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I must say. After watching the latest citadel dispatch I'm a little freaked out. And not meaning a citadel/rabbit hole "freak"., But truly concerned.

The Blockchain seems much more fragile than what I thought. I always thought that Bitcoin is so robust, nothing can stop it or corrupt it. But holy fuck. Now I know about "selfish blocks", spying blocks. All this "out of bounds" bullshit. And there was talk of viabtc potentially in cahoots with antpool. What if foundry was in cahoots with another pool? They have over 30% (or more). Could they coordinate an attack with just another pool and create a largest Blockchain count that can't be re-allocated? And suddenly double spend or spend Satoshi coins corruptly?

Granted I'm just an idiot. And I don't know all the nuances about this. But I'm concerned that our beloved Bitcoin (with capital B) might not be as robust as I assumed.

I would love for someone to enlighten me so that I can sleep well at night.

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Discussion

Zach⚡️ 2y ago

Go watch some trader university videos. He does great breakdowns on each of those topics which will give you a better understanding of why those scenarios both won’t play out, and also are practical and wouldn’t impact Bitcoin long term

As for the Satoshi coins specifically, even with 100% of the miners you still need the private key to produce valid transactions which nodes would accept. Blocks with invalid transactions (not double spends of legitimate transactions but actually fraudulent transactions) would be rejected and ASIC power would have then gone to waste

Zach⚡️ 2y ago

Pools are also aggregated collections of many individual miners which are physically dispersed and not centrally managed. If a pool becomes a bad actor, physical miners can instantly redirect their hash to a new pool and move off of the old one. This incentivizes pools to do the right thing and has been a consequence in the past for pools which do things the miners don’t approve of

Brent 2y ago

I have 156 miners on Luxor pool. I don't understand what you mean that miners will instantly change pools if they see a bad actor. My miners just run blindly. And I assume the pool is doing right.

But I will watch the video sent recently and see if it covers my concern.

eb83184c... 2y ago

Its bad phraseology. The point is that people watch blocks being built quite a bit, and if there was a trend of unhealthy blocks being produced (like the statistic available in mempool.space) then people would figure that out very quickly. From there, its up to you to redirect hashing power to a different pool, with the knowledge that if you don't you are losing transaction fees from censored transactions. Redeploying your equipment to a different pool is a lot easier and fast than dealing with something like, staked ETH.

Zach⚡️ 2y ago

I haven’t listened to the latest citadel dispatch, but I’ll go check it out

Zach⚡️ 2y ago

Here’s a 7 year old video which explains most of your concerns and obviously has some merit due to Bitcoin functioning without issues over all the time since it was posted

https://youtu.be/ncPyMUfNyVM

Brent 2y ago

Oh yeah, I've seen that video before.

Not exactly covering the scenarios discussed in the citadel dispatch.

Thanks for video though. That video is actually part of my previous assumption that Bitcoin is so robust.

Brent 2y ago

What would be nice...

Get rid of "out of bound" transactions

Get more diversity in pools. Maybe somekind of open source co-op pool for miners.