Re:Founders Fund Makes Bet on Bitcoin
by seibelj on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @04:12PM
(#16055694)
If this was pulled off successfully, the value of bitcoin tanks, thus harming the attacker. It's still game theory. I don't worry about miners trying to attack bitcoin, it's governments.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
In the scenario I'm describing, the attacker profits when the value of bitcoin tanks.
Two new developments:
- Vast investment in mining hardware due to the bubble.
- Liquid BTC markets, including futures and shorting.
Say that the world's miners accumulate so much hardware that it costs $1m / hour in electricity to run it all. At current prices, they'd still be making a profit! But if that changes, datacenters in China will go dark, BTC difficulty will go down, lots of hardware will sit unused.
So if one group ever finds itself sitting on a ton of no-longer-profitable mining hardware, they could take a large short position and then attack the network.