mikeblackson
The US (Fort Detrick), Japan, UK, and Germany all rank higher on the list of potential suspects than China.
ESG people are trying to solve something that is already solved. POW is here to stay and will scale tremendously well as we all move to layer 2.
>Because when you break the law and get caught, you give up your freedom to choose.
Being poor in the USA is a criminal offense.
It seems like an effort is being made to use 1000 social media posts as a reason to create avenues to further shutdown legitimate criticisms.
This article is dead. It took me a long time to argue against it because I assumed you knew what "adaptability" of bitcoin meant in practice. It seems you didn't and will need to do a lot more research before discussing viable attacks in the future.
Your attack vector fails and we know Satoshi knew the game theory and outcomes of just this scenario over a decade ago, as it is detailed in his posts on the bitcointalk forums. They are a great starting point for you to learn more about bitcoin's various defense mechanisms.
---Responding here due to rate limit...
Variations of POW, POS, POK, etc....are easy drop in replacements that are actively being developed as we speak. Most of those alts you speak of have Bitcoin DNA at their core.
>And even if it does, nothing prevents me from 51% attacking that one, too.
Good luck attacking Bitcoin with a proof of stake hybrid that requires owning 51% of the supply to succeed, when the majority of the supply is already issued and is not available for sale. That's why I keep stating that a 51% attack/defeating POW is just the beginning of the work the Fed has to do...
---Rate limit response part 2....
>Finally, this is all kind of irrelevant to the article.
I think you are admitting defeat in long form. The article itself is irrelevant because it doesn't consider the 2nd order effect of any attack. Bitcoin is considered anti-fragile for a reason, it gets stronger as it gets attacked. The developer communities (including the devs working on alts) are an inextricable part of its anti-fragility.
>not some imaginary future thing we might or might not be able to invent after the Fed 51%s actual bitcoin to oblivion.
I could hit a target where it was positioned x years ago... Big Whoop. You aren't defeating its current form, so you lose, repeatedly, and debase the currency (USD) further in the process.
After a few trillion dollar USD expended on failed attacks, the currency being issued will be debased enough to be noticeable by consumers. This "infinite money printer" argument is not thought through. The outcome of more debasement is more demand for bitcoin aka undebaseable money.
Bitcoiners know there is a hyper inflationary event coming soon, I'm sure many would love to induce it by getting the fed to burn money attacking bitcoin :D
I see the issue here, you think the endgame is for bitcoiners is to own more fiat. That is not the goal, fiat is dead to most bitcoiners, they will hold until fiats currencies implode like they constantly do.
You seem to think the choice of money originates with banks or governments, it doesnt. The primary form of money is chosen by the masses. Good luck stopping billions of people that choose to opt out of bad money.
And no, they can't destroy something that can be forked and updated an infinite number of times. Not sure why you don't understand that its trivially easy to copy Bitcoin and build an alt. As long as that is the case, Bitcoin cannot be defeated.
If the current POW mechanism is repeatedly attacked and defeated it will adapt or projects will move to another consensus method. This is an arms race that CBs cannot win and they will burn a lot of money in process of losing, which is a beautiful thing.
Realize a successful 51% attack is just the beginning of the war, not the end of it.
*All the arguments you put forth so far are defeated by this simple flip of a consensus mechanism switch.
Central banks are more fragile than the Bitcoin network and they definitely don't have the support of the masses. I expect they would lose a lot more than just money in this attack.
Bitcoiners would love to pull these institutions out of the shadows and I don't think central banks survive when exposed to sunlight. Just a small community of coders caught wind of how CBs operate and constructed powerful platforms to carry out large scale speculative attacks on them. Imagine what happens when a few billion people understand how CBs operate... their days are numbered.
How long can the fed fight a few hundred million (soon to be few billion) people?
In the war of attrition, this small group of people with incentives that are not aligned with the majority of the humans on this planet will lose, it's just a matter of time.
I expect Bitcoin will destroy/neuter most central banks in your lifetime.
I disagree with the 2nd part too, the idea that the Fed does anything tech related with a higher level of competency than the private sector has not been proven to me.
The idea that a centralized closed network that's severely hampered by operating restrictions can beat a well designed adaptable open network in the long run is a joke.
As long as governments debase the currency to carry out this attack, they are also continuously creating more reasons for variations of Bitcoin to exist.
They would fork Bitcoin and the Fed would burn a ton of money with very little to show for it. The miners they bribed would pile into the non-Fed controlled fork using the Fed funds they received. The network may actually grow after this kind of attack is successfully sidestepped purely from the Streisand Effect and the corrective action proving what people theorized about the difficulty of censoring the bitcoin network.
The FBI wants to interact with and attack the 200M+ people that will eventually hold "dirty bitcoin"? Much of whom are non-KYC holders? Good luck accomplishing that with a limited budget and man power.
What you are describing is just people moving money to an exchange and buying with leverage, not fraud. Price moves up when large buyers step in with FOMO.
My understanding is funds in a bank account were seized and the account closed. Describing the shortfall that followed, while they tried to recover said funds, as fraud, is a tremendous mischaracterization.
Did somebody at Bloomberg have a BTC short position blowup? They have a long history of publishing FUD to manipulate markets in their favor. I hear people are still looking for the mythical SuperMicro "spy chips"... lol
I agree and expect that is the lesson the $18M fine taught them.
The key point is, they had a legitimate reason for under-collateralizing during the biggest bull run in crypto history at that point. 2014-2017 was the perfect period to begin fraudulent activity if they were really interested in it.
I guess the question is, what is the best time to commit fraud in the crypto space, earlier or later (during-post increased regulatory scrutiny)?
In 2017, when they were busy securing other banking partners due to accounts being shutdown.
I consider this a gap due to growing pains, as did the NYAG. How would you shutdown Tether temporarily (2-3 months) if a bank ends a relationship?
Also, there is nothing which proves that Tether actually isn't backed by anything.
I see a lot of people jumping to conclusions about a topic they are self admittedly ignorant about. Perhaps wait for the DOJ to do their jobs if you don't have insider knowledge.
In response to -dsr's sarcasm below (rate limit), I've got a bit of my own.
"I've run a profitable business for years and haven't committed fraud during the time I spent in an unregulated environment. Now that regulators are nearing my doorstep, it's the perfect time to start committing fraud." /s
That ZH article's ifs, possiblies, and maybes are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Is the Bitcoin price up? Queue the Tether FUD.