Crypto 360°

Friday, 2 September 2022

Post from Gavin Andresen from 2010.

submitted by /u/PumperDumperr
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Came across this discussion criticizing bitcoin. What are your thoughts?

Here is one of the main talking points I'd like to discuss:

Rockefeller/51% attack: Rockefeller was one of the wealthiest Americans of all time. He did this by running a monopoly (Standard Oil Company, Inc.). To create the monopoly, all he had to do was operate at a loss for short periods of time. Although his assets and capital allowed him to enter periods of negative income, his competitors could not survive the loss of revenue and would leave the market. This allowed Rockefeller to retake control of the market, and bring his prices back into profit range again. Rockefeller didn't have much competition, because anyone entering into the market would know already the losses they would take for a risk they weren't sure to win (they wouldn't). The monopoly consolidated power quickly. And because the company grew so large, it was always guaranteed profits in the long run. It didn't matter how much it hurt short term, when the monopoly was reestablished the promised flow of profits would begin again. Selling at a lower price wasn't a long term strategy it just served to eliminate other businesses. This was how he maintained the monopoly.

What about bitcoin, at the protocol level?

Suppose some entity (a government, a cabal of miners, a worldwide energy conglomerate?) decided to band together and they controlled 51+% of the hash rate. They take extreme profit losses in the short term, so that it denies other miners the revenue from getting their blocks added to the chain. The blockchain thus eventually becomes constructed only by the entity that now has taken control. Meanwhile, no other miners are allowed to enter the market because they cannot bootstrap the appropriate funds to overcome the monopoly. By protocol, the longer chain is always be the preferred one.

Suppose this cabal owned 70% of the mining hash rate. You would be providing 70% of the power of the network, but at the same time consuming 100% of the rewards, hypothetically. Joe Kelly thinks this possibility could start in the ASIC chip world, or perhaps be a state sponsored (clandestine) effort. In fact, the path towards a 51% majority would be profitable along the way, but only once you attacked the network would you have to worry about revenue.

An interesting side note: A monopoly could even exist in secret, whereby the main blockchain censors the blocks of other miners, but in such a fashion that a pattern cannot be easily established. Frustrated by a lack of transparency, these miners would then become suspicious and unreliable when compared to the hidden monopoly.

How does this tie into the idea of bitcoin as a projection of power? Determining the fate of the worlds currency (or however you want to define it, now or in the future) is where everyone wants to be. It's good to be king. Why not mine your way to the top, then decide who to kick out? Kick out any country you don't like... or better yet, just slow or inhibit their capabilities on the network, in an either explicit or obscured way.

I understand the energy requirements, but what about a project that started with the miners first? Or what if an energy company decided to tie in all their excess energy to the network, and then work with a government subsidy? Didn't Adam Beck say something about all the unused, excess energy that exists right now could easily increase the size of the network to possibly bear such a brunt?

Any thoughts?

BTW: I'm pro-bitcoin, never selling, long term hodler, there is no spoon. This argument seemed to just hit me a little differently because I never thought of the possible profits during an attack, not just afterwards.

submitted by /u/SleepCom
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I just want to say, I’m ultra thankful to this community of builders for everything they’ve done and are doing, all the researchers, developers, business leaders and users. You make me proud.

I was never proud introducing BTC to my father in the height of 2017, when he laughed at the transaction fees being higher than Western Union when I sent him that BTC transaction.

Today, I’m not only proud showing off Bitcoin Cash’s (or Bitcoin as it should have always been) transaction fees, but also:

Native OP codes which enable unprecedented non-account-based smart contracts and oracles
Cash Fusion and the truly enabling of cash-like fungibility
SmartBCH (even though I still dislike its current centralized topology) and what it enables and empowers creators in issuing their own SmartContracts and tokens: My barber is planning to expand his shop by issuing a SmartBCH token and then offer the holders a part of his future revenues!
Flipstarter and the decentralized nature of fund raising. We saw first hand how the bank accounts and fund raising efforts of the Canadian mandates protestors were frozen. FlipStarter forever changes this.
The multitude of Decentralized exchanges available for SmartBCH and BCH - From the amazing indexers which allow you to trade across all these exchanges to the amazing Pokémon game and lottery on BenSwap. The creativity is endless.
BCH.Games and the other amazing casinos and lotteries leveraging the insanely fast 0-confirmation transactions and the eventual near-free on-chain transaction. Absolutely ground breaking applications of an otherwise a very straightforward working-Bitcoin implementation.
AnyHedge and the amazing of native oracles and on-chain contracts enforcing externally-determined outcomes. This will literally redefine industry standards when it comes to options, futures and other derivatives trading.
True Decentralization: Decentralization of mining clients, Decentralization of development teams, Decentralization of mining, Decentralization of Development Roadmaps (CHIPs), Decentralization of everything. Every other coin fails this test, and this is how BTC was captured and throttled by a company who then sold their solution (Liquid) to a problem which otherwise wouldn’t exist had this team didn’t centralize decision making around themselves.
Censorship resistance on the community and ideology level: Every Bitcoin Cash participant and community member actively resists censorship and advocates for dialogue. From rBTC to Read(dot)Cash to memo(dot)cash to Twitter spaces: All non-trolling opinions are welcomed and all constructive discussions and criticisms are welcomed.
Decentralized Payment Processors such as Prompt(Dot)Cash and others. Absolutely phenomenal in merchant on-boarding and in allowing conventional commerce an easy on-ramp to the peer to peer electronic cash universe.
True resistance to any take-over attempts driven by a mature understanding of the Bitcoin Peer to Peer electronic cash use case: Teams were kicked out when they tried to fork segwit into the code (BTC) in order to sell off-chain rent-seeking solutions , then again when they tried to copyright Bitcoin (BSV), and yet again when they tried to tax Bitcoin (ABC/XEC), and it will reliably happen over and over again thanks to Bitcoin’s built-in game theory incentives and equilibrium.
Amazing Protocol-level development and on-chain scaling research: From the amazing work General Protocols do in creating native development frameworks and protocols, to the amazing scaling work by people such as Andrew Stone (XThinner) and Peter Rizun.
Amazing on-chain unstoppable tools: From decentralized voting with voter(dot)cash to Cash IDs
And the list goes on and on.

Bitcoin Cash (Bitcoin) will eat the world. Stay tuned!

submitted by /u/wisequote
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/x3geth/i_just_want_to_say_im_ultra_thankful_to_this/

Thursday, 1 September 2022

Lightning Network adoption..

Have a question. Why all the modern secure wallets don’t have lightning network integrated? What’s stopping them to use it.

submitted by /u/NckyDC
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UK inflation 22% in 2023. Why isn’t this on news headline everyday?

This is war-level catastrophe. I’m surprised people are walking around as if this will never happen or even if it does, it will be subdued in short order.

Is no one worried or are we re-living the pre-crisis 2006/2007 days again…

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/30/uk-inflation-could-top-22percent-as-energy-prices-soar-goldman-sachs-warns-.html

submitted by /u/jensiejebeb8
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