Re:Coinbase Wants to Be Too Big to Fail
by damon_c on Thursday September 27, 2018 @04:30PM
(#18088307)
Well isn't the problem at hand that the 51% of the "larger" bitcoin network can actually, at this moment be controlled by only 4 pools?
Re:Coinbase Wants to Be Too Big to Fail
by sparkie on Thursday September 27, 2018 @04:36PM
(#18088364)
Ideally we would be better with increased decentralization. It could be a problem if they colluded and attempted to censor or double spend. Chances are they won't, because it will probably negatively affect their own bottom lines (reduced confidence in Bitcoin leading to reduced value of their own assets).
Secondly, any blatant attack on the network could be countered by the participants forking in a change in the algorithm used to do the proof-of-work. This would bankrupt the attacker because they would be sat on enormous amounts of now useless mining hardware.
Re:Coinbase Wants to Be Too Big to Fail
by etaioinshrdlu on Thursday September 27, 2018 @10:21PM
(#18090497)
I'm not sure about my statement but I'm not sure about yours either.
Before Bitcoin was created I would have said such a system was probably impossible...
I guess my point is that the world is a complicated place to try to understand.
Changes to Bitcoin rules require consensus by all the participants (people running and using nodes). The only things a majority of miners can do are attempt double-spends of their own transactions, or temporary denial-of-service by excluding transactions from the chain of blocks they mine. Any other changes will fork them off the network, and then they'd be minting coins with no economy to sell them into.