> Any cash comes from buyers and if there is any attack all the buyers are scared away.

Well, assuming any kind of rationality in the crypto market is always hazardous: meme coins (doge coin, shiba inu) are worth billions in market cap, so do hard forks of bitcoin, and Ethereum didn't not collapse after they decided to rollback a bunch of things they didn't like during the DAO “hack” while they are advertising Ethereum as immutable and tampering resistant.

You can never be sure how this market will react in any event (well, except Elon tweets I guess)

> Any cash comes from buyers and if there is any attack all the buyers are scared away.

I used to assume that, but there are coins which have been attacked successfully before and people still use them anyway. I don't attempt to explain the logic there :P

So NVIDEA is doing the smart thing, and just keep raking in cold hard cash from the miners, whom take on all the risk for when the market collapses.

This is the terrifying thing about a bug in one of these systems or some other kind of attack. The whole network can suddenly drop to zero in the blink of an eye.

Hence the value of a stabler currency such as USD or GBP versus more volatile currencies. It is an implicit judgment on how much trust there is in the system that uses them.

As with any software, bugs can be fixed or forked out. The risk of it going to zero is smaller than most people think. Remember the inflation bugs Bitcoin had in it's early days? [1]

1: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/itcoin-unhackable-it-h...

Sure, but basically every currency has some theoretical problem.

Usually it's just about the currency becoming worthless (usually only a problem in government controlled currencies that have loans in foreign currencies), or people just not accepting it anymore.

There's no inherent value in any currency, it's just a useful fiction because it's really hard to go get five goats to trade somebody for a laptop.

Currencies are propped up by taxes. The IRS wants a significant percentage of the US GDP paid in USD, as long as the economy exists and the government doesn’t print truly vast amounts of money from thin air the USD can only move within a fairly narrow range.

That would be true if only the US was using the dollar.

Given the number of countries using the dollar as their reserve currency, value could collapse quite a ways without the US doing anything.

It's not likely, but neither is a 50 + 1 attack on bitcoin given the amount of computing power currently tied up there.

That’s less significant than you might think as US GDP is almost 1/4 of global GDP and foreign countries don’t keep that many USD on hand. Aka even in global terms US GDP is vast.

Also, Bitcoin has significantly more vulnerabilities than just a 51% attack or a crash as nodes need to be connected to the internet and therefore can at least in theory be hacked. What exactly happens after that point is anyones guess, but it could easily be worse than a traditional 51% attack.

> That’s less significant than you might think as US GDP is almost 1/4 of global GDP and foreign countries don’t keep that many USD on hand. Aka even in global terms US GDP is vast.

Sure, but the value of the dollar (like everything else) is in how easy it is to get (supply). The US GDP is not a measure of the supply of dollars on the market, it is a measure of how often those dollars are exchanged.

> Bitcoin has significantly more vulnerabilities than just a 51% attack or a crash as nodes need to be connected to the internet and therefore can at least in theory be hacked.

That's fair, if we're including implementation vulnerabilities, it does expand the potential problems quite a bit. The post I was responding to was specifically about a 50 + 1 attack. Though if we include these, we should probably also expand physical currencies' problems to include counterfeiting in that case.

> Sure, but the value of the dollar (like everything else) is in how easy it is to get (supply). The US GDP is not a measure of the supply of dollars on the market, it is a measure of how often those dollars are exchanged.

The US GDP directly translates into the amount of taxes paid. Suppose a 50% drop in the value of USD happens. If nothing else happens taxes increase by 100%, and people need to acquire more USD which drives the value of the currency up.

You might wonder about economic hardship, but historically that causes deflation. +/- 2% per year without printing money is easy, but there is a reason you don’t see huge swings without the government printing money.

> counterfeiting

An issue for any physical currency but electronic currency actually operates independently. Trying to counterfeit large quantities of cash is therefore surprisingly difficult even for nation stale level actors. A great fake bill can get passed around, 10 billion in fake bills which is still a trivial amount would trip up various monitoring systems.

>The US GDP directly translates into the amount of taxes paid. Suppose a 50% drop in the value of USD happens. If nothing else happens taxes increase by 100%, and people need to acquire more USD which drives the value of the currency up.

? GDP is produced and denominated in USD, domestic taxes are paid in USD. How does a drop in the relative value of USD compared to a foreign currency influence domestically paid taxes in any way?

> If nothing else happens taxes increase by 100%, and people need to acquire more USD which drives the value of the currency up.

Oh definitely. I did not mean to imply that taxation in USD does not have a modulating effect (and if I came across that way, I apologize). I'm just trying to say that you can have some pretty wide swings even with that.

> but there is a reason you don’t see huge swings without the government printing money.

You don't generally see it, no. Mostly because other countries use the dollar as a store of wealth, and they don't want to tank the value that they've squirreled away. I'm bringing it up as a hypothetical with the same likelihood as a 50 + 1 attack on bitcoin.

China, for example, seems to hold ~2 trillion in USD (~60% of 3.5% trillion total reserves).[0] I assume most of this is held as digital assets, as there's only ~2 trillion physical dollars in circulation.[1] Dumping that much on the market would cause some pretty wacky inflation (as well as destroy China's stability). In a similar vein a 50 + 1 attack on bitcoin would allow an actor to give themselves all of the bitcoins, but would also destroy the value of those bitcoins because nobody is going to trust the network after that.

Both of these attacks are really only useful if you value hurting other actors more than you value your own resources/your own sense of self-preservation.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves_of_C... [1]: https://www.uscurrency.gov/life-cycle/data/circulation

OMG it should be illegal.

There are BTC futures, they could use those to bet against BTC

Only if they know.

"Clue" and "holding coin" have not so much overlap.

The part where they stop selling cards will sure go completely unnoticed by everyone and not draw any scrutiny at all.

They could re-route 10% of their wafers with no one noticing.