FYI:
In Bitcoin PoW history ,
the Majority Rewrote 6 hours of bitcoin blocks in 2013, proving the majority will move the PoW chain however they deem fit.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bitcoin-network-shaken-by-blockchain-fork-1363144448The economic damage was significant, but fairly small; the only monetary losses that have been reported are the $26,000 USD worth of mining block rewards from the 24 mined blocks of 25 BTC that are now forever lost in the now abandoned chain, as well as a $10,000 double spend against OKPay.
A Doublespend has occurred on the Bitcoin PoW network.
No Doublespends have ever occurred on the Cardano PoS network. From the above, PoW does not seem all that secure.
FWIW that event you are talking about was not a double spent, it was a database issue. The older software running nodes were using a different database system that had a block limit size. The nodes running the newer software had a different database system without that limit.
It was as if the dependencies forked BTC, not a villain mastermind that performed a double spent...
And now a more elaborate explanation:
0.7 and older nodes use BDB for storing the blockchain databases. It seems this database has a limit on the size of the modification it can make atomically to the database. With the larger blocks of the past days, it seems to have triggered the limit. The result is that 0.7 (by default, it can be tweaked manually) will not accept "too large" blocks (we don't yet know what exactly causes it, but it is very likely caused by many transactions in the block). Specifically, block
000000000000015c50b165fcdd33556f8b44800c5298943ac70b112df480c023 (height=225430) with >1700 transactions.
However. 0.8 (which uses a different database system) has no such limit, and happily accepts the block. As the majority of the hash power was on 0.8, the longest chain ended up using this block, which is not accepted by older nodes.
The solution is to (for now) go back to the old chain, which has block 00000000000001c108384350f74090433e7fcf79a606b8e797f065b130575932 at height 225430.
And regarding BTC mining power usage... creating demand will just increase the development of cheaper alternatives which are also more and more environmental friendly. Doubt anyone will open a coal mine next to a mining hub nowadays...
Wow, you really drank the Bitcoiner Cult Kool-aid
if you can't see that someone was watching the rewrite and took advantage of it for a double-spend in bitcoin ,
so whoever did it, made a $10K profit.
Contact the writer of the article, and tell him he does not understand crypto,
oh by the way the writer is Vitalik Buterin , the genius behind ethereum.
If Bitcoin Proof of Waste does nothing but create new demand, then how do you resign yourself to the fact ,
that instead of just adding Nuclear or new Coal plants, that
China rather just kick out the bitcoin miners.Watch Texas and their new problems with rolling blackouts,
because asking a single state or county to sustain a geometric increase in energy drain, is not going to happen.
FYI:
Renewable energy sources only increase worldwide ~4% per year,
Bitcoin energy waste can increase 80% in a year.
Source: https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/bitcoin-energy-consumption-cambridge-study-cryptocurrencies-bitcoin-mining-climate-change-2021-3-1030180485(That is like adding a new country to the planet every year, while our energy resources are drained, Unsustainable!)No current source of energy production can keep pace with that type of geometric growth.
Which is why the banning of bitcoin is going to get much worse.