- Some US government agency publishes “bad bitcoin address” list - this is initially a list of addresses of clearly evil people, like ransomware attackers.
- The new law is passed, requiring all US-based bitcoin firms to refuse any transactions that derive, in whole or in part, from “bad bitcoin” list. And KYC laws require passing identities of people who use “bad bitcoins” to FBI. All exchanges have to follow that rule or be fined.
- This will kill things like mixers (who wants a part of “bad bitcoin”), anonymous exchanges (if you receive money from stranger and it was “bad bitcoin”, FBI will visit you if it ever touches a legal exchange. Not a very pleasant situation).
- This will be US only, but it will propagate to other countries. Let’s say you are in Russia, and you are accepting bitcoins. At some moment in the future, you may want to buy a new iPhone using all those coins. But if they are on “bad bitcoin” list, you won’t be able to do so! So it makes a fill economic sense to refuse bad bitcoins, or maybe accept them at a heavy discount.
- Big players, such as investment funds or major payment processors, are almost unaffected. After all, only 0.001% of bitcoins are bad, and losing a few potential customers due to regulations is common in financial industry.
- Eventually everyone gets used to “bad bitcoin” system, and the US starts putting more addresses in it. “Terrorist activities”, “embargoed countries” and so on.
And that’s how US can get a fair amount of control over bitcoins, and without having to buy entire thing out!
1. Destroying bitcoin as a free market network would put the final nail in the coffin of crypto as an alternative to fiat.
2. They would have no obligation to buy bitcoin from anyone they don't like.
3. They can funnel a lot of wealth to the elites who own the lion's share of the bitcoin.
4. They're just printing the money. The cost to the government is zero. In fact, a 51% attack is probably cheaper than the bureaucracy required for a complex legislative effort and worldwide enforcement. Not that cheaper has any sensible meaning when you have a money printer in your basement, LOL.
5. This involves no messy legislation, no courts, at most a special purpose vehicle or two. The Fed can take it from there with their own "private" resources.
6. The bitcoin network has no legal protection against a 51% attack like this, there is no legal obligation for a miner to process any particular transaction they don't like.
At best, a 51% attack allows double spending a few transactions while destroying the miner’s business.
The FBI wants to interact with and attack the 200M+ people that will eventually hold "dirty bitcoin"? Much of whom are non-KYC holders? Good luck accomplishing that with a limited budget and man power.
People may want to participate in mixing, but then they won’t be able to get their money back in the US. It is that simple. Imagine a future where almost everyone has a Paypal(tm) Bitcoin app on their phone. And here is a bitcoin dev who has mixed all of their money. They just had a pizza with their non-technical friend, and the friend asks “Can you send me you portion of the bill? Thanks! Ugh, my phone is not accepting your payment, something about dirty money error.. Can’t you send me some normal bitcoin”? There will be no convicing that non-technical person of the problem with the “bad list”, the do not care.
In other words, you are going to have 46M people who just want bitcoin to work and don’t care about “bad bitcoin” list (US non-technical population), maybe 0.1M of principled bitcoin holders and dev who are against the mix, and 150M+ people in other countries who simply don’t care.
The government is happy because their fiat monetary system is secure from any threat crypto poses, bitcoiners are happy because the Fed buys their bitcoin for fiat at a good rate, the miners are happy because they got to sell their assets to the Fed for a sweet pile of fiat.
The only people crying is the middle class who bears the burden of all this currency debasement. I think we have more empirical data than we'd ever need to predict that nobody who matters politically cares about the tears of the middle class.
The Fed can do this by launching their own bitcoin exchange and then dominating the mining of blocks on the blockchain (AKA a 51% attack). They can then prevent any other miners from being able to mine blocks, and they can configure their own miners to only accept transactions which are depositing bitcoin into the own exchange's wallet.
At this point nobody can sell bitcoin to anyone other than the Fed's exchange, at any price, because the transaction will not be recorded in the blockchain. The Fed can now set the exchange rate to whatever they want, and they can pay for the bitcoin they exchange with whatever instrument they want. They can run the money printer to buy your bitcoin with USD, they can make you accept US treasuries at a certain price, whatever makes the most sense for their balance sheet. Your alternative is to HODL and never be able to sell your coins.
the network is only global and decentralized to the extent that the miners operate with a profit motive. The government that prints the world's reserve currency can afford to print more money than honest miners can afford to lose. Game over.
To put it another way, consider that the Fed prints money to rig the entire treasury bond market and fix interest rates. Buying up 80% of the mining companies and ASICs in the world is not even a rounding error in comparison.
A 51% is not only useful for double spending, it can also be used for un-spending. The Fed would use their hash power advantage to roll back transactions they don't like (this would be any transaction that didn't originate in their own crypto exchange). This puts all the non-Fed miners out of business.
The icing on the cake is that the Fed can use its 51% attack to force Americans owning BTC to sell to them (as they won't be able to sell a bitcoin to anyone else at any price). This ensures that all that money they print goes right back into the US economy, it's just effectively an asset swap like quantitative easing. They can easily sell this to congress for its economic stimulus value.
I see the issue here, you think the endgame is for bitcoiners is to own more fiat. That is not the goal, fiat is dead to most bitcoiners, they will hold until fiats currencies implode like they constantly do.
You seem to think the choice of money originates with banks or governments, it doesnt. The primary form of money is chosen by the masses. Good luck stopping billions of people that choose to opt out of bad money.
So what are bitcoiners gonna do if Paypal and VISA add “pay with bitcoin” option and give it to billions of users? It would be a nice and simple interface that is easy to use but that complies with “bad bitcoin” list.
For every hardcore bitcoiner who is waiting for fiat to implode, there would be 1000 laypeople who do not care but they bought some bitcoins because TV said so. And all of those laypeople will be forced to comply with “bad bitcoin” list.
So now let’s say you have a bitcoin business. You can accept “good bitcoins” that you can send to billions of people, or “bad bitcoins” which you can only send to hardcore bitcoin enthusiasts, 0.1% of population. Is there any economic sense to accept “bad bitcoins”?
Central banks are more fragile than the Bitcoin network and they definitely don't have the support of the masses. I expect they would lose a lot more than just money in this attack.
Bitcoiners would love to pull these institutions out of the shadows and I don't think central banks survive when exposed to sunlight. Just a small community of coders caught wind of how CBs operate and constructed powerful platforms to carry out large scale speculative attacks on them. Imagine what happens when a few billion people understand how CBs operate... their days are numbered.
They would fork Bitcoin and the Fed would burn a ton of money with very little to show for it. The miners they bribed would pile into the non-Fed controlled fork using the Fed funds they received. The network may actually grow after this kind of attack is successfully sidestepped purely from the Streisand Effect and the corrective action proving what people theorized about the difficulty of censoring the bitcoin network.
When one actor has a money printer they can use the permissionless, decentralized nature of the bitcoin network as a weapon. It's a vulnerability they can exploit.
As long as governments debase the currency to carry out this attack, they are also continuously creating more reasons for variations of Bitcoin to exist.
Bitcoin is the ultimate fiat in that it's not backed by anything tangible. The bitcoiners will say that the intrinsic value of bitcoin lies in the value the network provides, eg. facilitating uncensorable, permissionless transfers across borders. It is definitely not a given that a new coin without this utility will be a success. I'd bet against it given the history of altcoins that have attempted to do it.
This is completely compatible with the bitcoin network, any miner can do that today without forking the chain. However, if the Fed had say 85% of all hash power it would be extremely expensive for any other miner to mine a block, so the Fed would gain complete control over the network over time.
Now consider that any investor who owns bitcoin can't sell it, because they can't get the transaction onto the blockchain. What is the market value of bitcoin? It's exactly zero.
Bitcoin is taken down. No follow-up work required.
This is something the Fed does all the time, this is exactly how they distort the economy to set interest rates and bond yields. They have been 51% attacking the bond markets for decades, and all the bond shorts who thought "they can't possibly keep printing at this rate" lost their shirts.
I disagree with the 2nd part too, the idea that the Fed does anything tech related with a higher level of competency than the private sector has not been proven to me.
The idea that a centralized closed network that's severely hampered by operating restrictions can beat a well designed adaptable open network in the long run is a joke.
Funding is far less of an issue for an attacker who has a printing press, and it's the relative level of funding that matters. In order to defend against a 51% attack the defender must be able to spend more resources than the attacker. It's the "who can afford to lose more money game", where one side can just print as much money as they need while the other side has to earn every dollar. Are you really betting on the workin' man here? I wouldn't.
> attacking any single network does nothing to limit that demand
Demonstrating that they can afford a 51% attack on any blockchain they want to attack will affect the price of all crypto. Investors will need to discount that risk. This will surely affect demand.
> The idea that a centralized closed network that's severely hampered by operating restrictions can beat a well designed adaptable open network in the long run is a joke.
Nobody is claiming that the Fed's intention is to compete with bitcoin. They only need to attack it and destroy it. Remember, they want people to be stuck using their fiat currency, they don't want to make a competing type of sound money.
How long can the fed fight a few hundred million (soon to be few billion) people?
In the war of attrition, this small group of people with incentives that are not aligned with the majority of the humans on this planet will lose, it's just a matter of time.
I expect Bitcoin will destroy/neuter most central banks in your lifetime.
Is your claim here that the Fed cannot afford to buy the 51% attack? Keep in mind that they printed about 6 trillion dollars last year.
If the Fed can buy a 51% attack then they will be successful. They will demonstrate beyond a doubt that an entity with the power to print fiat can always take down a decentralized, permissionless network by exploiting those very features.
The same way sovereigns have since the dawn of time--divide and conquer. In the 20th century they discovered the secret, international socialism.
Give millions of people stimmys and enhanced unemployment checks. Destroy the savings of responsible, productive people so they can't afford to take risks without the promise of government bailouts. Make the people dependent on the state in every way.
Deficit spending and the money printer is the only way to fund all of these social programs the people are addicted to. Do you really believe that these millions of people hate the central banks who fund the welfare state?
They are winning. Their power increases every day, and it never decreases. They are ruthless, and I think it's reasonable to expect that they will not think twice about nuking bitcoin from orbit with a 51% attack, and print as many billions as they need to succeed.
---Responding here due to rate limit...
Variations of POW, POS, POK, etc....are easy drop in replacements that are actively being developed as we speak. Most of those alts you speak of have Bitcoin DNA at their core.
>And even if it does, nothing prevents me from 51% attacking that one, too.
Good luck attacking Bitcoin with a proof of stake hybrid that requires owning 51% of the supply to succeed, when the majority of the supply is already issued and is not available for sale. That's why I keep stating that a 51% attack/defeating POW is just the beginning of the work the Fed has to do...
---Rate limit response part 2....
>Finally, this is all kind of irrelevant to the article.
I think you are admitting defeat in long form. The article itself is irrelevant because it doesn't consider the 2nd order effect of any attack. Bitcoin is considered anti-fragile for a reason, it gets stronger as it gets attacked. The developer communities (including the devs working on alts) are an inextricable part of its anti-fragility.
>not some imaginary future thing we might or might not be able to invent after the Fed 51%s actual bitcoin to oblivion.
I could hit a target where it was positioned x years ago... Big Whoop. You aren't defeating its current form, so you lose, repeatedly, and debase the currency (USD) further in the process.
After a few trillion dollar USD expended on failed attacks, the currency being issued will be debased enough to be noticeable by consumers. This "infinite money printer" argument is not thought through. The outcome of more debasement is more demand for bitcoin aka undebaseable money.
Bitcoiners know there is a hyper inflationary event coming soon, I'm sure many would love to induce it by getting the fed to burn money attacking bitcoin :D
Please explain how bitcoin gets stronger when the Fed successfully deploys a 51% attack on it and either buys or puts out of business all the honest miners?
This article is dead. It took me a long time to argue against it because I assumed you knew what "adaptability" of bitcoin meant in practice. It seems you didn't and will need to do a lot more research before discussing viable attacks in the future.
Your attack vector fails and we know Satoshi knew the game theory and outcomes of just this scenario over a decade ago, as it is detailed in his posts on the bitcointalk forums. They are a great starting point for you to learn more about bitcoin's various defense mechanisms.
Ok, so what would equal bitcoin failing? Or is bitcoin just defined to be a success a priori?
> There are many methods of reaching consensus available in the toolbox
Are you saying that someone will come out with some new code that reuses the bitcoin blockchain, but has different characteristics?
If so then I would say there are already plenty of examples: bitcoin cash, zcash, etc. etc.
Are these altcoins really substitutes for bitcoin? Why should we expect your new altcoin that's banged out under duress to perform better than bitcoin cash has in terms of maintaining value? And even if it does, nothing prevents me from 51% attacking that one, too.
> There are many variations...
Sure, and there are already tons of altcoins putting those variations to the test. So far none of them are in the same universe as bitcoin. Also, every one of them that I have seen relies on economic incentives for security. Economic incentives are not a restraint for an entity that prints the world reserve currency.
> Good luck attacking a proof of stake hybrid that requires owning 50% of the supply, when the majority of the supply is already issued and is not available for sale.
If it's really true that there is no market for the majority of coins in a POS network then I would say that this is not a decentralized network anymore, and you are making a very strong claim when you assert that this coin will be able to serve the same purpose as bitcoin currently does. This coin is basically launched with a built-in 51% attack by design, locked in by the majority owners. It's really not so different from a CBDC.
On the other hand, if there is a market for coins in your POS world, the Fed will just buy them all. They can offer 10x, 100x, 1000x what anyone else will pay, it costs them nothing.
Finally, this is all kind of irrelevant to the article. The article merely lays out how the Fed could destroy bitcoin, not some imaginary future thing we might or might not be able to invent after the Fed 51%s actual bitcoin to oblivion.
I would give you 1,000,000 to 1 odds that 24 hours of no transactions on the bitcoin blockchain, nobody able to buy or sell bitcoin, would crash the price of bitcoin forever. What kind of person would pay $40k for such a thing. Anyone who did spend $40k of fiat to buy their bitcoin would then be out of luck, busted. That stings, and people remember the pain.
> After a few trillion dollar expended on failed attacks, the currency being issued will be debased enough to be noticeable by consumers, this "infinite money printed" argument is not thought through.
How long have the sound money people been making this tired argument? At least 50 years since Nixon put the final nail in the gold standard's coffin, but really even before that. Thought through or not, if you have been betting on the demise of fiat you've been on the losing side. After a long track record of being wrong, eventually you need to bring forth some compelling evidence that this time really is different, and I just don't see any.
As an aside, I like how weird the recursive quoting is between our two comments here, LOL.
The fiat standard may be imploding, but the central banks are definitely winning. The Weimar hyperinflation, for example, did not destroy the Reichsbank; it empowered it. When the currency collapsed they did not replace it with sound money, they replaced it with new fiat of a different color with less zeroes on it. It's the same with all the other hyperinflations we've seen in the past century. The mantra of "this time is different" makes a pretty bold claim and requires some evidence to back it up.
And no, they can't destroy something that can be forked and updated an infinite number of times. Not sure why you don't understand that its trivially easy to copy Bitcoin and build an alt. As long as that is the case, Bitcoin cannot be defeated.
If the current POW mechanism is repeatedly attacked and defeated it will adapt or projects will move to another consensus method. This is an arms race that CBs cannot win and they will burn a lot of money in process of losing, which is a beautiful thing.
Realize a successful 51% attack is just the beginning of the war, not the end of it.
*All the arguments you put forth so far are defeated by this simple flip of a consensus mechanism switch.
I think you're right; the war will go on for awhile. But I'm convinced by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28028542 that in the end, if anything bests fiat, it will be gold.
Barring some new technological breakthrough, it seems to me that bitcoin has no value in a fiat world, and no value proposition in a sound money world. It's a noble dead end.