Shmadz, BJA: to comment on double spend risks. You both seem to have missed some details.
If you have 75% of the hashrate, your success rate with double-spends is 100%, since you are guaranteed to be building the longest chain. Sure, 25% of the blocks will not be built by you, but you have the power to discard those from the blockchain. I'd guess a double-spend in this kind of scenario would probably be best achieved by willingly orphaning the blocks containing the tx you want to re-spend. So the situation, if you assume Chinese miners are all in collusion, is actually worse than BJA is saying.
OTOH, honest miners aren't the only protection against double spends. simple race attacks can be detected by any sufficiently connected node. That won't help against dishonest miners, but the kind of attack a majority miner could pull off seems pretty problematic in terms of financial gains. The attack would be detected too quickly for the miner to exchange their BTC for other assets and take delivery of said assets, so any profits would be counted in BTC. And what do yout think happens to the BTC price if a majority miner goes rogue?
Yeah, but China has ~75% hashpower, not 50%. winning three bets in a row with 75% odds is a 42% chance, a heluva lot higher than 6.25%
If you have 75% of the hashrate, your success rate with double-spends is 100%, since you are guaranteed to be building the longest chain. Sure, 25% of the blocks will not be built by you, but you have the power to discard those from the blockchain. I'd guess a double-spend in this kind of scenario would probably be best achieved by willingly orphaning the blocks containing the tx you want to re-spend. So the situation, if you assume Chinese miners are all in collusion, is actually worse than BJA is saying.
OTOH, honest miners aren't the only protection against double spends. simple race attacks can be detected by any sufficiently connected node. That won't help against dishonest miners, but the kind of attack a majority miner could pull off seems pretty problematic in terms of financial gains. The attack would be detected too quickly for the miner to exchange their BTC for other assets and take delivery of said assets, so any profits would be counted in BTC. And what do yout think happens to the BTC price if a majority miner goes rogue?
I'm not suggesting miners are or could be or want to collude. It's in their best interest not to do that unless...they are coerced by the government, Communist Party or central bank. My concern is that 75% hashpower in the same POLITICAL jurisdiction (not where most people live) threatens censorship resistance.
Nothing anyone has said changes that.
I know the U.S. has suppressed voices of dissent, but in modern times we've had nothing like the Tienanmen Square Massacre. There are levels of Statist evil. Still, I don't want to defend myself or my country, both of whom merit legitimate criticism because it changes the subject.
The issue, no matter how badly everyone wants to ignore it is the Bitcoin is centralized now, not in a way we predicted or worried about, but centralized all the same. I would have the same objection if mining was concentrated here, but probably not as strongly. Mining cannot be concentrated in ANY one political boundary without compromising censorship resistance.
If we can at least agree on that, we can talk about what to do about it, but ignoring it, changing the subject, making personal attacks is not constructive. This is a real problem.
Scmadz seems to think I'm an agent or something, but i usually don't respond to ridiculous attacks. This one has been repeated many times, so no Dude. It's still me.
LOL
