Not defending the Monero bros shitcoin, but it’s important to recognise that the same thing is possible to happen to Bitcoin *today* as well. Most Bitcoiners simply don’t realise 51% attack is possible even without 51% of the hashrate. Foundry can do it. AntPool can do it. They just haven’t decided to go that route.
Discussion
On one hand they have different incentives not to do it.
On the other hand is too expensive
And third its what Andreas said 10 years ago ... so not that easy with Bitcoin.
Incentives change. Companies have incentives to protect their commercial interests, but they cave to governments to put backdoors in their software to spy on their customers. Large public miners/pools can be pressured into doing things that are against their interests. We see this playing out in real time. Also, Andreas was wrong 10 years ago, but he didn’t have the whole picture back then. Mining has become absurdly centralised since then.
And we have the means to decentralize mining.
I don't think Andras was wrong.
Yes, we have now, but Datum is a relatively new tool, Bitaxe too. Things are slowly improving imo, but we have miles to go. It’s good to stay humble and acknowledge that what is happening to the shitcoin bros could happen to us if we stay complacent. Their loss is not a win for us. It’s a cautionary tale.
Bitcoiners verify and all those things just show how Bitcoiners think ahead and take actions to try mitigate any risks. We have acked it long ago as a risk but we also need to be real about it. Monero hashrate has been 4.99 GH/s at the period of attack (I know they use CPUs ..). I run 1000GH/s on my Bitaxe Gamma. Bitcoin hashrate is 950 EH/s which of course has its cost.
This adds a perspective on our conversation. I found it interesting (link is below the picture)
A few thoughts on this in no particular order:
- pools don’t directly own/control their hardware and hash rate, so it would require prolonged collusion among their participating miners
- the cost would be prohibitively astronomical even if they somehow convinced their miners to participate
- the incentives just don’t line up at all
- it’s good/necessary to practice adversarial thinking, while also important to be mindful of reality when doing so
This works in theory, but reality doesn’t back it up. Case in point: miners not redirecting hashrate despite clear forensic evidence that most of the smaller pools in the top 10 are just AntPool proxies - meaning a handful of people control what goes into 70% of mined blocks. On top of that, we’ve seen miners stick with pools even when those operators are actively attacking Bitcoin (spamming the chain and bloating the UTXO set). And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve got yet another example: miners refusing to switch pools even when they could earn 10–20% more in rewards, like with Ocean. In short, theory tells us one thing, but the actual behavior of miners (or should I say hashers?) keeps proving the opposite.
Clearly you’re the expert here. We should all just give up. Bitcoin is dead.
That’s not what I’m saying.