-negligible chance for a government to spend billions of dollars incentivising independent miners to individually mine at a loss, just so that the majority of BTC users would then choose to use a new Bitcoin client with a 2MB block size?

We do know that bitcoin is being attacked

Once again, this is a very shocking assumption to make.  You'd need to justify it pretty well.

[cellard]

But we also know that there is bribing going on

We don't know that.  There is no evidence of that.  They also haven't been mining at a loss at all yet, they've just been signalling their intention to mine the SegWit2x chain.

It will most likely involve mining at a loss if the current percentage of hashrate support stays the same and the current cost of futures matches the price when the chain is created, but you need to point out these assumptions to make a reasoned argument.

If this is an operation funded by US Government, PBOC, or whatever other similar institution, they can print a lot of fiat to keep miners mining at a loss.

So you think that there's a non-negligible chance for a government to spend billions of dollars incentivising independent miners to individually mine at a loss, just so that the majority of BTC users would then choose to use a new Bitcoin client with a 2MB block size?

We do know that bitcoin is being attacked

Once again, this is a very shocking assumption to make.  You'd need to justify it pretty well.

The very second a miner starts mining at a loss it means he has a hidden agenda. Isn't it strange to you that Coinbase has put this arbitrary "48 hour limit" to decide and stick to what they will be listing as BTC? It sounds to me that they have the money to mine S2X chain at a loss for at least 48 hours, then they could be able to stop the bribing and keep listing S2X as BTC and then point at how they followed what they said they would do.

Bitcoin has the potential to become worth several trillions. A government would sure find incentives in having people like Jeff Garzik (bloq) as the main dev of the main branch of the software so they can make a call and introduce changes in the protocol that would benefit them. This is a war for power, everyone knows doubling the blocksizes solves nothing, and BCash is already out there for these that want cheaper transactions without caring about running an affordably sovereign node.

Bitmain has already threatened with attacking the chain before, this is not new, so you get ready for such an scenario before it happens.