Re:Amazon denies report of accepting Bitcoin as payment
by vbezhenar on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:51PM
(#27966463)
51% miners have limited control over blockchain. They can censor blockchain by not allowing some transactions (and forking whenever other miner tries to add those transactons). They can undo some transactions by making a fork before that transaction has happened and eventually forcing the world to switch to their chain.
All those cases are highly visible. I don't know what will happen if someone will attempt to force-fork blockchain. But I highly doubt that 51% miners could monetize that power.
Another point: bitcoin miners are using ASICs, not GPU or CPU. Those ASICs are useless bricks outside of bitcoin mining. If bitcoin miners will collapse bitcoin, they'll lose their ASICs investments. AWS can sell their CPUs to anyone, but mining bitcoin on their CPUs is pointless. To mine bitcoin, you need to buy or build ASICs. And you need bitcoin to stay afloat to return investments from those ASICs.
The only danger is if some actor have lot of money (e.g. US government) and want to kill bitcoin. They can rent some fabs, build lots of ASICs and wreak havoc. They'll spend a lot of money, but probably they'll achieve that goal.
All those cases are highly visible. I don't know what will happen if someone will attempt to force-fork blockchain. But I highly doubt that 51% miners could monetize that power.
Another point: bitcoin miners are using ASICs, not GPU or CPU. Those ASICs are useless bricks outside of bitcoin mining. If bitcoin miners will collapse bitcoin, they'll lose their ASICs investments. AWS can sell their CPUs to anyone, but mining bitcoin on their CPUs is pointless. To mine bitcoin, you need to buy or build ASICs. And you need bitcoin to stay afloat to return investments from those ASICs.
The only danger is if some actor have lot of money (e.g. US government) and want to kill bitcoin. They can rent some fabs, build lots of ASICs and wreak havoc. They'll spend a lot of money, but probably they'll achieve that goal.