Topic: why wouldnt a government create its own asic to 51% bitcoin? - page 2. (Read 1728 times)

yeah thats kinda what led me to post this tread.

bitcoin is still in its infancy and is fairly vulnerable at this point. and i want bitcoin to succeed.

so they build it enough to be 70% or some other figure that allows them to rebuild the chain from 20 or 30 blocks back. it allows them to blacklist transactions, reverse transactions (with enough hashpower they can rebuild the blockchain back 10 or 20  or whatever blocks, nullifying any transactions they want in that time frame).

point would be to have people lose faith in bitcoin. if no transaction can be guaranteed until days/weeks later because the government mine can roll it back that far who will trust it?

Exactly mate. Although Governments do not have a good record of making correct judgements on such things.

There are at least two schools of thought that say roughly the attack you describe is already in progress.

bitcoin cash could be the Chinese govt's attempt and bitcoin segwit the USG's

for now that is correct.

at some point things may indeed be priced in bitcoin, at the moment its to volatile so once its settles down that could happen.

at that point fiat is in trouble. the time for a government worried enough about that to happen is to destroy crypto now (well, soonish). 

the government that tries to attack bitcoin by gaining enough percentage of the hashrate to make it useless (my premise in the op) is not trying to make its own crypto, it is to destroy crypto in general by proving it unreliable. thus keeping their national currency as the only option.

Whilst people still talk about bitcoin in terms of dollars, and how its going to make them rich, its not a threat to fiat. Its when people start valuing things in bitcoin that fiat will be at risk. The dollar remains the "gold standard".

heh. been in bitcoin since 2011. its already more or less regulated here in the usa; I claim it on my taxes.

quite happy with crypto, its paid for many vacations and toys over the years. i want to to prosper.

and the object for such a government doing such a thing is to destroy bitcoin (and thus by trickle down theory other crypto), not make its own blockchain based currency. bitcoin and crypto as it exists now can be a threat to (some) governments based fiat.

Instead on making this kind of attack or plans on destroying on Bitcoin, russia have been decided to go in mining field which is really a nice thing and about on the 51% attack on bitcoin wont really be sufficient enough considering on the hashrate its too big and even government do have the power i dont think they will jump in to this aims or goals on controlling or blocking bitcoin. Its not possible its soo damn vast.

the goal of such a plan is to destroy faith in crypto, not approve it. thus preserving the existing fiat currency.

destroy crypto from the inside so to speak.

There still seem to be a lot of misconceptions about the misnomer that is the 51% attack.  You do not necessarily need 51% of the hashrate to carry one out.  But at the same time, the infinitesimally small benefits gleaned from it, compared to the enormous effort required to successfully perform such an attack on Bitcoin (altcoins with considerably less hashrate are another matter entirely), generally don't make it worthwhile.  If an attacker were successful, they could, for a very short period of time, block or double-spend transactions.  But only until the rest of the network noticed that happening, then immediately forking away to a new algorithm as a result.  The attacker would have to start again, which gets costly with so much hashing power involved.  It would only be a temporary hiccup.

Maybe 3 or more years ago, this attack method might have been viable, but I think we're well beyond that point now.  I'd be prepared to revisit that assessment if someone managed to devise something an order of magnitude more powerful than ASICs and also managed to keep it to themselves, though.  Technology should never be underestimated.

For altcoins that don't have the same sort of hashing power behind them, however, it's a different story.  When it's easier to obtain the lower thresholds of hashrate required to interfere with less secure chains, the attack can be carried out more often and more cheaply, causing a continued and harassing nuisance that it may not be possible to recover from if the attacker is sufficiently determined.  But seemingly it's still not that common an occurrence despite the relative ease.  Again, this is likely due to limited incentives, with the ability to block transactions and double-spend really not being all that appealing in the grand scheme of things.

But as per my knowledge, in recently have some rumor about Russia government has spend $100 million for support community miner Bitcoin in their country for compete miner in China. This is positive signal about government in some country still interested Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

Yes, the bitcoin market is really huge. Its market capitalization reaches billions of dollars. No one is able to dominate the entire bitcoin market, the rise of bitcoin is due to the demand of the market, which is something we can not stop.

Realistically if a government REALLY wanted to take away our coins they could, they would just arrest you and torture you for the private key. Thats why some level of constitutional protection is a good thing.

Having said that this is all theoretical. I very much doubt that this would happen.

It would be stupid for anyone to try and get control of bitcoin.  Once that happened, it would no longer be of value to people because they know they can be screwed out of their money if they use it. If people aren't using bitcoin, it's of no value to the 51% people either.

I don't really know what to say to your mindset either you don't own Bitcoins or simply say you know nothing op. If government were to do that, it would be regulated and one would have to pay taxes, what's the point of using such thing. Then again government would have full record of this and it would be suicidal to use it, what if they suspected you of cheat and they could take away all your coins.

Your logic relies on the public losing faith in cryptocurrencies just because a government has over 51% of hashrate.

However, having 51% of hashrate certainly does not mean you can destroy the network.  An attacker can only reverse their own transactions or prevent new transactions from being confirmed.  All of people's transactions with a reasonable number of confirmations would be perfectly fine.

If a government wanted to break consensus rules, they couldn't do that either.  They'd have to fork off while the ordinary BTC users stayed on the minority chain.
I agree.  That would pretty much destroy clearnet use and the darknet wouldn't even have much faith after the price drop.

That's right. The price of the national currency would fall down towards other currencies and became cheaper and cheaper. Add to that nobody can even predict that this insider would be popular among citizens. And only the demand is that instrument that make the price of the new crypto-currency. What if people would prefer to stay with expansive Bitcoin rather to move on cheap national crypto? Too many if.

The same reason why they cannot stop bitcoin because when they do that, then their currency will be limited to their own country which will not be valuable for international trade in which we all know play a dominant role in the development of any country. Aside that going that route would then mean that government is approving crypto currency which might therefore means overhauling the whole financial system. Also, the next issue of concern would be the privacy in which majority of the already exposed to bitcoin will not trade for anything else.

Yes this is spot on.

For me the main risk is that so much of the network is under the jurisdiction of one government. I would like to see the spread more decentralised across countries.