Possible covert mining attack (in progress???)

[Gabrics]

Financial attacks make no sense at this level, the way you picture it this would be an attack to kill the coin and that's it, after such a thing the is no way out of it, who do you think will deal with it anymore? You buy coins at an ATM and 3 weeks later you have no coins? You sold 100k$ worth of stuff and suddenly you have nothing? You traded some shitcoins for BTC and you end up with zero? What about all the miners who have mined at zero income for a month?
Do you really think there will be something after all this chaos?

I only raised this as a real issue this specific time because of the huge hashing capacity which was provenly freed up recently.

I would 100% agree - usually/anytime else. My theory started that IF (big IF) this one time the CCP colludes with the miners each having their side of the deal. Miners withdraw as much FIAT as they can (with CCP blessing) and CCP can seriously hurt the best/only real blockchain. CCP also likes to be seen omnipotent I think at almost any cost which this attack would definitely enforce.
They can also put the gun to the miners head which makes the deal even sweeter/harder to resists.

[Gabrics]

I think there is a security issue right here. If some of the nodes aren't online at a specific time, then they won't know if the blocks were reorg-ed before. Sybil attacks are also a problem in this case. The potential for a network split in this case is far greater.

Yepp. Serious problem indeed I didn't think about. I always thought there is a reason why there is no rollback protection (which looks easy), but as usual "looks easy" is actually pretty hard/impossible.

[philipma1957]

The main difference that you can gain much much more than just the block reward with the long term attack. Imagine if you hidden mine your longer chain for two weeks. Under that two weeks you can send your real bitcoin to an exchange and withdraw the FIAT or exchange bitcoin for USDC, Monero, etc. That's all on the public chain.

On your hidden chain you send the bitcoin back to yourself to spend the input TXU. So when you publish your longer chain you get your coins back ....

And let's stop there.
Because the moment you do this the value of those coins will drop if not to zero pretty closeby it, imagine 4 weeks of trasanctions getting rolled over, who the hell do you think will use this coin, all aspects of security are destroyed, once this attack happens is clear another one is possible two so everyone will simply dump.
So you will end up with the coins/fiat that you exchanged first, worthless coins after the attacks and worthless mining gear as the reward will plummet too in $ terms.
At this point, you're at a loss.

Financial attacks make no sense at this level, the way you picture it this would be an attack to kill the coin and that's it, after such a thing the is no way out of it, who do you think will deal with it anymore? You buy coins at an ATM and 3 weeks later you have no coins? You sold 100k$ worth of stuff and suddenly you have nothing? You traded some shitcoins for BTC and you end up with zero? What about all the miners who have mined at zero income for a month?

Do you really think there will be something after all this chaos?

well it could easily be used to kill

BCH
BSV
Xec

or any sha 256 alt.

it is not easy to do for btc.

and op is fantasying to think it would be.  But with good old free speech he is allowed his idea.

Actually the real damage is not what he is saying but that hash was dropped 1/2 by shutting down cloud mining due to most cloud contracts have the we can fuck you when we want to clause.  It has clearly shown that a large builder/ miner/cloud company can 1/2 the hash rate when it wants to. and that it can make sure they have a running farm now earning 2x the coins it did when the diff was 25.04t

To me this has shaken a bit of faith in all coins as it was also done to LTC/DOGE. so the 3 largest asic backed coins BTC LTC/DOGE were played and played hard.

Everything here is confirmable except for the size of Bitmain's farms not in China.
This clearly shows a weakness in the asics due to the amount of control bitmain can do over the hash rate.

Lots of chips flood the market with gear.= yes been done more than once.
no chips = shut the hash off yes been done right now.

[mikeywith]

That is an interesting theory, however, I would be more worried if hashrate stopped growing as opposed to dropping, imagine the devil or CCP or anyone for that matter was buying all the new gears and most of the used ones that are for sale without making any noise, wouldn't that be scary? but as it stands right now, we know for certain that those gears are not mining on a separate chain.

The proof is simple - if you have enough money to buy the gears that went offline, you can load them on the back of the ship in a few weeks, they are still there, a ton of them is for sale, I can personally arrange an order of a few EH worth of gears if someone is willing to buy  , this isn't a sort of a secret tiny object that someone can hide and work with, you are talking about a few hundred thousands of mining gears, this could be hard to digest if you are not watching the Chinese market closely, but as someone who does this on daily bases ( alongside with a few other members here), we know for certain that what you think is happening is not the case whatsoever.

With that being said, the 51% attack theory is still interesting, do I know for sure that it won't ever happen? nop, is it happening right now using the gears that went offline? most certainly not.

[jabowery]

What IF this is a stealth syndicated attack by Chinese miners?

Only plausible if coordinated by the CCP as a military takedown of proof of work if not cryptocurrency in general.

Here's the best case for this scenario:

• The CCP already demonstrated they're hostile to cryptocurrency.  
• The timing of Musk's announcement about bitcoin must be considered in light of the difficulties Tesla was having with the CCP prior to that announcement, and their resolution subsequent to that announcement.
• There has been a lot of noise in the financial press about "GPU dumping" from China.  But has anyone noticed the kind of drop in the price of high performance ASIC miners one would expect if Chinese miners were closing up shop?  I have looked and haven't noticed any.

We're still not in "probable" territory though.  Such a coordinated attack by the CCP requires preventing information leaks out of China and there are just too many miners in China and too many ways for information to leak while protecting identities.

[jabowery]

...if you are not watching the Chinese market closely...

A country the size of China outlawing a market should produce price changes obvious to the most casual observer in markets outside of that country.

[ranochigo]

That is an interesting theory, however, I would be more worried if hashrate stopped growing as opposed to dropping, imagine the devil or CCP or anyone for that matter was buying all the new gears and most of the used ones that are for sale without making any noise, wouldn't that be scary?

Why? Buying and hoarding that much ASICs without using them would be ridiculously expensive and you'll have to outpace the entire network (given stagnant hashrate) as well. It'll make far more sense to control the current 51% of the network and suddenly switch to their own rogue chain. It is far cheaper, or seizing them would be the cheapest. It is far more scary for a sudden percentage of the hashrate to go offline for an extended period of time.

Besides, after that, every SHA256D coins are either worthless or would just fork to something else.

[DaveF]

It really looks like miners for other algos are coming online before SHA ones. Kind of what a lot of people expected with a massive hardware move.
After some very large drops in Scrypt difficulty it has had +14.91% then +3.65% a small drop 0.46% an now it looks like +5% or tomorrow.
ETH is climbing slowly as far as I can tell.
Might just be they are building different / larger facilities for SHA and the other miners which at the moment are more profitable in terms of power vs. revenue are being powered up 1st.

-Dave

[Philipma1957cellphone]

Eth did not tank much in the difficulty.  Likley due to more out of china one or two card rigs.

Ltc / doge with a L7 miner is really good money maker.

3300 watts gets you over 180 usd worth of coins

While the s19 makes 33 usd with the same power use.

My guess is anyone with both L7 and s19 gear is going to turn on all his L7 gear on and leave the s19 off.

As to a stealth attack the op is tripping on acid.

The BCH chain would be attacked not the Btc chain. It is 70x easier to do.

I would argue that it would be done as it would scare the shit out of all pow mining  and the hash power offline is big enough to roll the chain back for over a few years. In a month they could have done this and we wake up in the morning knowing the chain was killed.

China would then announce they are forcing all Chinese builders to build asics just for them and that they are killing off ltc/doge next.

If that happened btc would die without a direct attack.

[stompix]

Might just be they are building different / larger facilities for SHA and the other miners which at the moment are more profitable in terms of power vs. revenue are being powered up 1st.

Or the hashrate generation for others is simply more fluid and more adaptive.
You make 2$ a day you think about shutting down, you check it up you see you make 5$ maybe I will put those back in use!

With sha256 miners is quite simple, you see the profits you don't have the gear you close the page, especially with this chip drought, with videocards is another story. I've watched those charts in profitability and seems always all other coins are having a spike in profits once the price goes up just as bitcoin does but this is subdued far faster. The profit for MH/s for Eth is already at December levels, for bitcoin is still twice despite actually ETh gaining on BTC in this interval.

Probably China didn't have that much other hashrate in the first place.

The BCH chain would be attacked not the Btc chain. It is 70x easier to do.

Far easier is to put BSV out of its misery, and despite the fear factor that will be triggered I think everyone would be happy with the outcome.

[mikeywith]

Why? Buying and hoarding that much ASICs without using them would be ridiculously expensive

performing a 51% attack on bitcoin will only be done to hurt bitcoin, the network is too large for someone to benefit from a double spend or anything else, so ideally, we should be worried about someone who has a lot of money and wants to spend a huge chunk it for the sole purpose of damaging the blockchain, in that case, they would want to do it as silently as possible, not buy announcing on public media like how things are now in China.

[ranochigo]

performing a 51% attack on bitcoin will only be done to hurt bitcoin, the network is too large for someone to benefit from a double spend or anything else, so ideally, we should be worried about someone who has a lot of money and wants to spend a huge chunk it for the sole purpose of damaging the blockchain, in that case, they would want to do it as silently as possible, not buy announcing on public media like how things are now in China.

Yes. It isn't impossible to mine without telling anyone. Bringing all those equipment online could take weeks. Every second that your equipment aren't running, you're incurring an opportunity cost. That could amount to a few billion, depending on how long you take to acquire the sufficient amount. No one would attack Bitcoin if you have to spend that much money, recouping some of the loss would make the most sense.

It is perfectly possible for them to slowly take them online, under the guise of actually mining them by using a company unaffiliated with the CCP. It is far more suspicious for that much equipment to be deployed in a few weeks than having it spread out over months.

[kano]

performing a 51% attack on bitcoin will only be done to hurt bitcoin, the network is too large for someone to benefit from a double spend or anything else, so ideally, we should be worried about someone who has a lot of money and wants to spend a huge chunk it for the sole purpose of damaging the blockchain, in that case, they would want to do it as silently as possible, not buy announcing on public media like how things are now in China.

Yes. It isn't impossible to mine without telling anyone. Bringing all those equipment online could take weeks. Every second that your equipment aren't running, you're incurring an opportunity cost. That could amount to a few billion, depending on how long you take to acquire the sufficient amount. No one would attack Bitcoin if you have to spend that much money, recouping some of the loss would make the most sense.

It is perfectly possible for them to slowly take them online, under the guise of actually mining them by using a company unaffiliated with the CCP. It is far more suspicious for that much equipment to be deployed in a few weeks than having it spread out over months.

Alas I'd suggest that 'over months' would be minimal months, since the ones moving the hardware, under normal circumstances, ignoring this tin foil hat conspiracy theory, are losing money the whole time.

[Gabrics]

Do you really think there will be something after all this chaos?

No and that's my main worry why I started this thread.
Because now a non game theory interested agent (CCP) may have enough hash power (built by good miners in the past) to pull something like this
I mean not moving it, just using it in it's original place. Probably by the original owners using coersion.

[Gabrics]

It is far more scary for a sudden percentage of the hashrate to go offline for an extended period of time.

Yepp

[Gabrics]

We're still not in "probable" territory though.  Such a coordinated attack by the CCP requires preventing information leaks out of China and there are just too many miners in China and too many ways for information to leak while protecting identities.

As far as I know the really big mines are so remote that this is doable in China (big MAYBE and as far as I imagine/afraid). Mine operation could be operated by the same simple/trained guys (I mean day by day, like fans etc.) who don't care as long as they get paid. They don't care/know where the hashrate goes. CCP just needs one pool a few techs and a few nodes to build the alternate chain.

[NeuroticFish]

No and that's my main worry why I started this thread.
Because now a non game theory interested agent (CCP) may have enough hash power (built by good miners in the past) to pull something like this
I mean not moving it, just using it in it's original place. Probably by the original owners using coersion.

I start to believe that your actual intention was FUD, despite of what you're telling from start.
It was explained long ago that the drop was under 49%. Since then the hash rate has recovered quite a lot (119-120 EH/s these days), and you still seem "worried"...

[ranochigo]

CCP just needs one pool a few techs and a few nodes to build the alternate chain.

Do you think the community wouldn't react in a way in a timely manner to counter any potential malicious re-orgs and negate the impacts caused by them? The reason why 51% attack is so dangerous is mainly due to the financial motivation, where there might not be enough time for people to react in a timely manner. If you kill off Bitcoin, great! Another crypto takes it's place. So what now?

I believe that the costs for an attack like this, if it is currently on-going has ballooned to the neighbourhood of about 287 million dollars. I've already mentioned it quite a few times, you don't want to do a 51% silently. Proving that you can consistently annoy the hell out of the community by re-organizing blocks every now and then rather than doing a very expensive block re-org achieves the same thing.

[philipma1957]

 Well op is wrong but pow may soon be under worldwide attack.

this is on dell website.
 six states ban this gear. and it pulls only 250 watts for 3070 or 400 watts for 3090

The ban is in 6 states.
It is for 3070 and for 3080 models

[moonstruck]

Sounds like a plausible scenario to me, there's definitely an incentive to ruin the largest cryptocurrency to promote regulation.
Even with 51% they'd have enough if they are creating a separate chain altogether instead of competing for every block.
They easily could have stockpiled enough equipment or older gear that was taken out of use to get the additional single digit % needed.

Although as a counterargument, one would expect the decline in hashrate would have happened much faster if it was coordinated.