Topic: Israeli Bitcoin Association Statement about Hashrate Attacks (Read 1398 times)

If you strongly desire This crypyto currencies success then you probably would wanna know the bad effects in bitcoin forking.
You should read Satoshi nakamoto's whitepaper an hardfork would drop the bitcoin's price and cut the majority of users and miners into half.

I have said several times on this forum and previously in this
thread that I'm somewhat agnostic on the issue of whether
the hashrate attack is moral.

As we start to approach the reality of breaking the blockade
and finally getting beyond 1mb, I am starting to lean more
toward feeling morally justified about attacking a minority chain.

For me, the stonewalling of the blocksize shouldn't have happened
at all and was a kind of stealth attack on Bitcoin to begin with,
and we are merely taking back Bitcoin.

I see this as a very different context from a minority wanting to
'do their own thing' during times of peace.  I feel we are at war,
and all is fair in love and war.

Again, I fail to see the freedom if the system is based on reciprocal violence.

This would be no better than if 1 business owner would burn down his competitors place. That is not freedom, that is thug tactics.


You are the one that doesnt understand the principles of freedom. You can have freedom, but it must not include agression.

Bitcoin works perfectly fine without hackers and thieves. We would consider thieves and hackers a downside to Bitcoin , not an upside.

Freedom to do aggression is not freedom, because you are taking away the freedom of the victim.



You can have both decentralization and moral rules. This is not opposite ideology.

So nothing prohibits a person from starting up his own crypto project. But if he starts DDOS-ing his competitor, you bet there will be consequences to that.


There are already laws against DDOS, and besides, slowing down somebody's server is causing financial harm to the victim.

It's as if you would have no problem if somebody would grafitti your house, because that is freedom of art no? Well not if it's causing financial harm to you.




So the point is that your freedom ends at the point when it becomes aggressive towards others. So you can only compete in a moral way if you respect your competitor.

I missed this reply. Sorry.

So there it is. If we hard fork to Bitcoin Unlimited, I do not believe the new stewards and the supporting miners will make the same mistake the Ethereum Foundation did by leaving the original chain alone.

I'm simply explaining the principles of the system YOU adhere to: freedom, permissionlessness, trustlessness.  It is maybe not the rosey world you think it is.  If you need somewhere a central authority, a police you can call, laws that have been imposed, and judges that punish the bad guys, why do you want crypto in the first place ?

I'm OK with the principles of freedom, permissionlessness, and trustlessness.  But I know that it is a Mad Max world.  I'm OK with that, but visibly, you aren't.

Then why are you in crypto ? Why do you need miners cryptographically protecting your bitcoins, if you can just go to the judge and complain ?

How else do you understand freedom, trustlessness, and permissionlessness ?  If there are rules, you are not free.  Of course, violence is permitted, because *everything* is permitted (permissionlessness).  It is the first of freedoms.  


The prey is always upset by being eaten by the predator.  
I really would like to know what you understand by permissionlessness, and trustlessness, if you need permissions to do things or not (be violent or not), and if you have to trust the judge who will condemn you when you are not following the rules that have been dictated by others (like : be not violent).


Again, what don't you understand in trustlessness and permissionlessness, apart from the fact that nobody is to be trusted, and that you don't need any permission to do anything you want ?


If you want a trustless, permissionless system, I don't see how you can impose "moral rules".  I'm not saying that you should adhere to trustlessness, and permissionlessness, but these are the founding principles of crypto.

Otherwise, you don't need crypto.  You introduce a moral principle that transactions should not be double-spend, and the same centralized authority that sets these rules, and that will judge these rules, is the entity that will verify whether these rules are "moral" to their standards.  In other words, the normal world out there.

Both are the same statement.  In a trustless, totally free, permissionless system, what happens, happens.  There's no "morality", because moral rules are orthogonal to trustless, permissionless freedom.

As such:

is against the first principle.  But of course, "condemning publicly" is just as well a free act, which can be used in the game of might.  "freedom, trustlessness and permissionlessness" is exactly, I would think, the DEFINITION of "wild west" and "savages".  From the moment you introduce morality, and rules of good behaviour, you killed freedom, permissionlessness, and you'll need trust to say what are the rules now, and who is going to judge those that do not follow them, so trustlessness is out of the window too.

At "best" you get a kind of representative democracy, and we're back to square one.

Yes because the founders and the real "official" developers behind it were the same people who decided to go for the hard fork. But that is not what I was asking in my post above and what the price might be should not affect your opinion. The point is the Ethereum Foundation said the fork will not result in 2 chains but now here are 2.

I would say that is some propaganda glad that i am not living in your full liberty system and if i am forced to live in a society like that i would rather purge what i consider is against me . If someone is trying to hack my assets i will make sure he will spend the rest of his life behind bars for trying that,stealing two hundred bitcoin is like stealing a high bank vault and he is punishable by law.

So do you think violence is ok? Just because a thug has the liberty to do violence?


In the online space, agression is literally no different than in the physical world.

If you have 200 BTC worth of assets, and somebody hacks your PC, I bet you would be upset, and would not tolerate that, however that is the "freedom of the hacker to steal" according to your mindset.


So the same way, if some fucker is DDOS-ing some node, or some miner is engaged in double spend, or somebody is filling the network with low transactions, that also causes financial harm to people, in one way or the other.

So why should we be ok with that? It's no different than physical agression, which we know to be immoral.


So what are you doing here, go back to your centralized banking system currency, which is created by the mightiest financial institutions.

You would definitely love that.

Of course that is what the free market is, everyone has their own ideas, and his own project, and they should both exist voluntarily.

If 1 side wants 1 chain, the other side wants the other, they should both be respected, and then they should both have the same capacity to compete with one another.


I came into bitcoin to see voluntarism in action, and it makes me sad, that so many fascists have taken over this debate. When they are advocating for attacking people digitally, censoring people for having different oppinions, and turning their belief of bitcoin into a cult, that is fascism right there.


And that is very dangerous for the community, we want a free currency, or possibly free currencies, as each person has a right to decide what currency they want to use. Bitcoin doesn't have a right for supremacy, nor does a particular implementation of it.

People either choose freedom or tyranny.

Meni is brilliant.

Sometimes it is better to listen to someone who is much smarter than yourself, and not respond with bullcrap 

If we're filing for irreconcilable differences, who gets LTC and the other 1000+ kids on the weekends?  

But yes, if there does have to be a divorce, as such, at least let's try to make it an amicable one.  It does seem like there is a rift that we are now well beyond healing and a middle-ground that, although visible in the far distance, is likely impossible to reach.  Both sides have some convincing arguments and I've reached the stage where I wouldn't be looking to short either chain.  I'm quite content to hodl it all and see how both visions of the "true" Bitcoin play out in practice, mainly just to put an end to the seemingly endless prognostications and pontifications from both sides.  I think it's safe to say we're all tired of that now.



But just to clarify, are you supporting the "might makes right" argument?  Or just commenting that it's a distinctly possible occurrence in a permissionless system?  Even if such actions can't be prevented, they can still be publicly condemned.  Poor form and low blows should always be reprimanded.  People might see cryptoland as a sort of "wild west", but (I hope) we're not savages.  It can, and should, be done cleanly.

This is the general problem when at the same time proposing total liberty and other principles.  You cannot prone liberty, and then prone principles according to which this liberty is supposed to be used, because that is against the first principle of liberty.

In the totally free (in the sense of liberty), trustless environment of crypto, what you call "attacks" is nothing else but exerting one's liberty in the frame of a strategy to overwhelm others (which is the principal usage of unconstrained liberty).  In a full liberty system there's only one right: the right of the strongest (smartest/fittest/fastest/wealthiest...).

The complex dynamics of interplay of different agents with different strategies, to be gamed by other agents, in a totally free environment, is very difficult to predict, and even more difficult to make it work out "according to desired principles" ; but the PoW scheme, where the investment in mining (and hence, fee collecting, selling transaction room, selling transaction permissions etc...) as a separate activity from "using the system", was or 1) not a smart move or 2) a totally vile idea from the start, with the aim to keep the entire system in the hands of a few, outside of the system itself.

Because you haven't yet seen the next potential part in this show: once the block chain is in the hands of a consortium of miners (most probably the monopoly producers of mining equipment), they can sell "transaction room" on the chain to a few privileged (paying) customers (say, exchanges and a few other big players), denying most normal users direct access to their own coins, as their transactions, not relayed by a customer of the miner consortium, will systematically be rejected, essentially obliging users to only have transactions from and to a few exchanges, but not amongst themselves, at which point, the exchanges have taken the place of commercial banks, and the miner consortium, as central bank, dictating their law to the exchanges being customers, which, on their turn, dictate their law to their customers.

There is no significant difference between a few centralized LN hubs to which everybody is bound to set up their channels, and a few exchanges, if those hubs/exchanges are at the mercy of a miner consortium, determining who has access to the block chain, by "exclusively renting block room".

In order to maintain exclusivity on the block chain room, no "escape route" must exist through another crypto currency.  This is why the strategy of the miner consortium is clear: they want small blocks of which they can sell the room to centralized exchanges, which will be the only agents through which bitcoin users can use their own coins.  Even though LN would give a similar structure (with exchanges replaced by LN hubs), the LN and Segwit offers the danger of bitcoin/litecoin exchange.  This is why the consortium needs to keep full control over this.  All this is a consequence of transaction maleability and PoW, which naturally leads to such situations.