Topic: MIner Question (Read 1820 times)

There is a third way that makes possible small fees and small blocks, all secured by huge hashrate.

Sharding strategy held together by atomic swaps

Hopefully after halvings rational BCH/BSV users and miners will move that way and current BTC will become BLN.

Less blocks will increase awards because the cost to get transactions included in blocks will go up and blocks that are found will have more included transactions.

That may not speak to Jihan Wu's price predictions. Bitmain might just be performing poorly and are tightening their belt.


For a few weeks, until difficulty adjusts.

You think if block time increases, miners everywhere will just immediately give up and abandon their operations?

If bitcoin fails, your zeitcoin isn't going to do much better. Also, I've seen miners mine when the price was below $1000. Just a few short years ago, it was below $500.

It is highly unlikely the price will go that low in the long term. Perhaps a glitch maybe, but it's not going to stay below $1k for any significant amount of time. Support can be seen at around $7.

Rogercoin's and Craigcoin's halving would make miners move somewhere they could mine profitably. Somewhere where they can collect higher fees.

Maybe the great exodus has started? Bitcoin's hashing power is ATH.


Their concern is LN would "steal fees" from the miners. Why are the trolls very concerned on Bitcoin's fees? They should be concerned on their big blocks' fees. Or are they big blocks? They have small blocks! Hahaha.

Then every miner there is outside of china would be making a fortune in fees.

 you are picking a strength showing you don't understand pow 's weakness.

The weakness has zero to do with high fees.

The weakness is block reward to tx fee  to price of coin ratio

ie if a block reward  is 50 coins  to .5 btc in tx rewards  price of coin is not too important.

but when you get to 3.125 coins to 1btc tx reward  the system has issues.

My opinion is 7-10 year 1/2 ing times would have been better then 4-5 year 1/2ing.

we are in for a rough ride on pow in 2028-2029.


1/2 ings are scheduled events not ifs.
and the 50 coin to 0.1- 0.5 tx ratio
dropped to 25 coin to .05- .07 tx ratio
dropped to 12.5 coin to 0.07 - 0.09 tax ratio
drops to 6.25 to ? tx id

i see problems below
drops to 3.125 to ? tx id
drops to 1.5625 to ? tx id

 long term btc price growth could save the day for miners down the road.

5nm mining gear is 20% better maybe 30%
3nm mining gear is 20% better maybe 30%

some bigger companies will build large solar arrays that last 20-30 years.

but it all points to an issue  of BTC down the road. will it continue to support mining.

The reward drop is a phenomena for the BCash and Craig Wright' indulgence coin too. That does not take the matter in favor of them. The fees that will love to LN does not limit the settlement fees for On-chain transactions.

In a scenario where LN is the norm for micropayments, higher value on-chain transactions will still serve as fee source for miners.


That is the sanest advice for people who are new to seeing cryptocurrency as an investment opportunity.

I have no idea as to the accuracy of the 65% number khaos77 cited. The Chinese government knows a lot of information on their citizens and others within their country, it is known to put spyware on some tourists phones, and may have spyware on large portions of its citizens phones, or otherwise surveil its citizens.

I don't think the Chinese government could shut down, or commander 100% of the ASIC farms located within the country, but it could probably control nearly all of them. If the Chinese government was involved in some attack on bitcoin/crypto, I believe it would take control over miners, not shut them down. Shutting down miners would not be very effective for reasons you cited below, but controlling miners could harm confidence in bitcoin if many blocks are orphaned, and/or many transactions with confirmations become unconfirmed.


There are currently some miners turned off because required operating costs (such as electricity) make them unprofitable to operate based on electric costs, estimated mining revenue, and the price of bitcoin. Some of these miners will be turned back on before the difficulty adjusts.

If the number of blocks per x time decreases, that means, the supply of block space also decreases, and all else being equal, when the supply of something goes down, its price goes up. This means the price per transaction will go up, which means the estimated mining revenue goes up (from transaction fees). The increased additional estimated mining revenue may cause some miners that were previously turned off to be turned back on.

thanks for providing some numbers for perspective. indeed, the "plummeting hash rate" situation probably wouldn't be so dire at all. people often FUD about the necessity of an emergency difficulty adjustment, but just like the 51% attack situation outlined earlier ITT, in all likelihood the network could just wait it out.

Bitcoin has existed for more than 11 years and has gone through 2 halvings already.

Is there risk that something that hasn't yet happened in past could happen in the future?  Sure.

However, I am left wondering why these things that you state could happen, haven't happened?  And if there hasn't yet been the proper incentives for these things to happen, then why do you feel that you can say with ANY confidence that the necessary incentives will ever exist in the future.

There are a million things that could happen in the future.  Many of them have nothing at all to do with Bitcoin.  The U.S. dollar could lose its dominance in the world.  Nuclear war could break out. Global climate change could wipe out humanity. A new Ice Age could wipe out humanity. We could colonize other planets. I could die an early death. We could run out of fossil fuels. A new source of cheap and clean energy could be discovered. Machines could become self-aware.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time thinking through all the repercussions and ramifications of all the "what ifs" of the world,

And I'm not going to waste a lot of time thinking through all the repercussions and ramifications of all the "what ifs" of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has risks.  Bitcoin has potential.  From everything I've seen and heard over the past 8 years since I discovered Bitcoin, I beleive the potential VASTLY outweighs the risks.

If you have 0 bitcoin and it lives up to its potential, you've suffered a disaster (because you've missed out on an amazing opportunity).
If you have your entire life savings in bitcoin and it falls to its risks, then you've suffered a disaster (because you no longer have the resources to take advantage of other opportunities).

It seems obvious to me, that the right answer is to manage your risk based on your personal risk tolerance.  Own enough bitcoin that you'll reap worthwhile benefits if bitcoin lives up to its potential, but not so much that you'll suffer significantly if it falls to its risks.

As I said, if Bitcoin were to come completely crashing down, I wouldn't be devastated.  I have enough savings outside of bitcoin that I'll be okay and I'll buy up as much cheap bitcoin as I can afford.  However, if bitcoin lives up to its potential, I also have enough bitcoin that my life will be significantly better than it is today.

if the network drops 65% transactions dont freeze they slow by a factor of 3.

so block time turns into 30 minute not 10 minute .  the worst case is it is done on day 1 of a diff jump.

so a 14 day wait is 42 days.  it is not a big deal.  it would be a good thing as it would show the network is a tough thing to kill.

also i estimate more then 20eh of gear is shut off that can be turned on.

which means the drop would be from 100 eh to 35 eh add back  20 eh and we are at 55eh.

which worst case means diff wait of 13 or 14 days will stretch to only 25 - 30 days.

Are you sure about that?  What proof do you have that 65% of the hash power is actually running on ASICs in China AND is running in farms that the Chinese government can identify, find, and shut off power?


Nonsense.  Even if we accept your assumption that China could identify and shut power off to 65% of the global hash power, that would simply increase the average confirmation time from 10 minutes per confirmation to 28.5 minutes per confirmation.  28 minute confirmations aren't going to "freeze the network" or result in "no transactions . . . possible for months".  That's just silly.

Furthermore, it's going to take less than 40 days until the normal difficulty adjustment gets things sped back up to an average of 1 confirmation every 10 minutes.

I think most people are going to be able to tolerate half hour confirmations for less than a month, especially since:

• The MAJORITY of confirmations will still take LESS THAN 28 minutes.
• Many transactions occur off-chain anyhow (through services such as Coinbase and/or through lightning network).
• People already tolerate long confirmation times during periods of high activity when low fee transactions are delayed.
• It will be clear that speed will return to normal again soon
• Professional mining organizations will learn to spread their risk around the globe more

First of all, I thought we were talking about shutting off power, not double spending.

Secondly, those attackers will need to:

• Gain more from the double spend than they would have from simply mining the block.
• Avoid getting caught by law enforcement for fraud/theft.
• Find a way to keep their double spending scam going after users learn to be MUCH more careful about avoiding scammers
• Risk angry victims finding and destroying their mining operations

And I'll be able to pick up thousands (or millions) of bitcoins for pennies!  That way, I'll be quite wealthy when the system recovers after a decade or so.

See, I KNOW for a FACT that bitcoin will NEVER drop below an exchange rate of 100 BTC per $0.01.  I KNOW this because, at that price I will buy every bitcoin I can find.  This creates a permanent floor at that exchange rate, and creates a scarcity such that if ANYONE else wants ANY bitcoins at all, they'll have to pay AT LEAST that much.  I'm pretty confident that there are others with more resources that are willing to do the same at a higher exchange rate.  Therefore, there will be competition for the scarce bitcoins, and the price WILL eventually rise again.

That's exactly why I don't believe that someone/group/government who controls hundreds of millions in mining gear would be irrational. Their incentives would simply align with the success of the network.


I don't know, honestly. It's something to ponder about, but I'm confident the community will come together, and mine altruistically. It aligns with our incentives, or else Bitcoin dies.

with an attack of this scale, the attackers might believe they are doing permanent damage. actually, that's the only way the attack makes sense: out-of-band incentives for miners, provided by attackers who are more interested in crushing bitcoin than profiting from it.

it seems like a long shot to me, but it's an interesting hypothetical to ponder. let's say they censor the chain so nobody could transact for a month---how would that affect user confidence and adoption? meanwhile, the proposed solution (a POW algo change) would destroy the mining infrastructure. billions of dollars in value in mining gear would be destroyed. after that, don't you think would-be miners would be very skeptical of risking capital on a new operation? not to mention that existing miners would be bankrupted. how secure (proof of work wise) do you think this new "bitcoin" will be?

Would you then say that whoever controls the large mining farms would start acting irrationally/collude to risk money/resources to attack the network, to do temporary damage?

that might cause hash rate to plummet and block times to become significantly longer. impatient people might start clamoring for an emergency difficulty adjustment, but a POW change? that wouldn't make sense.

even if the chinese government seized farms, miners, pools, chip fabrication factories, etc and performed sustained 51%/censorship attacks.....the electricity, overhead, and production costs would be real. they couldn't just sustain the attack indefinitely. so ideally there would still be no POW change---we could just let the attackers burn themselves out. i just hope that bitcoiners are patient enough to do that.

If mining farms don't have power or internet, then they won't be mining, leaving the rest of the world to continue the mining. Difficulty will go down a bit when that happens, but we'll just continue like normal.

I think the bigger Chinese crypto companies (exchanges, asic manufacturers) have offices in other countries for the purpose of avoiding government control.

But from his point of view, I was asking him if he believes that it would be rational to start clamoring for a POW-change.


The Chinese government could order to cut all electricity to all mining farms in their country immediately. Should we start clamoring for a POW-change?

why would they care about a leak? i assume the point of such an attack would be to crush confidence in bitcoin. a state-backed attack might shake peoples' confidence all the more.

bitcoin miners in china are fairly concentrated and there's no comparison in numbers to a popular protest movement. large mining farms and pools would be much easier to control.


i'd prefer to think we could just "wait out" an attack like this rather than hard forking.

It is kinda hard to hide something of that scale, in case a prominent member of the Chinese mining community such as Jihan Wu (or anyone else for that matter) is threatened with prison time. Something is going to leak out.

The governments know that, so they won't do anything like co-opting mining farms. They can't even contain some of their territories ... (HK protests, etc.)

PoW algo change is one of the last things to change, if it ever gets to that point.

Then do you truly believe that we should start clamoring for a POW-change? The Chinese government can do it anytime they want, you know.

Are you just trolling?

We're talking about a situation where the government is physically co-opting mining farms and threatening miners with prison time. Business concerns went out the window a long time ago...

IT IS irrational. Sacrificing the fundamental nature of their business, ending it, and all potential future profits by being corrupted is rational? Jihan Wu would be the first to call for a POW change if he saw it. Hahaha.

That's not irrational behavior given the circumstances.

In any case, you're conceding my point -- if we can't depend on miners to be honest, how can we have confidence in the system's ability to secure our money? Even if the community rallied around a hard fork, what is the basis for user confidence in the new (and much less secure POW-wise) fork? What is to stop this from happening again?

If you were a miner, and not just any small home hobby miner, but someone who has maybe at least 1% of the network OR otherwise has significant investments = such as renting a warehouse or other building and have a whole floor or shelf of equipment... and suppose you mined enough to pay all relevant bills, electricity mostly with some change leftover, or enough to make it worth your while ...

Would you do anything else that could possibly harm your source of income?

The ones I hear about, a lot of them are legit miners who don't want any attention, have basic physical security, and just mine quietly in their little buildings, paying all their bills, pretending to be some other type of business with almost no other social interaction. Just enough not to be noticed.

I don't really think that anybody would leave or divert or shift (whatever you call it) their mining power to any shit coins unless BTC's security becomes questionable and encounters the possible attacks OP started talking about. It's not just the 51% attack alone that could destroy BTC but the interest of miners is one another major consensus that could leave you, me and everyone empty handed as well as scratching our heads off if they ever decide to drop this Bitcoin thing right there because of their personal (possible) losses that they may face because of lower prices and not being able to even break even, and as many miners mine for economic gains too, if they see more profits while mining other 2 coins you talked about (and even any other coin they think to be the next Bitcoin and what not), it will literally do a lot of harm to the economy of BTC and may slide it down from its (1^st) position that it has been holding since a decade.

Someone could be shorting bitcoin, and to make sure that happens, they attack it. They'd have to spend an ungodly amount for the attack, keep it sustained, watch the price go down to whatever level they need it to go to, and profit.

In order to make it worth their while, they'd have to at least double what they spent on the attack, so we're looking at millions at stake.

POW change is very unlikely as currently this is the most secure it's ever been.

NO, that would show the Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and SV communities that the miners that accepted payment can be irrational, and can never be trusted. POW change, their attack would cost them everything.

I believe it might bring the Bitcoin community together again, maybe for a short time.

No, it was about a situation where incentives external to the protocol might override block rewards. All game theory assumes that miners will be rational.

Hypothetical situation: The Chinese government pays miners to attack the network, and threatens those who don't comply with prison time. Wouldn't it be rational for Chinese miners to engage in the attack? I think so...

That debate I can accept, and say "we can only leave it to the market, the miners, the users". But the assumption that the majority of fees will be moving to LN this year, no it won't.

Plus ask you yourselves, "Will miners, developers, and users truly leave Bitcoin for Bitcoin Cash or SV"?


The debate started from "the miners are stopped from being rational". If they continued to be rational, no problem.

Bitcoin's entire model is based on rationally incentivizing honest mining. This case would prove that the existing incentives are insufficient to actually achieve that. It would be a catastrophic blow to confidence in the system.

Do you really think we can just brick all existing mining hardware without consequences?

How would mitigating a direct catastrophic threat be an "ultimate failure" if the mitigation is what would actually save the network/protocol?

But, ultimately, I believe the threat/fear of a POW change will cause miners to sort themselves out. Their interests are tied directly to the network/protocol.

Such a POW change is not a cut and dried decision. To some, it would indicate the ultimate failure of Bitcoin's economic model. And ousting SHA256 miners would effectively pull the rug out from underneath the economy. A blockchain split would be inevitable and the security of the forked chain would be highly questionable.

It'd be interesting to see how that would play out, but it's not something I hope for. In that sense, maybe it's a good thing that local authorities are pressuring Sichuan miners to scale down.

Then that's where we might be underestimating the fact that the Bitcoin network/protocol is composed of people. I believe if there was that direct threat from the Chinese government, a POW change is in the discussion.

he just explained how:


the government threat is the reason why china's share of the hash rate is concerning. they could take control of all the major mining farms, pools, even the chip manufacturers.

i'm also paranoid about stuff like antbleed (the backdoor bitmain built into antminer firmware) which could play a role in this kind of theoretical attack.

OK. But first explain how a bad actor could off-set the potential wasted resources from a 51% attack, and would that it be better to profit through honest mining.

The mining operation would lose money, however a potential attacker would not be trying to be making money via mining, but rather would be trying to profit by harming bitcoin, or maybe would be trying to avoid losses by harming bitcoin.

A potential attacker would be one with a lot of resources, and a lot to lose if bitcoin were to succeed. A potential attacker could either buy up mining equipment, or if it was a government entity, could seize miners physically located within the country.

I already said it, that the Bitcoin network is composed of people. They would be wasting resources. POW change to hard fork the network away from bad acting miners would be strongly debated.

As PrimeNumber7 pointed out, they would be economically irrational with regard to Bitcoin's incentive system.

That doesn't rule out incentives external to Bitcoin. Let's say the Chinese government simply wanted to crush Bitcoin with a sustained 51% attack. They could systematically co-opt mining farms, threaten pool admins with imprisonment if they don't cooperate, etc.

Not that I think it would be successful long term -- I'm just pointing out a situation where a majority of miners might be incentivized to collude against the network. Indeed a POW change could eventually thwart the attack, but it's interesting to ponder what kind of damage they could do in terms of market confidence and adoption.

Any attack will be short lived. People will forget about it in a few days and only the affected parties will have something to complain about. Unless of course, the attack is done on a multitude of people or of such a scale that it affects entire groups or populations or accounts.

Again, anyone who actually gets to control 51% would much rather keep the coins mined honestly than risk losing it to some attack they're not sure will have any effect anyway. If I had 60% of bitcoin hashing power, I'd make it look like I had 6 different mining pools or something so no one else knows, and just keep the coins.

splitting millions of dollars into smaller sizes is so hard and it also needs to ge as many people involved as the victims. not only finding that many victims accepting such still large amounts is hard but also it means more legal action against the attacker. nowadays with all tracking that is done specially in exchanges it is not easy to get away with that kind of scam.

That "economically irrational attacker" would be wasting resources. The network is made of people, capable of coming to consensus if there was a direct threat.

What the troll said was that the miners could collude. But would they? They would be opening a strong debate for a POW change.

A potential attacker would need to act economically irrationally to successfully launch a 51% attack, when only looking at the attack in terms of bitcoin.

This means that bitcoin, or crypto in general would need to be an immediate threat to whoever is launching the attack. I don't see bitcoin being this much of a threat to any entity with the resources to pull off a 51% attack.

^^ the thing about  51% attack is that it can only be considered an attack and also be profitable if it is accompanied by an actual double spend otherwise just replacing an already mined block with a block the attacker mines has no benefits with the same exact transactions has no benefits.

when speaking of profit you first have to factor in the cost. and since the cost of 51% attack is in the millions of dollars the transaction that is being double spent must be worth millions of dollars.

now that we establishes the tx value we have to think of a trade that involves a transaction worth millions of dollars and the other party doesn't ask for a high number of confirmation such as at least 30. such trade does not exist in real world. nobody has ever made such a transaction and only accepted low number of confirmations ever.
with that kind of high confirmation requirement the cost of performing a successful 51% just shot up into billions of dollars instead.

Somewhere in the troll's post, is part of the answer on WHY anyone who can afford a 51% attack will never dare actually do it.

Plus he discounts the fact that, if an attack was indeed successful, the Bitcoin network is composed of people, the community. There will be damage, but it won't be "irreparable damage". Bitcoin has reached the stage that it can actually do "the honey badger don't care".

Newbies, learn about Bitcoin's basic incentive-structure.

The troll discounts the fact that miners/pools/ASIC-producers have a direct long term incentive for the success of the network.

Plus if they were truly colluded, the troll discounts the fact the Bitcoins is composed of people, who can be in consensus to fork the network away from anyone who tries to co-opt the network.

point is with even 1 pool the network would be relatively safe as the costs for attack would be significant for miners (who could just switch to another pool they make if it's the operator causing issues)

either way miners answer to the users via the market or they lose money they can't recover

Two colluding partners is difficult to maintain (since either partner can gain an advantage by first agreeing to collude and then operating outside the collusion).

More colluding partners is even more difficult to maintain.  There is more opportunity for a partner to operate outside the collusion, and more opportunity for the secret to leak.

Even if you could get 10 pools to collude without cheating on each other, there's nothing stopping me or anyone else from starting up another pool.

miners have sunk costs and depend on selling coins to cover the sunk costs

at equilibrium the coin rewards and costs are nearly equal, forcing sale of majority of coins

by selling coins miners depend on the users on the market to give them value

if coin owners don't like what miners are doing, they can sell the coins costing miners money so miners are unable to cover sunk costs

miner abuse could easily cause a fork via algorithm change or user activated forks

then coin owners can sell only on specific forks to effectively
1. crash the security of that chain
2. profitability of miners on that chain (i.e. losses)
3. crash value of every owner of coins on that chain (exodus)

Big difference in 25 coins/block worth $7000 each and 25 coins/block worth $1 each

miners answer to users, both depend on each other.

https://i.imgur.com/eDY9gGY.png

If the pool operators collude...

Why won't the pool participants just leave the pool and join some other pool?

I've seen some miners or entities approach 51%. They need much more than 51%.. or 50% + 1. It has to be sustained too. I'm not talking about PoS, we are talking about miners, proof of stake was never in the discussion. I'm not confused.

I've yet to see any miner or group of miners or government even attempt to try to do 51% (or more, as needed). You say it's so easy, but why haven't they done it? There's also a lot of bureaucracy involved.

As for vendors, if they just wait 10 seconds after they first see the transaction and then check the transaction in question, they can determine if a double spend is likely or not. Part of that would be to not immediately accept if RBF was used.

That video is mostly false propaganda, but I stopped watching after about 20 seconds when they started using the usual "bad" words to describe bitcoin. Waste of time to watch the rest of it. The first few comments says a lot already.

Uhm I mean, why would fiat become worth 0 when Crypo space goes down? Like Fiat is a seperate market system from cryptospace though? Plus, BTC plummeting to zero doesn't necesarily mean that Altcoins would also follow, though the possibility of them following is high, it isn't a 100%. Plus, if what you were to say DOES happen ( in which I case I doubt it is) that everything goes to zero, the world would go back to the bartering system of the old age, where no currency was upheld between trading parties.

Plus, starting from the initial idea, it is plainly a worthless and wasteful endeavor for the part of whoever is gonna lead the attack through using miners. I mean, that is over 51% of the mining network, who would spend an astronomous amount to do that. And if it does happen, the guy or group doesn't even take profit in there since they are pretty much crashing the BTC market.

First, a large entity or government would need much more than just 51% of the network. They'd need at least maybe 70% or 80% of the network hash power, sustained at that rate for several hours or days.

And the most they could do is a double spend ... any sufficiently large private organization would be more interested in how it can benefit them, and I don't see how else than to just mine bitcoins honestly and normally and receive a few hundred coins a day as they get the block rewards.

50% of the network implies they get 50% of the block rewards in a day, so that means 72 blocks * 12.5 BTC = 900 BTC per day.

I think a private company would do much better to simply keep $6 million dollars a day a secret, rather than try to do anything else and fail at making any profit. Unless it's controlled by some crazy dude who doesn't care about the money.

For the first part of question, a random group of miners CAN collude but only at the expense of rendering their expensive hardware meaningless. A credible threat in this direction is from Bitmain due to their pro-BCH stance. They are the only entity with an alternate network to bet on, in case they try to attack Bitcoin. That scenario is gradually getting implausible due to the ongoing diversification of mining hardware.

If you consider the threat from a nation-state, there isn't a way to do this covertly. It'll be open war and grant legitimacy to bitcoiners stand that Governments are afraid of the money properties that Bitcoin has. It'll only make people want more of it.  Why would they do it?

Still, Let us assume they people actually begin questioning the Fed and Govts over legitimacy of their monopoly on money supply. They grow tired of being constantly questioned and decide to demonstrate that bitcoin is not the answer. They will need to show it to be insecure with a double spend/ bug. This is all that needs to be done:

• Secretly takeover mining operations in China while opening up fast connections bypassing the Great firewall. Doing it anywhere outside China would take away any chance of doing this covertly.
• Whisking away all the core devs to a secret location in a way that nobody knows something is amiss...ooohh..
• Build up 65-75% of network hashrate without anyone getting to know it. This can include seized miners hardware that has been custom made in some super-secret lab. Keep in mind that the sudden surge in hashrate from the second case will be a noticeable event.
• Now that they have the hashpower, what do they do? How do they show that it is not an "attack" but a bug? How do they let all the full nodes accept their "buggy"/ "double spend" transactions without letting it be known that it is a fork.

Whatever they do next is a noticeable event, assuming that it hasn't already been caught. This is where the full nodes and the independent miners come into picture. It'll be a flurry of maddening activity with internet restrictions and cypherpunks revving up their judgement day radios to broadcast messages to each other about potential fightback. It'd be a glorious few days and in the end, they would have only proven bitcoin right.

Even if the pools work together to ruin the whole network, why should they initially carry out such an attack on the bitcoin? It would ruin their own company or the profits they were gaining all these days mining bitcoin. For instance, Ghash once had 51% of the total hashrate, but they requested the miners to move onto other pools making the network decentralized again. Same goes for the Bitmain and its hashrate as well. They made over $4 billion in profits in 2017 through mining and selling of ASIC chips and if they were to attack the network, it would ruin their future business completely.

Checkpoints were one such thing which could prevent 51% attack to happen, but they were removed citing they created unnecessary confusions and I agree to that. They were introduced in code to prevent DOS attacks and were not meant to prevent 51% attacks on the network. But if some mining company/pool in future tend to involve in such an attack, developers would write a new code and insist miners to run that. As ranochigo pointed out, 51% is basically making fake transactions to get accepted by the network and if the node has sensed a fake transaction/double spend it would make the subsequent blocks as invalid I guess.

It would be a VERY EXPENSIVE attack, with very little to gain.  In most cases, they'd gain more value by using all that hash power to mine honestly than by attacking the network.


Again, it would be very expensive, and wouldn't gain them much.  Nation states have better things to spend their money on.  That being said, there aren't many Nation States that have more than 50% of the global hash power within their own borders.


Bitcoin has a built in incentive structure to discourage collusion to attack.  If this incentive structure works, then Bitcoin is a success.  If this incentive structure does not work, then Bitcoin is a failure.  After more than a decade of operation, so far, Bitcoin is a success. Only time will tell if that remains true.

But if BTC is the Global Reserve for all Cryptos , Wouldn't that hinder the entire crypto space? If i took down BTC value and made it plummet to 0 , all the other alt coins would follow , and if this does happen , then everything is worth 0 in fiat and 0 in BTC value because BTC no longer has value correct? If all of the money were to leave the ecosystem , then everything goes to 0 right?


I'm assuming at this point , that they would move to something that allows for ASICs for SHA-256...? But if Nation states were to extort or try to kill miners , we would be screwed if they managed to take over the network.


Well if BTC is the digital gold standard by which all other Cryptos are backed by (Assuming DCR / BTC value) , It would make everything else plummet... in fiat and BTC value because they no longer have value thus nation states or governments which may have an interest in destroying the world of crypto (and the trustless nature of it) and bring on their centralized shitcoins that they control , maybe backed by gold or fiat money?

Economical rationality ?

The cost and the total available hardware.
The cost might not be a huge problem for a state but after the attack, what will they do to those ASICs that they've used for the attack?
But before that, where will they get the necessary hardware to gain 51%+ of the current network hashrate? Produce their own?

(They will be needing more than half of the current hashrate since their own hash power will be added to the total).

---

Forcing the Pools (not the miners) is more effective and cheaper than than "setting up their own farm" but a lot harder to pull off.

Nothing. They can attack the network by mining on the same fork. The attackers just need to be in agreement.

Nothing that they can do. With 51% attacks, you can't change the network rules. You would mainly only affect the transaction's confirmation and the ability to double spend.
It'll be pretty screwed. If BTC somehow gets attacked, the main damage would probably be done with the first double spend. Subsequently, people would probably realise that it is under attack and people would switch to another coin which has a different algorithm. This could render the attack pretty useless but it'll still cripple bitcoin.

If a few miners were to control a majority of the hash rate (say over 51% of the network)

What would stop them from colluding and trying to 51% attack the network?

What if the nation states try to stop Bitcoin by setting up their own farms and forcing the miners to adhere to their rules otherwise face death?

Is there a backup plan for if Bitcoin goes down due to collusion? Or is BTC screwed?

Thanks guys.