If you take a shot at the king, try not to miss. Once again breaking down to most ridiculously complex topic into easily understood explanations. Once again, my brain is fed. Thanks as ever AA.
So I've heard these defenses 1) They can't keep it up forever (Andreas here) 2) We just use invalidate block (Jimmy Song) 3) Fee Pressure will topple attacker (Erik Vorheus or however that's spelled.) 4) Alt-Coins are still there 5) POW change / switch to POS None of them seem completely convincing to me. Bitcoin is in a bad state should this happen, none of these defenses are easy, quick or pain free.
BTC is NOT secure. Eth will be the MOST secure blockchain within a year, two at most for many reasons to long to list here. DYOR your wealth depends on it.
10-20 billion USD is deemed to be fairly expensive endeavor for a nation state???? USA issued 5 trillion in the past 12 months in fiscal stimulus. 7 billion is less than a rounding error for the larger nation states.
Thanks for the great content Andreus!!! However, there have been some good points in the comments here that you did not address. Perhaps a longer form discussion on this topic with a panel of other BTC experts would help to tease out all the different scenarios? The degree to which this kind of attack represents a real threat to BTC, I do not know, but it is a real threat and needs to be treated with deeper consideration IMO.
my concern is that a Government with unlimited printing power would do this. $7 billion is nothing to them. And their motive would not care about profitability, but to simply hurt the private crypto ecosystem
Wow, actually your education Andreas is the best counter measure. We definitely want to invest as such and ensure this technology survives for all. With knowledge there is security and control and less reaction to baseless fears.
I had occasionally contemplated the DoS attack vectors relating to the jamming up of mempools and the bandwidth of its replication network, BUT it wouldn't be easy to overcome the node validation process unless you are using transactions that "seem" valid, and in large numbers. The problem is the signatures on the transactions have to be verifiable, and the transaction fee would need to be high enough to even be seen, and the distributed nature of the network would mean you couldn't really jam up more than a few nodes at a time. And you would really only be creating a load of double-spends which would be weeded out fairly quickly .. unless you have 7 billion dollars either spread over a LOT of UTXOs, or even over a lot of addresses. But it would cost you a fortune to pay for spreading those funds far and wide over the blockchain in preparation for the attack, and even then the blocksize is quite small in BTC so you would be limited in the number of UTXOs you can get into a block (can't say the same for BSV .. they might have an issue perhaps since they have a large block size and also low transaction fees which could make them susceptible perhaps). Regardless, you would have to waste a LOT of money even attempting it. The ASICs are a completely different attack vector .. if you are going to attack consensus then producing enough bad ASICs would cost more than $7 billion, but somehow you would need to swap out the ASICs in 51% of mining hardware to do it. There is a possibility that the biggest ASIC producers could slip in an FPGA sublayer into their ASIC chips, but it is hard to imagine a backdoor that could allow the manufacturers to easily re-flash the remote FPGA for fake consensus. And fabricating faulty logic into ASICs themselves would not be in the interests of ASIC makers to bring down the network that their industry relies upon. I cannot see how it is doable unless you have access to immensely fast off-terrestrial "alien" mega-QCs, but that would result in a different kind of attack on signed addresses (likely attacking Elliptic Curve using Shor's algorithm - where they already have some spent UTXOs). Such a megaQC could also go after the signatures as they arrive in the mempools and attempt to sign a new transaction (with the cracked private keys) from those addresses by using a higher fee .. but that's not likely any time soon.
Hi Andreas. Maybe I don't understand the fundamentals, but what if the attacker did not go for DOS but rather start producing blocks with transactions transferring BTC to the attacker's wallet address and therefore simply steal BTC? Starting from whales going through all these smaller fish until his funds allow to sustain 51% attach. I'm not talking about what would follow that - I guess you are much better at exploring these consequences and hope you would do so if this is even possible. My main question is: Is this even possible or am I missing a fundamental piece here?
Hey Andreas, Love your shows. Please keep up the great work. Have you thought about accepting tips in BAT(Basic Attention Token) through the browser? I watch a lot of your shows in this browser and I have it set to autocontribute and was hoping that some of my earned BAT would go to you.
Let’s be real: if someone has 7B to waste on a Bitcoin spam attack, they would be better off buying $7B of Bitcoin and probably doubling their $ instead of wasting it trying to keep up a 51% limp noodle. “If you take a shot at the king, be careful not to miss.”
I love how Andreas glossed over the fact these types of attacks were allegedly tried in 2017 (dusting attacks) with Asic manufacturers themselves supported and bank rolled by people with more money than states have. It's now way more expensive to do than it was in 2017.
I would argue that it would destroy their own currency because everybody then knows that they fear Bitcoin and how trustworthy they are. On the other hand it would cause disruption for a while but will never destroy the network. The Bitcoin network has become to big and there are player that are not in for the money but belief in it (not the majority)
It depends on how long the attack persists. If it persists long enough for the price to drop far enough that miners begin to go bust, it could create a death spiral. A crucial assumption is that enough people (both consumers and miners) will be willing and able to "wait it out". But if miners become insolvent due to the low price, they literally can't continue operating, which cedes more hashrate to the attacker. Though Andreas is right to point out the logistical issues involved in purchasing half the ASIC market, legitimately purchasing ASICs isn't the only way to acquire them. Coercion could work too. Suppose nation states colluded to seize as much domestic mining equipment as they could identify. Some combination of coercion and purchasing could amass a significant amount of hashrate to perform this attack. I hope a state attacker would fail, but the outcome still seems unclear to me.
Also, is it possible that a non economic actor could already be slowly and covertly accumulating ASICS, building up their war chest as it were? Or would such a strategy render said ASICS obsolete by the time the actor deployed the attack? Never the less, I think you make a very good point about miners ability to remain solvent under such a sustained attack. Certainly a nation state, backed by its central bank would be able to outspend the market no? Also, couldn’t the consensus algorithm just be changed such that empty blocks would be automatically rejected? Not a computer scientist here, just trying to tease out all the possibilities.
What happens if/when most (over 50%) of the btc hashrate is based in China? Will btc then be considered centralized as one country will have the majority hashrate and the majority vote? Is Monero better in this aspect as it's truly decentralized as everyone can mine it on consumer hardware without the need of specialist hardware and Monero transactions are truly uncensorable where as we already see exchanges refusing btc that's 'tainted' (has been used in a way that the exchange doesn't approve of). Bitcoin seems to of failed (or fallen short) on a few important factors that it claimed to provide (p2p money (high fees kill this and Lighting is still something mostly spoken about rather than used), fungibility, privacy & decentralization)... but people getting rich of it so who cares about little things like privacy, fungibility & decentralization... now I'm off to buy some Doge 'stocks' because tiktok said it will make me rich...
@@mickeydrago9401 A bit harsh towards Monero.... How did Bitcoin gain traction early on? A total guess, but I'd guess more Bitcoin has been ceased by law enforcement over 'illicit' usage than Monero. Many people forget, even more so these days that privacy is a right not just a luxury. Andreas even commented by recommending Monero for privacy on twitter (so I guess that means Andreas wants to join the Mexican drug dealers and fight with IRS too) "Not moving to Monero, but definitely using Monero AND Bitcoin together" aantonop Apr 9 twitter.
Hello Adreas, question bothers me in relation to the recent ATH peak of the transactions fees.Why is that? Probably is nonsense but is it possible lets say in near feature when 1 btc cost 1 million to be so expensive to move satoshies around that any transaction from your wallet to an exchange to be unaffordable for the average Joe?
I am a graduate from Andreas School of Bitcoin. :). Just had one question that, in my research, I've not got conclusive answer to. Can a quantum attack affect a wallet where bitcoin has only been deposited to ever, abd never spent from. If not, why not?
Actually it feels like a similar attack is currently being executed. There are transactions with a 2.000.000 Satoshi fee and the hash rate dropped significantly. Apparently someone tries to raise the fee rates. I don‘t think this expensive attack will succeed though since the difficulty will get adjusted on May 3rd and fee rates will get back to normal.
@@mickeydrago9401 Well, I don‘t think the Chinese government wants to buy cheap bitcoin. If they stopped mining on purpose, they did it in order to help their own currency. But let‘s not forget that - like with other energy intensive and polluting industries (cement, steel, etc) - China is still profiting (through taxes and by selling electricity).
3 года назад+1
So, you could punch Bitcoin, but never knock it out! It will get up again and become stronger, some weeks later.
You don’t need to kill Bitcoin, nor do you even need a 51% attack. All you need is enough hash power to slow it down. If say 25% of all new blocks are empty…that means 25% less transactions processed. That leads to higher fees and slower transactions for everyone. If you sustain this for years it will create a public view that Bitcoin is this slow and expensive way to make transactions and mass adoption never happens.
Kindly 1rst of all my most sincere respect and admiration indeed Mr.Andreas Antonopoulos many thanks for your empowering insight,it´s always so interesting to listen to your interviews,learning tons !!!!!
I think what people really worry is whether their high leverage longs survive such an attack. Definitely not! So in such a scenario: Greed will be punished. Natural selection at its best. Also: Game theoretical point of view suggests that, according to Prisoner's Dilemma, none of the nation states will take such risk unless they all agree on one thing: "kill bitcoin". If this could have been the case; First of all things, Climate Change (which already harms them more than bitcoin) would have been solved decades ago (or the Famine in that perspective).
But the point is not to bring bitcoin down but to bring our financial system down, assuming that bitcoin becomes mainstream then. If an adversary seeks vulnerability with our electrical grid, surely they would be interested in undermining our financial system. Dependence on bitcoin can only up more channels for our adversaries against our financial system.
It's not necessary to mine bitcoin to perform this kind of attack. It is enough to pay fees for purposeless transactions. You just have to make your fees larger than the others.
Did you know? In 2014, Bitcoin was hacked. The attackers stole $USD83,000 in Bitcoin equivalent by running a BGP hijacking attack. Recently, another BGP hijacking attack has been proved successful against Ethereum by redirecting the traffic of some of Ethereum machines.
The point an an attack would not be to directly destroy Bitcoin, but to undermine confidence in Bitcoin by amplifying it’s instability, and impact confidence in the constancy of it’s availability that would then impact market sentiment with regard to its use as a fungible store of value, and as a means of exchange. This would quite likely have longer term consequences for bitcoin’s progress towards mainstream adoption. The fallout of such an attack could amount to economic terrorism, and the cost of such an attack, if well timed, could be offset by the perpetrators through the futures market.
Good explanation. But why do you have to spend 7 billions dollars when you can cut electricity (with some state collaboration) to hurt bitcoin network? States could simply ban the use of electricity for the mining activity. End of the story for Bitcoin or I am missing something?
They could also go straight to the third parties where all the wallets are kept. All they have to do is write a little legislation and send in some feds. Then they can just grab it all. Or most of it. I heard that almost 95% of funds are kept in these wallets. If hackers can steal these accounts then you better bet the government can too. You really think the people running these exchanges will go to jail to protect other peoples money? Doubt it? They will likely hand it all right over. Seems like a big flaw to me.
Interesting aspect. On the other hand 51% of the hashing power gives you only the chance to find more blocks than other miner. So you can't prohibit that other miner find blocks. So you can only slow down the Network. Correct?
Mr. Antonopoulos, I'm feeling a bit betrayed. This has nothing to do with your content. I'm hearing a lot of fluff about CBDCs and it distresses me. There's no talk of decentralization or distributed ledgers or blockchain. A few months back, I was sure the world had finally opened its eyes to the promise and benefits of Bitcoin. Today, I can feel the narrative being steered back to the fiat path, yet nobody is speaking out about it. Surely you've noticed. What can we do?
What if the chip shortage is the preparation for such attack? I mean the attacker wouldnt want to start an attack below 51% ideally. Btw. at $50 each tx is already a denial of service.
IMHO that nation state would have to sustain the attack indefinitely. The difficulty is adjusted every ~2 weeks and will go down again when a lower hash rate is detected and we are back in the game.
But if you can print trillions... you could suffocate Bitcoin under the water for many years. Doesn't matter much if the yearly cost to do this is $7 Billion or $70 Billion. It just determines how much time you have until your CBDC has gained a foothold. Then you have other means to enforce a prohibition of Bitcoin. Or is there something I'm not getting?
I was hoping Mike would come back with the argument "But China already has all of these ASICS hosted within their borders, all they need to do is confiscate them". But he did not, and it seems you also do not go into this. If you read this comment, could you reply or talk about it in a future video? The argument here is that China does not need to purchase large amounts of hardware, they just need to confiscate what they already have available.
Seems that the adversary(ies) wouldn't need new hardware. If they are totalitarian/authoritarian states, they could seize existing hardware, couldn't they? Which then would be quite sustainable. Since most mining is done in physical locations where such seizure is quite conceivable, I do worry this refutation misses that point. And perhaps an algorithm change of POS might mitigate that anyway. Maybe this is what we need to move to POS and mitigate the environmental disaster Bitcoin is responsible for.
@Fllamber you don't think bitcoin will have bugs in the future? Bitcoin is not supposed to have a lot of changes and features. It gives stability to the entire industry. However, that means it looks like early operating systems compared to ETH and some other alts. There is nothing wrong with that, we just can't have it both ways. I own both btw. I am not a fan boy where my money is involved 😀
@@NeoKailthas I own both as well. Eth and Bitcoin are 2 separate conversations. ETH has more competition than Bitcoin. ETH needs to roll out is POS platform with lower fees and do so with a timetable in mind for the growing competition. Polka Dot, Cardano, Elrond, Harmony....etc.. etc..
![Why Do All These DeFi Projects Have Their Own Tokens? What Are the Risks With DeFi? [2021]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/fAYcSfYo3FM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Why Do All These DeFi Projects Have Their Own Tokens? What Are the Risks With DeFi? [2021]](/img/tr.png)
If you take a shot at the king, try not to miss. Once again breaking down to most ridiculously complex topic into easily understood explanations. Once again, my brain is fed. Thanks as ever AA.
@@aantonop2529 seems legit
if you take a shot at the king... try not to miss... -drops mic. perfect ending Andreas
And he's quoting Omar from The Wire!
@@margoomahony9565 Thanks for watching...
F>o>r>r>o>f>i>t>b>l>e>n>v>e>s>t>m>e>n>t>
W>a>t>s>a>p>p>>>><
*+*1*...*3*...*4*...*7*...*7*...*3*...*6*...*8*...*0*...*5*...*2*
So I've heard these defenses
1) They can't keep it up forever (Andreas here)
2) We just use invalidate block (Jimmy Song)
3) Fee Pressure will topple attacker (Erik Vorheus or however that's spelled.)
4) Alt-Coins are still there
5) POW change / switch to POS
None of them seem completely convincing to me. Bitcoin is in a bad state should this happen, none of these defenses are easy, quick or pain free.
You are always exceptional. Such an important channel you have . Very very underrated.
Couldn't agree more!!
Thank you so much 😀
@@aantonop I feel very lucky that you answer . Thank you for your work.
🧡💛💚💙 ANDREAS IS ONE OF THE GREATEST CONTRIBUTIONS THAT CRYPTO BRINGS TO THE WORLD 🧡💛💚💙
BTC is NOT secure. Eth will be the MOST secure blockchain within a year, two at most for many reasons to long to list here. DYOR your wealth depends on it.
@@taccntb4345 that's laughable to the nth degree.
Outstanding!! I was hoping Andreas would address this thesis!
I knew it was a sham...
I liked your video Antop... Thanks for the flow of information from your mind to our ears !!
10-20 billion USD is deemed to be fairly expensive endeavor for a nation state???? USA issued 5 trillion in the past 12 months in fiscal stimulus. 7 billion is less than a rounding error for the larger nation states.
Well said , you think really intelligently. I would like to have a conversation with you
I think he said inexpensive
Thanks for the great content Andreus!!! However, there have been some good points in the comments here that you did not address. Perhaps a longer form discussion on this topic with a panel of other BTC experts would help to tease out all the different scenarios? The degree to which this kind of attack represents a real threat to BTC, I do not know, but it is a real threat and needs to be treated with deeper consideration IMO.
Quality content! I always underestimate the bright minds in the btc community in my fundamental analysis.
Always insightful, thank you very much
my concern is that a Government with unlimited printing power would do this. $7 billion is nothing to them. And their motive would not care about profitability, but to simply hurt the private crypto ecosystem
Exactly
Thanks for putting this out.
Shit the fed could print that in a nano second 😂🤣😂
I appreciate your efforts.
As always the best!!
That was excellent!!!! as usual!
Glad you enjoyed it!
never seen such a positive like/dislike ratio. holy and I see why. What a video!!!
Wow, actually your education Andreas is the best counter measure. We definitely want to invest as such and ensure this technology survives for all.
With knowledge there is security and control and less reaction to baseless fears.
I had occasionally contemplated the DoS attack vectors relating to the jamming up of mempools and the bandwidth of its replication network, BUT it wouldn't be easy to overcome the node validation process unless you are using transactions that "seem" valid, and in large numbers. The problem is the signatures on the transactions have to be verifiable, and the transaction fee would need to be high enough to even be seen, and the distributed nature of the network would mean you couldn't really jam up more than a few nodes at a time. And you would really only be creating a load of double-spends which would be weeded out fairly quickly .. unless you have 7 billion dollars either spread over a LOT of UTXOs, or even over a lot of addresses. But it would cost you a fortune to pay for spreading those funds far and wide over the blockchain in preparation for the attack, and even then the blocksize is quite small in BTC so you would be limited in the number of UTXOs you can get into a block (can't say the same for BSV .. they might have an issue perhaps since they have a large block size and also low transaction fees which could make them susceptible perhaps). Regardless, you would have to waste a LOT of money even attempting it.
The ASICs are a completely different attack vector .. if you are going to attack consensus then producing enough bad ASICs would cost more than $7 billion, but somehow you would need to swap out the ASICs in 51% of mining hardware to do it. There is a possibility that the biggest ASIC producers could slip in an FPGA sublayer into their ASIC chips, but it is hard to imagine a backdoor that could allow the manufacturers to easily re-flash the remote FPGA for fake consensus. And fabricating faulty logic into ASICs themselves would not be in the interests of ASIC makers to bring down the network that their industry relies upon.
I cannot see how it is doable unless you have access to immensely fast off-terrestrial "alien" mega-QCs, but that would result in a different kind of attack on signed addresses (likely attacking Elliptic Curve using Shor's algorithm - where they already have some spent UTXOs). Such a megaQC could also go after the signatures as they arrive in the mempools and attempt to sign a new transaction (with the cracked private keys) from those addresses by using a higher fee .. but that's not likely any time soon.
Hi Andreas. Maybe I don't understand the fundamentals, but what if the attacker did not go for DOS but rather start producing blocks with transactions transferring BTC to the attacker's wallet address and therefore simply steal BTC? Starting from whales going through all these smaller fish until his funds allow to sustain 51% attach. I'm not talking about what would follow that - I guess you are much better at exploring these consequences and hope you would do so if this is even possible. My main question is: Is this even possible or am I missing a fundamental piece here?
Cryptocurrencies are out of the running until they do something about taxes and transaction fees. These are the things that will undo bitcoin.
But don't they just create the money out of nothing anyway? There's no actual cost...
Hey Andreas,
Love your shows. Please keep up the great work.
Have you thought about accepting tips in BAT(Basic Attention Token) through the browser? I watch a lot of your shows in this browser and I have it set to autocontribute and was hoping that some of my earned BAT would go to you.
Nice video thank you! :)
always great content thanks!
@Andreas, could all the other miners fork the Bitcoin network to a healthy network and leave the attacker mining alone?
Let’s be real: if someone has 7B to waste on a Bitcoin spam attack, they would be better off buying $7B of Bitcoin and probably doubling their $ instead of wasting it trying to keep up a 51% limp noodle.
“If you take a shot at the king, be careful not to miss.”
I love how Andreas glossed over the fact these types of attacks were allegedly tried in 2017 (dusting attacks) with Asic manufacturers themselves supported and bank rolled by people with more money than states have.
It's now way more expensive to do than it was in 2017.
Fantastic video, Andreas. Really demonstrates the robustness of the proof-of-work system and how it works.
One does not simply place an order in an environment working over capacity.
Remember to read it with Boromir's voice in mind.
Subscribed on Patreon, thank you for your service Sir!
Much appreciated!
I would argue that it would destroy their own currency because everybody then knows that they fear Bitcoin and how trustworthy they are.
On the other hand it would cause disruption for a while but will never destroy the network. The Bitcoin network has become to big and there are player that are not in for the money but belief in it (not the majority)
We love you Andreas Antonopoulos!
I'm sure you're Satochi
I sure abbasi?
@@aantonop6290 Fake.
Andreas, one of the most inspiring and down to earth people the world has ever known
Anton, did u seriously just recommend proof of stake as a fork to combat DOS?
You need to highlight that nodes can simply switch to the forked version where transactions are not blocked per se ! Thats all !!
Great rebuttal Andreas.
mmmm I've check upload date but is troday...but it seems i've seen this video LOL
Maybe you seen the future 😂
@@tishagonzalez725 Supongo que lo más probable es que haya subido alguno muy parecido jaja.
Ευχαριστώ πολύ Ανδρέα !
It depends on how long the attack persists. If it persists long enough for the price to drop far enough that miners begin to go bust, it could create a death spiral. A crucial assumption is that enough people (both consumers and miners) will be willing and able to "wait it out". But if miners become insolvent due to the low price, they literally can't continue operating, which cedes more hashrate to the attacker.
Though Andreas is right to point out the logistical issues involved in purchasing half the ASIC market, legitimately purchasing ASICs isn't the only way to acquire them. Coercion could work too. Suppose nation states colluded to seize as much domestic mining equipment as they could identify. Some combination of coercion and purchasing could amass a significant amount of hashrate to perform this attack. I hope a state attacker would fail, but the outcome still seems unclear to me.
Also, is it possible that a non economic actor could already be slowly and covertly accumulating ASICS, building up their war chest as it were? Or would such a strategy render said ASICS obsolete by the time the actor deployed the attack? Never the less, I think you make a very good point about miners ability to remain solvent under such a sustained attack. Certainly a nation state, backed by its central bank would be able to outspend the market no? Also, couldn’t the consensus algorithm just be changed such that empty blocks would be automatically rejected? Not a computer scientist here, just trying to tease out all the possibilities.
Can u do a video of electricity costs of sustaining the attack in relation to time ?
What happens if/when most (over 50%) of the btc hashrate is based in China? Will btc then be considered centralized as one country will have the majority hashrate and the majority vote? Is Monero better in this aspect as it's truly decentralized as everyone can mine it on consumer hardware without the need of specialist hardware and Monero transactions are truly uncensorable where as we already see exchanges refusing btc that's 'tainted' (has been used in a way that the exchange doesn't approve of). Bitcoin seems to of failed (or fallen short) on a few important factors that it claimed to provide (p2p money (high fees kill this and Lighting is still something mostly spoken about rather than used), fungibility, privacy & decentralization)... but people getting rich of it so who cares about little things like privacy, fungibility & decentralization... now I'm off to buy some Doge 'stocks' because tiktok said it will make me rich...
@@mickeydrago9401 A bit harsh towards Monero.... How did Bitcoin gain traction early on? A total guess, but I'd guess more Bitcoin has been ceased by law enforcement over 'illicit' usage than Monero. Many people forget, even more so these days that privacy is a right not just a luxury. Andreas even commented by recommending Monero for privacy on twitter (so I guess that means Andreas wants to join the Mexican drug dealers and fight with IRS too) "Not moving to Monero, but definitely using Monero AND Bitcoin together" aantonop Apr 9 twitter.
Hello Adreas, question bothers me in relation to the recent ATH peak of the transactions fees.Why is that? Probably is nonsense but is it possible lets say in near feature when 1 btc cost 1 million to be so expensive to move satoshies around that any transaction from your wallet to an exchange to be unaffordable for the average Joe?
Digibyte, a Litecoin fork, has 5 algorithms.
Vegeta was always taking it to the next level 🔥
Simply five star material. Thank you brother. 🙏
So nice of you
I am a graduate from Andreas School of Bitcoin. :). Just had one question that, in my research, I've not got conclusive answer to. Can a quantum attack affect a wallet where bitcoin has only been deposited to ever, abd never spent from. If not, why not?
Thank you for your work.
Great video, thank you Andreas.
so the other miners would stop mining? this does not make any sense.
Actually it feels like a similar attack is currently being executed. There are transactions with a 2.000.000 Satoshi fee and the hash rate dropped significantly. Apparently someone tries to raise the fee rates. I don‘t think this expensive attack will succeed though since the difficulty will get adjusted on May 3rd and fee rates will get back to normal.
@@mickeydrago9401 Well, I don‘t think the Chinese government wants to buy cheap bitcoin. If they stopped mining on purpose, they did it in order to help their own currency. But let‘s not forget that - like with other energy intensive and polluting industries (cement, steel, etc) - China is still profiting (through taxes and by selling electricity).
So, you could punch Bitcoin, but never knock it out! It will get up again and become stronger, some weeks later.
You don’t need to kill Bitcoin, nor do you even need a 51% attack. All you need is enough hash power to slow it down. If say 25% of all new blocks are empty…that means 25% less transactions processed. That leads to higher fees and slower transactions for everyone. If you sustain this for years it will create a public view that Bitcoin is this slow and expensive way to make transactions and mass adoption never happens.
The counter narrative point is well thought out. Thanks for everything you are doing 👏👏
Kindly 1rst of all my most sincere respect and admiration indeed Mr.Andreas Antonopoulos many thanks for your empowering insight,it´s always so interesting to listen to your interviews,learning tons !!!!!
"If you take a short on the KING, try not to miss!"
I think what people really worry is whether their high leverage longs survive such an attack.
Definitely not! So in such a scenario: Greed will be punished.
Natural selection at its best.
Also:
Game theoretical point of view suggests that, according to Prisoner's Dilemma, none of the nation states will take such risk unless they all agree on one thing: "kill bitcoin". If this could have been the case; First of all things, Climate Change (which already harms them more than bitcoin) would have been solved decades ago (or the Famine in that perspective).
Well said , you think really very intelligently too. Having a convo with you, I would like to
Jeff Berwick at The Dollar Vigilante and the Crypto Vigilante are great also
Who thought of Minecraft when Andreas said grief
how was that figure arrived at? it seems very arbitrary given the cost of such an attack is a function of its duration
But the point is not to bring bitcoin down but to bring our financial system down, assuming that bitcoin becomes mainstream then. If an adversary seeks vulnerability with our electrical grid, surely they would be interested in undermining our financial system. Dependence on bitcoin can only up more channels for our adversaries against our financial system.
You are Brilliant...!
Hi everyone
Andreas could you talk about Metawhale protocol?
I wish I could have a one on one conversation with you sir, I will support you on Patreon as soon as I'll be able to.
@@aantonop6290 Hahaha
@@aantonop6290 aha
He didnt explain why it couldnt be taken down. He just said "i dont think so"
It's not necessary to mine bitcoin to perform this kind of attack. It is enough to pay fees for purposeless transactions. You just have to make your fees larger than the others.
Well said , you think really intelligently. I would like to have a conversation with you
@Andreas m. antonopoulos Fake.
Did you know? In 2014, Bitcoin was hacked. The attackers stole $USD83,000 in Bitcoin equivalent by running a BGP hijacking attack. Recently, another BGP hijacking attack has been proved successful against Ethereum by redirecting the traffic of some of Ethereum machines.
So with that said. Andreas how would you 'kill' bitcoin? Wouldn't a nation state 51% double spend attack basically undermine faith in bitcoin?
The point an an attack would not be to directly destroy Bitcoin, but to undermine confidence in Bitcoin by amplifying it’s instability, and impact confidence in the constancy of it’s availability that would then impact market sentiment with regard to its use as a fungible store of value, and as a means of exchange. This would quite likely have longer term consequences for bitcoin’s progress towards mainstream adoption. The fallout of such an attack could amount to economic terrorism, and the cost of such an attack, if well timed, could be offset by the perpetrators through the futures market.
Great explanation!
great video!
Its just FUD! Ignore and HODL
Good explanation. But why do you have to spend 7 billions dollars when you can cut electricity (with some state collaboration) to hurt bitcoin network? States could simply ban the use of electricity for the mining activity. End of the story for Bitcoin or I am missing something?
They could also go straight to the third parties where all the wallets are kept. All they have to do is write a little legislation and send in some feds. Then they can just grab it all. Or most of it. I heard that almost 95% of funds are kept in these wallets. If hackers can steal these accounts then you better bet the government can too. You really think the people running these exchanges will go to jail to protect other peoples money? Doubt it? They will likely hand it all right over. Seems like a big flaw to me.
Andreas, excellent!
You don't need 51% to launch a successful attack, it is possible to launch a successful attack with a much lower percentage.
How do you know?
How do you know really ?
Owning 51% of the hash rate gives you 51% chance of winning the block
Interesting aspect. On the other hand 51% of the hashing power gives you only the chance to find more blocks than other miner. So you can't prohibit that other miner find blocks. So you can only slow down the Network. Correct?
Mr. Antonopoulos, I'm feeling a bit betrayed. This has nothing to do with your content.
I'm hearing a lot of fluff about CBDCs and it distresses me. There's no talk of decentralization or distributed ledgers or blockchain. A few months back, I was sure the world had finally opened its eyes to the promise and benefits of Bitcoin. Today, I can feel the narrative being steered back to the fiat path, yet nobody is speaking out about it. Surely you've noticed. What can we do?
What if governments invade the mining farms?
What if the chip shortage is the preparation for such attack? I mean the attacker wouldnt want to start an attack below 51% ideally. Btw. at $50 each tx is already a denial of service.
genie is out of the bottle
your risk assessment is too simple.
The honey badger of money.
IMHO that nation state would have to sustain the attack indefinitely. The difficulty is adjusted every ~2 weeks and will go down again when a lower hash rate is detected and we are back in the game.
But if you can print trillions... you could suffocate Bitcoin under the water for many years. Doesn't matter much if the yearly cost to do this is $7 Billion or $70 Billion. It just determines how much time you have until your CBDC has gained a foothold. Then you have other means to enforce a prohibition of Bitcoin.
Or is there something I'm not getting?
Very good content. When this Happens I think we have a quick consensus to implement a new rule with a minimum block size
Sure i would try it, then buy the dip i caused
Another thing, the nation state that just has to say the words "mine empty blocks" would be china, right?
I was hoping Mike would come back with the argument "But China already has all of these ASICS hosted within their borders, all they need to do is confiscate them". But he did not, and it seems you also do not go into this. If you read this comment, could you reply or talk about it in a future video? The argument here is that China does not need to purchase large amounts of hardware, they just need to confiscate what they already have available.
You're far better off putting the 7B into bitcoin
Would love to hear your take on the vice versa of this! What would it take to bring down the federal reserve? Whats harder to achieve?
Simple. Mass global adoption of BTC. Or in other words, just keep doing what we’re already doing!
Seems that the adversary(ies) wouldn't need new hardware. If they are totalitarian/authoritarian states, they could seize existing hardware, couldn't they? Which then would be quite sustainable. Since most mining is done in physical locations where such seizure is quite conceivable, I do worry this refutation misses that point. And perhaps an algorithm change of POS might mitigate that anyway. Maybe this is what we need to move to POS and mitigate the environmental disaster Bitcoin is responsible for.
Bitcoin.. Honey badger don't care. 💯🍻
Bitcoin code is like DOS compared to eth though...
@Fllamber bitcoin had bugs.
@Fllamber you don't think bitcoin will have bugs in the future? Bitcoin is not supposed to have a lot of changes and features. It gives stability to the entire industry. However, that means it looks like early operating systems compared to ETH and some other alts. There is nothing wrong with that, we just can't have it both ways. I own both btw. I am not a fan boy where my money is involved 😀
@@NeoKailthas I own both as well. Eth and Bitcoin are 2 separate conversations. ETH has more competition than Bitcoin. ETH needs to roll out is POS platform with lower fees and do so with a timetable in mind for the growing competition. Polka Dot, Cardano, Elrond, Harmony....etc.. etc..
Central banks, Rothschild and BlackRock would love to do this...
Why are you blinking so much when you talk about the national state & an attack? You don’t normally do that.
3 gorges dam goes down, what would that do? If a small power outage in China can dip the hash rate, 3 gorges.
Doctor? You give him too much credit
If there is a 51% attack, can they make a code change?
@aantonop Fake.
I suppose a Nation State with nuclear capabilities could bring Bitcoin down for less than 7B, but who's counting? 💣
And with those 7 billion you can invest in securing blockchain and get revenue in BTC XD
You hear that nation state?! Get rekt.