Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Somewhat good news for GPU prices, Proof of work taking a hit.
With Crypto currency, someone like Elon Musk has a bit of influence. Like when he drove up the price of DogeCoin. In a recent tweet, Elon Musk mentioned Tesla will no longer be accepting Bitcoin as payment due to it's electrical demands and less than ideal renewable energy used to power the grid. Bitcoin itself consumes 0.78% of all electrical demands globally. It's believed that 73% of this is from renewables.
As a result, most proof of work cryptos are taking a hit while proof of stake cryptos have seen a jump. Bitcoin is down 17%, Ethereum up 8%, DogeCoin down 27% and Cardano up 44% in the last week. Most of that change happened in the last couple days with Ethereum now trending down.
As a result, most proof of work cryptos are taking a hit while proof of stake cryptos have seen a jump. Bitcoin is down 17%, Ethereum up 8%, DogeCoin down 27% and Cardano up 44% in the last week. Most of that change happened in the last couple days with Ethereum now trending down.
Comments
It'd need a much bigger hit before miners would stop buying cards.
https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
Suppose that a major government decided that Bitcoin is bad and publicly announced that it was going to launch a 51% attack on it. All that it takes is for the government to be willing to outspend all of the miners and that cryptocurrency is dead. Given that there's no question that a major government could do that if so inclined, how much money do you think miners would be willing to spend to prevent it? And even that assumes that the government doesn't "cheat" by confiscating mining hardware, which tends to be very concentrated and hence easy to seize.
With a credible claim that a 51% attack is coming and going to wipe out that cryptocurrency, how much do you think people would be willing to pay to buy it anyway, knowing that it's soon going to be worthless? Most likely, its value would tank long before the government followed through.
All of the built-in incentives not to do things that will wreck a cryptocurrency assume that the players involved own a lot of the currency and want for it to remain valuable. That doesn't work for a government that is setting out to destroy the currency and would be happy to see its value go to $0.
Considering that all that you'd have to do to kill Bitcoin is scare people into believing that it's going to be worthless, the actual cost to a government to kill it wouldn't necessarily substantially exceed the cost of a press release.
It's not going anywhere.
Graphics cards are inferior to asics by a big margin.
As far as 74% of BTC running on renewables... I wonder how they came up with that claim.
Quiz is right - the value of BTC is entirely based on faith. It wouldn't even take a 51% attack to tank BTC (or any other crypto) - it only works because people want it to work. And if "motivated actors" didn't want it to work, it would stop working in a hurry.
Look - all it took was Elon Musk saying he wasn't going to accept it anymore at Tesla to tank a considerable amount of value. Now, he didn't kill BTC all on his own, but just imagine that next is a few hedge funds announcing BTC selloffs shortly thereafter... then maybe a few large personal investors dump on the down low. A bad run and the house of cards all comes tumbling down. You can think that would never happen.. but that's exactly how stock market crashes happen all the time -- except stocks have real companies behind them that provide goods and services to be able to lean on assets and people to re-establish their stock worth, BTC has.... a ledger?
The usual defense against that is that if you own a large fraction of the world's bitcoins, then you don't want to wreck the currency and destroy the value. That doesn't work for a government coming in with the express intent of destroying Bitcoin.
In order for a government to launch a successful 51% attack, they wouldn't have to steal all of the coins or shut down the servers. All that they'd need to do is to create enough chaos that no one else could use the system. Bitcoin would have a reliable record of who owned what before the 51% attack started, but no way for anyone to transfer currency after that point in time.
It wouldn't take a broad conspiracy among governments, either. The government of South Korea cutting a deal with Samsung to design and build ASICs would be enough to end Bitcoin forcibly, without regard to what the rest of the world does, and there would be absolutely nothing that miners could do about it. Quite a few other governments could do it, too, if so inclined; South Korea is just an arbitrary example.
And if that's all that it would take to bring Bitcoin to a swift end, quite a few other cryptocurrencies would die a whole lot more easily.
However governments usually do not do that kind of thing. They don't publicly sabotage an activity unless it's something clearly criminal, and a 51% attack could not be done stealthily either.
If a government wants to get rid of crypto, they'll just outlaw its use to everything within their jurisdiction and that's it.
I tend to find defenders of CC who like yourself will fall on their sword for it, are all miners themselves, good luck with that but don't let you future depend on something so potentially volatile.
Energy must both be saved and produced with eco-friendlier methods. Neither is good enough solution alone.
So if you've build a decentralized system that uses something like 100 000% extra energy compared to what a central database would use to store and process same data, then your solution is environmentally unacceptable no matter how you were planning to produce that energy.
The thing about it is that in order to destabilize the system, you don't have to shut it down entirely. Suppose that you're a vendor and know that if you get paid by method A, about 10% of the time, the transaction gets reverted and you're out the money. If you get paid by method B, you reliably get to keep the money. For how long after you figure that out do you continue to accept payment by method A?
All that a government has to do to kill Bitcoin is to turn it into method A. You don't have to stop all of the transactions. You just have to revert enough for people to lose faith in it and switch to something else. But if you've got most of the world's mining capacity, you could mess with nearly all of the transactions.
Numbers used for this:
-Bitcoin energy consumption: 0.78% global consumption, taken from Cleffy's numbers earlier this thread
-Number of credit card transactions: 1 010 000 000 a day, taken from cardrates.com:
https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number-of-credit-card-transactions-per-day-year/#worldwide
-Number of bitcoin transactions: average 330 000 a day in December 2020, taken from Google
And calculations based on those numbers: 1 010 000 000 / 330 000 = 3061 credit card transactions for each bitcoin transaction.
3061 * 0.78% = 2 388% of global energy consumption
As this borders on political and I don't think we should use this forum for such I will say no more.
Like you, “Oh dear, we already have someone saying we should “educate ourselves” in other words ‘think like I do’.” - This is proof you don’t care and you want to win an argument. Childish.
You're also right that a 51% attack couldn't be done stealthily, but my point is that it wouldn't need to be done stealthily. If you're only trying to destroy a cryptocurrency and not to steal it, you don't need to be stealthy about it. To the contrary, the more noise, the better. If you can convince people that you're going to launch a 51% attack that ruins the currency, you can create a panic that destroys the currency without needing to actually follow through with the attack.
So long as mined cryptocurrencies are inconsequential, governments won't bother trying to destroy them. But if they're inconsequential, then why does this thread exist? Would you bet that no government will ever feel the need to take out Bitcoin if it becomes popular enough to be a serious threat to replace that government's own currency? Because the only way you can justify mined cryptocurrencies being worth in the ballpark of $2 trillion and expecting it to go up further is if you seriously believe that they're going to replace traditional currencies.
I can tell you really haven't researched much at all about the bitcoin protocol.
Once they milk it for all its worth they will destroy it, you will cry as you lose all your money because the real gangsters are long gone by then, and they will bring in what they wanted all along.
A CENTRALIZED government backed (and thus insured) digital currency. Problem, reaction, solution. Same as always.
I hope they pull the plug soon so you guys can get your graphics cards
You mean - the exchanges are in total control of what you own. And you are at their mercy...
If you were in total control, something like bitcoin theft wouldn't be possible. yet it happens... quite a bit actually.