Plan falls apart at Step 1. The rest no matter how clever can't work without step 1.<p>China and Russia and others would align against any Western powers seeking to destroy bitcoin at this point. Beyond that, many Western powers would start running the calculus of the potential upside of marginalizing USD by allowing bitcoin to continue, and choose to not participate or actively undermine efforts of those trying to kill it.<p>At best it would never materialize given the obvious diplomatic and game theoretic consequences. At worst, it would escalate to an arms race that may even spill over into a real conflict. I'll admit it would be somewhat ironic, in this era of fear around climate change, to see us get into an arms race over who can burn the most energy fastest in an un-winnable game that also doesn't have the same obvious consequences of not de-escalating as MAD.<p>May answer the question around the Great Filter. I wonder if we'll find ancient ASICs scattered across the surface of Venus.
The level of cognitive dissonance around Bitcoin (and crypto in general) is kind of amazing. That much I will agree on.<p>But to dismiss anything pointing out the flaws in Bitcoin as sour grapes from people who missed out? Wow. That's cognitive dissonance right there.<p>The simple truth here is that:<p>1. Bitcoin consumes an awful lot of energy;<p>2. It solves a problem for almost nobody; and<p>3. It's not as secure as people think it is.<p>I've become increasingly convinced that (1) is what will ultimately doom Bitcoin. I mean it will likely be replaced by something more energy-efficient (ie PoS vs PoW). But that transition will be a massive event in wealth redistribution.<p>As for (2), Bitcoin seems to have two forms of utility:<p>- To escape capital controls in many countries. Wealthy individuals in China trying to bypass Chinese capital controls was (IMHO) a big initial driver in Bitcoin. This also covers countries without a stable currency (eg Venezuela) or artificial limits on currency conversion (eg also Venezuela); and<p>- Illegal stuff.<p>You could argue that Bitcoin is also an asset you can hold for diversification purposes but ask yourself this: would people hold Bitcoin if it was expected to hold a constant value against the US dollar? Or another relatively stable currency? Or even a basket of such currencies?<p>That's impossible to know but I suspect not. I strongly suspect that expectations of BTC rising in value is a big part of why people buy and hold it. "Ponzi scheme" is one characterization of this. I'm not sure it's fully accurate but it's not that far off either. I think "tulip fever" may be more accurate. Either way, the chickens come home to roost eventually.<p>As for (3), I can't speak to the technical merit of the suggested attack in this post. It's known however that the network as a whole is vulnerable to a 51% attack (and I honestly believe there are several who could orchestrate such an attack if they were so inclined).<p>Personally I find this fascinating. And sure I wish I could go back to 2010 and buy $1000 worth of Bitcoin. But that applies to anything. Buying Apple in 1999. Buying Amazon at, well, pretty much any point. Buying land in the 1990s.
Of course Bitcoin can be taken down with enough (according to the article <i>worldwide</i>) concerted efforts.<p>Compare that with the parliament of the most powerful nation on earth being overrun by a few thousand morons.
Kill it. It's gone now. So what happens next? Ethereum will be #1. I guess you want to take it down too. It will be tougher job since all those smart contracts are not just "dumb coin money" anymore, but let's say you succeed with that too.<p>What's next? Start a global brainwashing program to erase the idea of a decentralized network from the mind of people? It will only create a situation like we see with the war on drugs. Drugs won, at least we should learn from it. BTC might be a financial drug, but declaring war on it is equally pointless.<p>Point is, it might be possible to kill BTC, but the core ideas are here to stay with us on the long run. The genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back.
I believe blockchain tech has the potential to change the world. With that said, I do have some burning questions:<p>1. Can there be consensus mechanisms that are environmentally sustainable? Does PoS work well? We have so many "new" blockchains with "new" consensus mechanisms but not enough information on the tradeoffs among them.<p>2. Do we actually <i>need</i> blockchain for anything other than finance? Can't we use p2p for things like governance? Can't we achieve a similar level of trust using traditional p2p tech?
Realistically this falls apart almost immediately, when you try to assemble the political will to actually ban Bitcoin. While you can talk about governments being willing to spend money on the drop of a hat, this just isn't realistic. Spending billions to combat magic internet money when prescription drug prices are sky-high? Spending billions to combat magic internet money when we don't even have enough to fund the programs that we are operating now?<p>If somehow you managed to muster the political will, the assumption that the cost structure could remain fixed is also laughable. As critics are quick to point out, Bitcoin uses a large amount of energy. Enough energy to mine 100 blocks ahead would require 100 times that energy, and that's assuming that the energy use stays constant, where it would clearly not do so. That amount of energy expended on the effort would be sufficient to substantially affect global energy markets, which would in turn affect the Bitcoin price.<p>The most you could hope for would be to bring up a mining operation that would be competitive with the rest of the network, and thereby throttle on-chain transactions. Bad news for you, ban-fans; the network is already severely throttled, and the price doesn't seem to be bothered much by it.
This article actually makes a good point, which I think many bitcoiners ignore, which is that governments have a big ability to seize hashrate and use it against the network. I have some criticism about the piece though.<p>The article plays it a bit fast and loose with which sets of countries need to cooperate to bring bitcoin down. It lists "everyone from the G20 and beyond" as an example of an international coalition wanting to bring down Bitcoin. But it then admits<p>>>> Plus we’re mostly talking about China and the CCP here, since that’s where the majority of mining activity is, so, yeah.<p>But later says<p>>>> Overall, you successfully seize 80% of the global Bitcoin hash rate and all the best mining locations, and it’s now under your control to do with as you please.<p>But the first quote shows what the problem is with framing this as an action of an international coalition: China really controls 80% of the global hashrate, so even if every other country were on board, it is really up to China whether the network gets destroyed.
Let me suggest a classic. It traditionally worked like this: You buy as much as you can (preferably all) of what is produced for a while. The factory flourishes on this new found demand. Then you reintroduce the product to the market cheaper than the freshly produced crop. The factory scales down as you've removed your demand and you've taken a significant amount of additional demand out of their game. You can just repeat the buy and sell cycles and make waves in the market until it gets unbearable for existing players however in a more perfect settings you create an artificial market where you are both the buyer and the seller. That way you can sell to yourself for 0.9 the one day and for 0.8 the next needing only one widget to make as many trades as you want. If others are willing to sell for 0.8 you buy theirs too and "sell" it for 0.7 the next day.<p>Of course the situation with bitcoin vs state players is unique. If you can arrest people holding bitcoin you can obtain a significant amount of widgets for free and win the game without having to invest much.<p>Additionally, by constantly buying on the cheap you can lure the doubting rebels out of the woods.
The Counter Attack wins. BTC holders counter attack and win.<p>STRATEGY #1:<p>* Bitcoin mining is effectively Peer-to-Peer DB sync.<p>* People who owned medium or high amounts of BTC run software that broadcasts good chains vs attack chains. They cryptographically sign it with their addresses.<p>* BTC holders who support keeping bitcoin going, are running a small number of mining nodes.<p>* They keep rejecting attach chains. They keep accepting valid chains. By side channel peer-to-peer sync by BTC holders.<p>* BTC effectively is forked. Attack chain keeps attacking their trash chain. Legit chain keeps processing transactions and rejecting sync of attack chains.<p>STRATEGY #2:<p>* Ethereum is years into PoS. Effort doubles down to finish this in 2 months.<p>* BitcoinPoS is created. Starts with BTC chain balances, but uses PoS. Every bitcoin is now living on BitcoinPoS chain.<p>* Gov attacker wastes $$ creating attack chains in PoW when bitcoin continues in the PoS universe.<p>Gov wasted $10 billion on this. Politicians are voted out of office. Politicians realize robbing the American people is unacceptable. Bitcoin was created because of the Wall Street 2008 Mortgage Crisis theft. The citizens don't take kindly and respond...
This attack is pretty unrealistic. For one, China is extremely invested in Bitcoin, and if they were to seize equipement from miners it would be to drive <i>up</i> the price, not try to kill it.<p>For two, pricing hash power as USD ignores that <i>they aren't the same</i>. The US doesn't need to spend $9m per day (actually $45m per day, since this is from Jul 8, 2020 @ 9k, and BTC has since went way up) since they can't buy Bitcoin ASICs any better than anyone else can, and probably a lot worse since govt procurement is fucked. There's a limited amount of ASICs in the world, and no matter how much they subsidize the electricity cost it doesn't do anything until they have 51% hash power.
Not sure when the next <a href="https://breaking-bitcoin.com/" rel="nofollow">https://breaking-bitcoin.com/</a> conference will be after covid.
But I am sure they would love to have you.
If government want to kill bitcoin they don't need technological solutions. They can ban companies from trading in it. And ban banks from interacting with companies that exchange it. Makes it very difficult for you to move money in/out. And there will be little to do with the bitcoin once you have it.
You don't need to kill Bitcoin... Bitcoin can adapt to our current situation. ETH started the switch to proof of stake for example... Bitcoin could do the same.
Since we're ignoring the geo-political climate (like Russia would just watch West tear down Bitcoin without trying to counter it seems unlikely since Russia is the wildcard in this story), generally making lots of leaps and other things that should have been considered, I have a simpler solution:<p>- The US proclaims a "War on Mining"<p>- Using a bitcoin full node to track IPs, drones to find locations and warheads to "disable" mining operators, bomb every mining location once found<p>Approx cost of operation: less than "$100m per day"
This whole thing reminds me a bit of xkcd.com/538/<p>The simplest way for the US to get rid of bitcoin is to secretly declare it a national security threat, then identify, apprehend, and possibly extradite a majority of the Bitcoin Core developers.<p>Then force them to release a new version which is easier to control, but incompatible with the old version. Maybe this is just a PoS version, with inherent flaws? If some of the miners stay with the old version that's fine - a fork helps your goal.