Building for the Blockchain

Re:Building for the Blockchain by EGreg on Thursday January 11, 2018 @10:31AM (#16124556)

That same logic can and does apply to Bitcoin. The governments can seize or buy many ASICs and mine in secret to destroy trust in Bitcoin's longest chain.

The mining has ALREADY been centralized in a small number of mining pools. They become a cartel that charges high fees, no collusion needed. You have only one miner every 10 mins, and it has to take every transaction made in the whole world. You call that a good scalable design. Not to mention they can just be DDOSed.

But anyway tell me again why it's not rational behavior for someone to mine Bitcoin Cash in secret and then unleash their far longer chain, after shorting Bitcoin Cash on the exchanges? Why is Bitcoin Cash even secure at all?

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Re:Building for the Blockchain by CryptoPunk on Thursday January 11, 2018 @03:05PM (#16127303)

1. Not all cryptocurrencies have ASIC mining. Ethereum has GPU mining. If a government attempted to attack Ethereum with GPUs that it bought, the public would likely react by turning their own GPUs toward Ethereum to protect it against the attack.

2. No one said that proof of work based cryptocurrencies can't be attacked. Obviously there's no such thing as an invincible protocl. The point is that it is much more costly/difficult to stop a proof of work based cryptocurrency than one that depends entirely on a small set of known and trusted third parties.

>>The mining has ALREADY been centralized in a small number of mining pools.

Already been addressed in my previous comment.

>>But anyway tell me again why it's not rational behavior for someone to mine Bitcoin Cash in secret and then unleash their far longer chain, after shorting Bitcoin Cash on the exchanges?

It would be much riskier than simply mining honestly. If they short it and their attack fails, they would lose a huge amount of money.

[ Parent | on HN ]