If by “disrupting mining” you mean making every single miner insanely profitable and capable of building more hash/infrastructure, then I suppose you’d succeed. It would be annoying for those who had planned on low fees, but it would be a net benefit to the network.
Discussion
By disrupt mining I was just referring to the theoretical attack where a state actor prints an unreasonable amount of money to buy mining hardware and 51% attack to stall mining. Seems like that would be much harder and more expensive than tx washing.
To me attack is interesting because it’s the extreme example of inscriptions: they are spending an insane amount on fees to outbid standard transactions. If they found a sustainable way to do this, bitcoin would become useless as a way to transfer value. Although it seems at this rate they are more likely to go broke.
The great thing about Bitcoin fees is that they are native to the network and denominated in Bitcoin, so there isn’t a true sustainable way to permanently pay for blockspace. You could have a stack as big as Saylors, and you’d still be eventually outbid and run out of Bitcoin to waste.
was just thinking this.
Honestly, the crazies inscribers were spending 7btc/block to clog the chain, and still it was perfectly usable if you were prepared, meaning already onboarded on LN or rich enough lol
7 BTC / block is 300000000 millions usd /day, even for a state it’s not cheap to spend 1 Billion every 3 days, for something as meaningless as Bitcoin (for them).
The most (rightfully) frightened politician right now, is the awful Warren and she doesn’t grasp the basis of Bitcoin yet.
Yes, that would be really hard. Pretty much impossible for all but 3(ish) countries, and soon to be zero.
If they want to short term clog the network, it would make more sense to print money to pay fees, but that’s functionally just printing money to buy Bitcoin with extra steps. We would be really close to winning if they tried something like that, and the hash rate would explode upwards.
I think they might’ve already figured out that it’s in their interest to hold Bitcoin instead of playing these silly games. The US had said they were going to sell all their Bitcoin last year, but that never happened.
Also, the state attacks things in much more subtle ways. “Divide and conquer” type strategies and psychological operations. We’re yet to see if those could be effective. I could see them trying to create two competing camps within Bitcoin, maybe “custodial holders” versus “sovereign holders” or something like that.
It’s easier for the government to buy a billion $5 wrenches.