Manufacturing the Crisis

Boost!🇮🇸🧡

V4V

Just a little Boosty McBoosterson to say that while I agree that we don’t need to worry about mining pools attacking the network, for the obvious reason that they have no incentive to destroy the value in the system, there are still entities out there who might just want to do exactly that. The same governments who can print money to buy mining hardware just may decide that it’s a good investment to destroy fiat’s only real competition. I don’t necessarily think this will happen, but, it’s a possibility. With regard to tariffs, I think something that we need to keep in mind is that tariffs are not meant to help “number go up” for the markets. Agree or disagree with their effectiveness, the idea is to try to get things moving in the right direction for national security. It’s not good to rely on adversarial nations for all of the stuff we need and not make our own goods. Unfortunately it make be too late to fix the problem, and tariffs won’t fix the fact that the US has chiefly exported nothing but fiat debt for so long.

Best part of my thursdays. 🫡⚡️

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Sats for tunes. V4v

Hey Chris, I'm not sure which part of what Saif said that you disagree with, but 100% of it is correct. The miners ARE service providers to Bitcoin. They can't change Bitcoin rules. If they try to produce a block that violates the rules, the nodes will reject it. So what is the risk of a 51% attack? It's not changing Bitcoin's rules. It's an attack that happens within the rules. In particular: double spending. Someone with 51% of the hashrate could attempt to respend bitcoin that's already been spent in a prior block, by directing all of that hashrate to producing a longer chain and negating an already produced block. But that is still incredibly hard to do. Suppose the transaction that is being targeted for a double spend is in the current top of chain. To double spend, the attackers have to produce 2 blocks before the honest miners produce one. Those two blocks will become the longest chain and the previous block will be abandoned. If they fail to produce 2 blocks before the honest miners produce 1, now the task becomes harder for the attackers. They have to produce 3 blocks before the honest miners produce 1. And here's the thing: it would be absolutely transparent any time a pool operator succeeded. Because someone who received Bitcoin that was mined into a block would pipe up about having their bitcoin stolen from them. A successful double spend would be huge news. Pool operators may control what template to mine, but they don't actually control hashrate. The individual members of the pool control the hashrate. As soon as a pool operator pulled off a double spend 51% attack, almost all of the invidivuals who provide hash power to that pool would abandon the attacking pool. That attack cost them money. Pool operators have the sword of damocles hanging over their head. There is certain power that they technically have, but as soon as they try to exercise it, they lose that power. I think mining centralization is a risk. And I like what ocean is doing. But I…