Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than Many Countries

Re:Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than Many C... by runeks on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @03:53PM (#15760521)

> In the cases for attacks that the protocol cannot slash for, the community can fork the network an exclude the attacker's accounts […]

Forks are always possible but, they’re not the solution, they’re the problem that a blockchain tries to avoid in the first place, because they lead to the issue: which chain do we follow?

If the community were able to organize itself to reach consensus on a given transaction history, we wouldn't need a blockchain in the first place.

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Re:Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than Many C... by drcode on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @04:04PM (#15760616)

> Forks are always possible but, they’re not the solution

The argument is not that we would fork away attacks, the argument is that we can threaten forks to remove the incentive to attack in the first place.

> If the community were able to organize itself to reach consensus on a given transaction history, we wouldn't need a blockchain in the first place.

Well, the idea is that the community can't police every transaction, but they WOULD be able to give input once a year in an emergency situation- And we can show that these "emergency situations" would be infrequent (if they happen at all) due to the fact that an attacker will forfeit large amounts of money with every attack.

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