makeasnek

joined 1 year ago
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[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Not really, and miners have fantastic financial incentive to remain honest. It's not altruism. In terms of the attack you are talking about (51% attack) Nobody can amass that much computing power and certainly not quietly, good luck acquiring enough ASICs to do it, let alone enough energy. You'd need your own fab for them which means designing your own ASICs (specialized devices for mining which are orders of magnitude more efficient than regular computers) or stealing designs for them. You're already into the billions of dollars right there with having your own fab. You can't buy even half of the processing power you'd need on the open market. A 51% attack is absolutely insanely expensive to do and logistically impossible at this point. And even if they could, the absolute best they can do is temporarily delay transactions or do a double-spend (spend the same BTC twice). They can't spend money they don't have the key for and they can't print extra Bitcoin as all other nodes would reject those transactions as invalid. Doing a double-spend makes no sense because the only benefit of doing so is getting something else in exchange for that BTC. If I'm going to trade say.. 1 billion dollars of oil for your BTC, I'm gonna wait for a few blocks of confirmation, even assuming I could transfer that much value that quickly. And whatever you trade has to be more valuable than the cost of a 51% attack which is probably north of a trillion dollars at this point depending on how you do the math. Plus, you know, the legal/extralegal/diplomatic/etc consequences of your actions depending on what you did the attack for.

The attack isn't a one time thing, your delay only works if you keep attacking. The second you stop, the chain reverse to the "true main chain". A 51% attack has never happened successfully against Bitcoin and never will at this point. Even at the nation-state scale, Bitcoin is tied in enough to international markets at this point that attacking it could easily cause an international bank run/financial collapse and massive diplomatic problems. And all you'd prove is that you wasted an inconceivably large amount of money to attack a system that picked back up right where it started a few minuted, hours, or days later. Because unless you intend to continue your attack and energy use forever, that's exactly what would happen. Meanwhile, you've pissed off every voter, hedge fund, state retirement fund, business, bank, national treasury, international organization, charity, and legislator who has any sort of exposure to Bitcoin.

Some back of the napkin math for anybody interested https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18salm9/the_economics_of_a_hypothetical_51_attack_on/

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

The government controls it and they use it to gradually decrease the portion of supply your hard-earned money represents. They aim for 2-3% inflation in a "good year". That's the nice countries, ask any Argentinean how they feel about who controls that money printer. Monetary inflation mostly impacts the poor and middle class who have more of their net wealth in cash whereas rich people have their money safely stored in assets like stocks or land. So the government controls the money printer.

Unless you use Bitcoin. Then the protocol (nobody) controls it. And it's controlled to never make more than 21 million BTC. No person, even if they had a trillion dollars, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence, even if they had 1000 guys with AKs, no person could make Bitcoin print an extra BTC it wasn't intended to print. Or spend money that they didn't have the private key for. That's a money printer I can trust. It's faithfully done this for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or being hacked and has a market cap that places it in the top 20 countries by GDP all while experiencing continual growth and adoption. But it's a fad right? That has no purpose? A scam? And on year 16 you'll finally be proven right?

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I joined this instance at random, look at my history if you think I'm a tankie.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 17 points 8 months ago (5 children)

"You can't use this at work" and "You can't use this ever" are very different things.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml -5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

Except it’s not, it’s an ad platform.

Right. So if they sell ads on it, it's not a speech platform right? Reddit, not a speech platform? The Washington Post? The Guardian? Lemmy, when lemmy instances start running ads, Not a speech platform? Gmail? Not a speech platform?

Nope, absolutely incorrect, it is indeed just a company being banned.

It's not. This isn't a company that sells cars, they provide an online speech platform. It's my ability to use the speech platform that gets banned in the process. They can ban TikTok from being able to "do business" in the US, that is different from pulling it from the app store or installing a great firewall to prevent US citizens from accessing their site. And frankly, "doing business" has been an inherent part of speech platforms for decades, selling advertising on speech platforms is how they can exist, all the way back to the days of newspapers and radio.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml -4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

Except they already made Oracle handle all that and they can easily legislate privacy protections without banning TikTok entirely. And, again, it is my right as a citizen to install whatever app I want even if it is spying on me, just like the rest of my apps do. I could film every second of my life and put it up on Facebook or a personal website and the Chinese government could watch it and there's not a damned thing the US government can do about it.

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