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How would a secret chain even get 1000 blocks ahead? There's zero probability of this happening over that long of a period of time while there's almost 400 exahash behind the main Bitcoin chain. The compute and energy just doesn't exist in the world to do that.
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Nice and Kind Vic 2y ago

I agree it goes against standard game theory.

Bitcoin is still not using enough global energy to prevent this from happening. The likelihood of this happening is very tiny, but in general contingent on production of mining units and having a decent idea on where those units have shipped and active

Assume an unknown pool has previously participated in known pools but gradually retracted their hash and focused on this shadow chain specifically to cause disruption. This would of course require collusion with a state actor that can fund this type of waste for a >50% of global hash to catch and exceed the active chain.

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nobody 2y ago

The incentives just don't make sense to do that though. If you have enough energy and hardware to meaningfully overtake the main chain for a brief time you'd make far more money just mining Bitcoin.

There's no government in the world that would spend billions and billions of dollars to do that. It would also be the biggest advertisement for Bitcoin in it's history. "Governments are so scared of Bitcoin that they'd rather spend tens of billions of dollars to attack it than feed their citizens." Everyone Bitcoiners and non-Bitcoiners would revolt at that kind of waste.

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Nice and Kind Vic 2y ago

I live in the United States and the government here routinely spends money to wage wars around the world. Cost is not a consideration if the ends are achieved.

If the intent is purely to cause chaos and doubt they could achieve this.

I dont think it would happen, but curious what people think they would do.

For me I would certainly want more block confirmations until the cause/culprit(s) identified. I would also consider it an attack if it was shadow mined and wouldnt be opposed to marking their block as invalid.

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nobody 2y ago

I live in the states too. People are already in a tizzy about not being able to afford rising rents, grocery bills, and healthcare costs, student debts, etc.

Can you imagine the utter shitstorm it would cause if the US government announced a concerted effort to spend $50billion+ to attack BITCOIN? Lmao it would be epic. There'd be guillotines out in front of the capital within the day.