Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Flobee · Apr 6, 2021

LachiusTZ said:
The ETH as internet analogy naked sense to me as it seems to provide utility.

I don't know if BTC layering is able to do the same things or can overcome the ecosystem already built on ETH

Ethereum can do a lot of things now that Bitcoin can't do. This provides significant value to that network as is shown by its marketcap. Ethereum also carries significant risks due to its nature (turing complete programming language, centralized aspects RE: Infura, significant premine, proof-of-stake giving power to those with the most capital which is a point of centralization, etc). However innovation is clearly happening on Ethereum and that has real value and could become a permanent home for applications like DeFi.

That being said there is a real possibility that as Bitcoin scales in layers as it is doing it will have the ability to perform a lot of these same functions, but backed by the most powerful decentralized computing network in existence. If, and it is an if, Bitcoin can perform these same functions I have trouble seeing longterm value in a network like Ethereum that has massive security risks baked into it at a fundamental level. Vitalik essentially decided to remove a number of the security constraints that exist in the Bitcoin blockchain in order to allow innovation to occur now rather than waiting. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this, but I think few people really understand that is what they are buying.

I'm not ready to call Ethereum a bad project (or liquidate what I hold), but I do see the risks to its future. Over time the Bitcoin maximalists are slowly convincing me that they're on the right side of this argument.

LachiusTZ · Apr 6, 2021

BTC computing is not exactly decentralized anymore.

Unless you think someone running their desktop part time compares to the miners with 18000 3080s

Haus · Apr 6, 2021

LachiusTZ said:
BTC computing is not exactly decentralized anymore.

Unless you think someone running their desktop part time compares to the miners with 18000 3080s

Or the fact that China is mining the HUGE portion of all mining done.

If the US was serious about it they'd be repurposing some of those NSA data centers and getting on it to establish a US BTC base.

Flobee · Apr 6, 2021

LachiusTZ said:
BTC computing is not exactly decentralized anymore.

Unless you think someone running their desktop part time compares to the miners with 18000 3080s

It is globally decentralized. Hash rate is going to flow to wherever the cheapest electricity is available. Right now that is heavily biased to China, but that is changing with big farms coming up in Texas. I fully expect this trend to continue as companies and individuals start to realize that they can capture excess energy in locations that it is currently being wasted. Bitcoin mining will consume excess energy in all markets in the relatively near future. Electric grids have to maintain supply/demand equilibrium at all times as we don't have efficient ways to store excess energy. Bitcoin allows power companies to monetize excess energy.

This is a game changer, wait and see. As the marketcap grows you'll see bigger players get involved to ensure the network isn't controlled by their competition.

Examples:

Bitcoin Miners Continue To Move Mining Facilities To Texas As Crypto And Blockchain Sector Gets Larger In Unprecedented Bull Market | Crowdfund Insider

Bitcoin miners continue to move mining facilities to Texas as crypto and blockchain sector Gets larger during unprecedented bull market.

www.crowdfundinsider.com

While it claims most of its hardware is situated in Asia, Nasdaq-listed mining firm Bit Digital has a small but fast-growing presence in Texas via hosted machines that are maintained by Compute North.
Riot Blockchain is testing out an immersion cooling test facility based in Texas “in anticipation of potentially larger-scale deployment of immersion-cooled mining in the region.”
Texas is now home to a Bitcoin mining data centre with “a touted energy capacity of 1 GW.” The facility has attracted clients such as SBI Holdings and GMO, which are two Japanese corporate giants.
Bitmain also maintains a fairly large mining centre based in Rockdale, Texas.
Layer1, a mining company previously involved in legal issues, also maintains mining operations in Texas which are led by its new Chief Executive Jakov Dolic.
Texas is also home to HODL Ranch, a firm that establishes data centers for crypto miners in West Texas.

Bitcoin Will Save Our Earth

By using energy to validate transactions in a way that is independent of any existing grid or source, Bitcoin mining will save the climate.

bitcoinmagazine.com

Bitcoin mines are the least location-dependent consumers of energy on the planet. As a result, they can easily use energy sources that are “stranded” far from current population centers — like ocean currents or desert sun. These sources either aren’t economically viable to develop at all, or have the potential to produce more power than the existing nearby consumers can possibly use. Bitcoin mining presents an income stream that helps bootstrap funding to develop these stranded energy sources. Once energy production is up and running, these cheap sources of power can be a draw for other power consumers — like data centers, factories, even people — to locate near them

LachiusTZ · Apr 6, 2021

Flobee said:
It is globally decentralized. Hash rate is going to flow to wherever the cheapest electricity is available. Right now that is heavily biased to China, but that is changing with big farms coming up in Texas. I fully expect this trend to continue as companies and individuals start to realize that they can capture excess energy in locations that it is currently being wasted. Bitcoin mining will consume excess energy in all markets in the relatively near future. Electric grids have to maintain supply/demand equilibrium at all times as we don't have efficient ways to store excess energy. Bitcoin allows power companies to monetize excess energy.

This is a game changer, wait and see. As the marketcap grows you'll see bigger players get involved to ensure the network isn't controlled by their competition.

Examples:

Bitcoin Miners Continue To Move Mining Facilities To Texas As Crypto And Blockchain Sector Gets Larger In Unprecedented Bull Market | Crowdfund Insider

Bitcoin miners continue to move mining facilities to Texas as crypto and blockchain sector Gets larger during unprecedented bull market.

www.crowdfundinsider.com

While it claims most of its hardware is situated in Asia, Nasdaq-listed mining firm Bit Digital has a small but fast-growing presence in Texas via hosted machines that are maintained by Compute North.

Riot Blockchain is testing out an immersion cooling test facility based in Texas “in anticipation of potentially larger-scale deployment of immersion-cooled mining in the region.”

Texas is now home to a Bitcoin mining data centre with “a touted energy capacity of 1 GW.” The facility has attracted clients such as SBI Holdings and GMO, which are two Japanese corporate giants.

Bitmain also maintains a fairly large mining centre based in Rockdale, Texas.

Layer1, a mining company previously involved in legal issues, also maintains mining operations in Texas which are led by its new Chief Executive Jakov Dolic.

Texas is also home to HODL Ranch, a firm that establishes data centers for crypto miners in West Texas.

Bitcoin Will Save Our Earth

By using energy to validate transactions in a way that is independent of any existing grid or source, Bitcoin mining will save the climate.

bitcoinmagazine.com

Bitcoin mines are the least location-dependent consumers of energy on the planet. As a result, they can easily use energy sources that are “stranded” far from current population centers — like ocean currents or desert sun. These sources either aren’t economically viable to develop at all, or have the potential to produce more power than the existing nearby consumers can possibly use. Bitcoin mining presents an income stream that helps bootstrap funding to develop these stranded energy sources. Once energy production is up and running, these cheap sources of power can be a draw for other power consumers — like data centers, factories, even people — to locate near them

They will scale, and consolidate, just like every other business.

BTC is in no way decentralized. And will be less so as time moves on. Not saying it's good or bad, but that's the break.

ETH will be similar, but my understanding it is should be a basis for an ecosystem, not a "currency".

So the incentives are different, and methods to satisfy them are going to be barely different.

I own both, and think they are both going to go nuts over the next few years. But for different reasons.

Flobee · Apr 6, 2021

LachiusTZ said:
BTC is in no way decentralized. And will be less so as time moves on. Not saying it's good or bad, but that's the break.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand how Bitcoin works if you believe this. Even if mining is massively centralized the network is still decentralized as long as individuals running nodes do not accept fraudulent blocks from miners. Miners cannot simply over run the consensus and change the network as they see fit.

Mining is and will centralize in some aspects of course, you're right about that. You can see this with the manufacturing of the ASIC's which is controlled by a relatively small group. They decide who gets to own the mining power. What I think you're not taking into consideration is the power that core developers and individual Bitcoin core node owners have. If miners go rogue for example the devs and node owners can simply change the consensus algorithm to invalidate the ASICs currently in use. In of fell swoop they can blast billions of dollars of value from that industry.

There is a careful balance in the design of Bitcoin. It is a lot more resilient than you're giving it credit for.

LachiusTZ · Apr 6, 2021

Flobee said:
I think you fundamentally misunderstand how Bitcoin works if you believe this. Even if mining is massively centralized the network is still decentralized as long as individuals running nodes do not accept fraudulent blocks from miners. Miners cannot simply over run the consensus and change the network as they see fit.

Mining is and will centralize in some aspects of course, you're right about that. You can see this with the manufacturing of the ASIC's which is controlled by a relatively small group. They decide who gets to own the mining power. What I think you're not taking into consideration is the power that core developers and individual Bitcoin core node owners have. If miners go rogue for example the devs and node owners can simply change the consensus algorithm to invalidate the ASICs currently in use. In of fell swoop they can blast billions of dollars of value from that industry.

There is a careful balance in the design of Bitcoin. It is a lot more resilient than you're giving it credit for.

Either I misunderstand what a 51% attack is, what you said isn't accurate, or something.

51% attack means miners can absolutely do what your said they can't, given a majority of processing power.

Flobee · Apr 6, 2021

LachiusTZ said:
Either I misunderstand what a 51% attack is, what you said isn't accurate, or something.

51% attack means miners can absolutely do what your said they can't, given a majority of processing power.

Right, so in the short term a 51% attack can overtake the network and present fraudulent blocks to the network. In a vacuum this equates to the malevolent miners controlling the network. However every single node being run has a full copy of the blockchain with every transaction that took place before this 51% attack. You'd also presumably have some percentage of Bitcoin core developers that would not be ok with the result of this 51% attack and they could simply change to mining algorithm to make the ASICs useless. Node owners that didn't support this fraudulent chain would adopt this new code. As such a hard fork would occur to invalidate the fraudulent chain.

This would be absolutely devastating to the Bitcoin network no doubt, but the ledger would survive and Bitcoin would move on. Whoever owns the hardware for 51% attack just cost themselves however much purchasing that hardware cost them, on top of the potential future gains they would have made from just continuing to support the consensus and mine blocks.

I don't claim to fully understand every aspect of how Bitcoin could react to all attacks, but the game theory behind the obvious attacks are pretty well developed.

LachiusTZ · Apr 6, 2021

Iirc the 51% works because it breaks how the network validates.

I don't think "them being ok with it" would matter.

It would basically hijack all BTC if successful.

Devs wouldn't matter, etc.

The reason for ETH changing is to create the incentive to remove the computational requirements, and create an as stable as possible platform for decentralized flow of information.

And as it is not PoW, that your stake it too a large processor shouldn't matter.

And a single 51% stake holder would not have any real incentive to attack ETH, because it would remove the value in a stable basis for the ETH ecosystem.

Unless pure terrorism, and that's pretty expensive terrorism.

This conversation is making me want to go all ETH. Lol

Flobee · Apr 6, 2021

You are incorrect regarding 51% attack. Those writing the Bitcoin core code and the individual node owners who choose what code they run have equally important roles to play in the functionality of the Bitcoin network. As I said, you don't seem to understand how Bitcoin works.

Specifically malevolent miners would only be able to control new blocks being mined.

You also are wrong about "hijacking all BTC" this could only be done by redoing all the previous 'work' in the proof of work chain, thus recreating the ledger entirely. You are advocating for a replacement to PoW when you don't even understand the basics of PoW.

51% Attack

A 51% attack is the most discussed threat to any public blockchain asset. This post explains what a 51% attack is and how to prevent it.

99bitcoins.com

They actually outline a simpler method to invalidate a 51% attack than I outlined above

According to Andresen, a simple line of code could be added to Bitcoin that would stop a 51% attack in its tracks:

Ignore a longer chain orphaning the current best chain if the sum(priorities of transactions included in new chain) is much less than sum(priorities of transactions in the part of the current best chain that would be orphaned)

This would require the 51% attacker to not only have a majority of mining power, but also a majority of high-priority transactions happening on the network.

Such transactions can be faked by the attacker, but only for a limited time. Andresen’s hypothetical code would serve to reject the fraudulent blockchain being built by the attacker, and return the Bitcoin network to working order within a couple hours.

However, changing the rules for how the correct blockchain is chosen can have its own repercussions. Andresen expands on this point in his blog:

The devil is in the details, of course, and the risk of introducing a new chain-acceptance rule (high) has to be weighed against the chances that somebody rich and irrational will try to pull off the attack (low, in my opinion, but maybe I’m not sufficiently paranoid about Big Banks or Big Government using Dirty Tricks to shut down Bitcoin). Maybe I’ll code it up and keep it as a ‘Not To Be Used Except In Case of Emergency’ branch.

It’s clear that he doesn’t consider the 51% attack a real threat to Bitcoin, and it can easily be combated by a simple change to the code.

I know you don't actually read anything I link, but for reference to others interested

LachiusTZ · Apr 6, 2021

Flobee said:
You are incorrect regarding 51% attack. Those writing the Bitcoin core code and the individual node owners who choose what code they run have equally important roles to play in the functionality of the Bitcoin network. As I said, you don't seem to understand how Bitcoin works.

Specifically malevolent miners would only be able to control new blocks being mined.

You also are wrong about "hijacking all BTC" this could only be done by redoing all the previous 'work' in the proof of work chain, thus recreating the ledger entirely. You are advocating for a replacement to PoW when you don't even understand the basics of PoW.

51% Attack

A 51% attack is the most discussed threat to any public blockchain asset. This post explains what a 51% attack is and how to prevent it.

99bitcoins.com

They actually outline a simpler method to invalidate a 51% attack than I outlined above

According to Andresen, a simple line of code could be added to Bitcoin that would stop a 51% attack in its tracks:

Ignore a longer chain orphaning the current best chain if the sum(priorities of transactions included in new chain) is much less than sum(priorities of transactions in the part of the current best chain that would be orphaned)

This would require the 51% attacker to not only have a majority of mining power, but also a majority of high-priority transactions happening on the network.

Such transactions can be faked by the attacker, but only for a limited time. Andresen’s hypothetical code would serve to reject the fraudulent blockchain being built by the attacker, and return the Bitcoin network to working order within a couple hours.

However, changing the rules for how the correct blockchain is chosen can have its own repercussions. Andresen expands on this point in his blog:

The devil is in the details, of course, and the risk of introducing a new chain-acceptance rule (high) has to be weighed against the chances that somebody rich and irrational will try to pull off the attack (low, in my opinion, but maybe I’m not sufficiently paranoid about Big Banks or Big Government using Dirty Tricks to shut down Bitcoin). Maybe I’ll code it up and keep it as a ‘Not To Be Used Except In Case of Emergency’ branch.

It’s clear that he doesn’t consider the 51% attack a real threat to Bitcoin, and it can easily be combated by a simple change to the code.

I know you don't actually read anything I link, but for reference to others interested

I didn't see anything in there that actually refutes what I think.

Esp considering they are all referring to the pragmatic of "as it is now" and not "as it could be".

Tmac · Apr 6, 2021

Flobee said:
Right, so in the short term a 51% attack can overtake the network and present fraudulent blocks to the network. In a vacuum this equates to the malevolent miners controlling the network. However every single node being run has a full copy of the blockchain with every transaction that took place before this 51% attack. You'd also presumably have some percentage of Bitcoin core developers that would not be ok with the result of this 51% attack and they could simply change to mining algorithm to make the ASICs useless. Node owners that didn't support this fraudulent chain would adopt this new code. As such a hard fork would occur to invalidate the fraudulent chain.

This would be absolutely devastating to the Bitcoin network no doubt, but the ledger would survive and Bitcoin would move on. Whoever owns the hardware for 51% attack just cost themselves however much purchasing that hardware cost them, on top of the potential future gains they would have made from just continuing to support the consensus and mine blocks.

I don't claim to fully understand every aspect of how Bitcoin could react to all attacks, but the game theory behind the obvious attacks are pretty well developed.

This.

The entity conducting the 51% attack would also be forfeiting their entire stake, so take that for what it is.

The implications are in the hundreds of billions. And that’s without considering that the nodes and devs still have responses to prevent it.

A nuke is a nuke. But crypto is a cockroach.

[edit] These attack scenarios can also be applied to fiat. So it’s not like crypto is the exception here.

Flobee · Apr 6, 2021

LachiusTZ said:
I didn't see anything in there that actually refutes what I think.

Esp considering they are all referring to the pragmatic of "as it is now" and not "as it could be".

Maybe there is some miscommunication regarding what you're thinking but the below points were refuted. Node consensus matters, devs matter, 51% doesn't hijack all BTC. Bitcoin is as decentralized as anything I can think of. Its not perfect but its probably the closest we've come in regards to money.

I don't think "them being ok with it" would matter.

It would basically hijack all BTC if successful.

Devs wouldn't matter, etc.

If you're referring to something else you think you'll need to expand on that.

Flobee · Apr 6, 2021

Tmac said:
[edit] These attack scenarios can also be applied to fiat. So it’s not like crypto is the exception here.

In fact fiat is in a constant '51% attack' state as a single entity controls the entire system and all issuance is almost completely opaque. Nothing like Bitcoin has ever existed. There is nothing else like Bitcoin that currently exists.

Jackie Treehorn · Apr 6, 2021

I just sold a 1965 Mustang project car for $7400 cash that wasn't doing anything worthwhile, guy drove 3 hours to come get it. This shit is going straight into crypto tomorrow, with more buying coming later this week.

I already bought $500 of VET today. All Eth? Some Cardano? Some Polkadot? Later this week if funds go through I'll invest an additional $30,000 in Ethereum, and possibly another $20k or so after that.

Daezuel · Apr 6, 2021

Should put some in Daezcoin

Jackie Treehorn · Apr 6, 2021

Daezuel said:
Should put some in Daezcoin

Wot kinda gainz you lookin' at for 2023?

Arden · Apr 6, 2021

Might get an ETH dip here gentlemen- for those looking to buy in.

Writing is on the wall:

Billionaire Mark Cuban Reveals Why He Thinks Ethereum Will ‘Dwarf’ Bitcoin As Crypto Market Price Hits $2 Trillion

Cuban has revealed that he expects ethereum's long-awaited 2.0 upgrade will spark the development of apps that "dwarf" bitcoin...

www.google.com

Scaramucci: Bitcoin Is The Apex Predator, But Ethereum Will Be The Actual Store Of Value

Anthony Scaramucci, known Bitcoin proponent heading global investment firm SkyBridge Capital, believes that the future of the digital asset in investment portfolios is inevitable. What Happened: In a recent interview with CNBC, Scaramucci called it "the apex predator in the space. I tell my...

www.google.com

Redirect Notice

Miami is collaborating with Ethereum to put city services on the blockchain

Episode 21 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro, Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and Cryptex founders Preston Van Loon and Joe Sticco

www.theblockcrypto.com

Rais · Apr 6, 2021

My 3080 and 1080 are finally tuned in. I decided to say fuck it and adjust mem core and power settings. Only took a few days to dial it in. Such a pain. Expected ship date on the 3060tis is Tuesday next week. Chase flagged it as fraud so I had to call them and reorder so it gave me a chance to make it a total of 12. So pumped to nerd out again doing this stuff.

LachiusTZ · Apr 6, 2021

Flobee said:
Maybe there is some miscommunication regarding what you're thinking but the below points were refuted. Node consensus matters, devs matter, 51% doesn't hijack all BTC. Bitcoin is as decentralized as anything I can think of. Its not perfect but its probably the closest we've come in regards to money.

If you're referring to something else you think you'll need to expand on that.

I've typed it all out before.

I think BTC eventually starts losing liquidity. And it's mostly derived from that.

I know nothing about how BTC layer 2+ works save for years old info on lightning.

My knowledge on the coding of BTC is old and vague. Same for ETH.

Maybe I'm wrong, would like to pick the brain of someone that actually knows.

Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

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