I think if the US, China, Russia or India, at the scale of these economies and state power, undertook a concerted attack, they could make serious trouble.
I'm not saying bitcoin wouldn't adjust and survive the attack. But they could inflict serious pain on the ecosystem, at the very least.
What doesn’t kill us…
Meh, â‚¿ring it.
Seems that realistically, any entity capable of deploying a coordinated attack of more than 158PFLOPS (with some assumptions, 280PFLOPS ~= ~355.57EH/s) so 51% of the hash power of the entire network as of May 6, 2023 can successfully launch such an attack.
That’s a LOT of countries.
In fact it includes quite a few private companies with non distributed compute like IBM(who would’ve thought):
https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/
After rubbing these numbers, the network is less secure than most think and MUCH less secure than I think.
But I guess it’s more realistic to do a relative comparison of what it takes to topple the current world reserve currency vs BTC 🤔
Assumptions + slightly in depth discussion on those: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50720.0
Attacks don't have to be hashpower attacks. They could be cyberattacks on miners. Bans. Etc.
Yep agree, I was just curious specifically about the 51% attack
I think the possibility of a 51% attack is quite overblown.
There are far more cost effective ways for a state actor to screw with bitcoin than trying to mount a 51% attack.
I was specifically addressing that one concern, which Andreas articulated far better than I can in under two minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM
Yep the rough math in the thread disproves what’s he’s speaking.
He’s talking specifically about malicious attacks by gaining majority compute.
For sure. Although the distinction then becomes attacks affecting accessibility(or network security by way of) v/s malicious ones affecting the state of the chain.
One would likely be more devastating, at least in the short term.
One major thing I point out to people when they insist that bitcoin is the most antifragile thing ever, is the substrate that it's sitting on top of -- the internet -- is not. There's often a lot of attention on the consolidation on platforms like Google, Facebook and Apple. But not much attention on the consolidation of network operators -- ISPs, backbone providers -- and on the fact everyone has moved almost all hosting of the entire internet into three cloud providers.
If I became a hypothetical dictator of the US, and I wanted to seize control of the entire U.S. internet, I basically have less then ten doors to go knock down.
Which is why I think this sense of invincibility people have vis-a-vis the state is a little bit over-wrought.
Which is one reason (among many) that I think those people who think the way forward is political disengagement, and a confident belief that the system is going to collapse in a way that will be positive for them, is a product of people living a little bit too much in narrative bubbles.
That’s a pretty easy easy(& well put) way of explaining the anti fragility of BTC, esp without going into numbers & most would understand!
