Electric currency could trash cash (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Electric currency could trash cash (1999)

theguardian.com

74 pointsmonort43 comments

To a certain extent it has. Living in London, I can't remember the last time I paid with cash! Now cryptocurrency is a whole other kettle of fish...

I live in London too and use cash all the time! You should visit a food market — London has some of the best food markets I’ve been to! They are almost all “cash”. And generally, if you buy less than £10 at a local store, they inform you it’s cash only.

Interesting... I live quite centrally, and the markets round me accept contactless card payments. Also, even if I'm buying chewing gum at my local corner shop, the owner accepts payment by debit card (however that may be because I'm a regular).

Hmm, interesting — I’m Zone 1 as well. Check out the Sunday Upmarket in Shoreditch and you’ll see what I mean =)

I believe their definition of electric cash, although fuzzy, included the attribute of being not tied to a bank. Are there cashless payments in London which do not in some way tie to a bank? Asking as someone not from London.

Everything is tied to a bank at the moment, but in mid January a new directive called PSD2 lands - this will make banks and bank account information much more open (and hopefully start to shake the monopoly banks have on our money and information).

Thank you .. now knows just my bank what's on my accounts. From next year on, if you give access to somebody over PSD2, you just can give full access to your account. So they see everything. A lot of companys will have access to a lot of data with PSD2. 1,2,3 next leak ..

It's about creating an open API, but you control who has access and who doesn't - why is that a bad thing? Also many people hand over their actual bank login details to services such as yodlee which is even less desirable (I believe it even breaches the bank ac's terms of service)!

It's just possible to give full access with PSD2. Even a third company just has access to pay a bill with your account, they can see each transaction on your account. The idea behind PSD2 is, as far I understand, a lot of services should have access to your account, to make it easy to pay with smarthones ond third party cards.

This is a fact that cryptocurrency maximalists love to conveniently forget. Despite all the ramblings about how corrupt and centralized, they are cashing out through a centralized bank.

The noose is tightening on all fronts and I believe we will see offical cryptocurrency backed by a large famous bank....not some phantom coin where majority of supply is owned by a small group of individuals that rely on the banking & legal system that protects them but which they also publicly bash to get more naive people to buy in.

Permissionless, trustless transactions are one of the primary benefits of crypto/blockchain/bitcoin technology.

It's not a benefit that has materialized, nor is there a roadmap to materializing it. Segwit will not make buying coffee with BTC any less reliant on trusting centralized merchant services/exchanges.

Sure it has. The fact that Starbucks hasn't implemented it yet doesn't change that tens of thousands of transactions per day are occurring with BTC. It certainly hasn't hit Visa scale for daily use yet, but either it or another crypto will within the decade.

curious, where are these tends of thousands of transactions occuring directly from consumer to paying for a product at a brick and mortar location?

Let's not count bitcoin mixers and drug transactions.

Same in Sweden. Sweden will probably be the first cashless country in the world. Our central bank has started to look into cryptocurrency (e-krona).

The original Chaum digital cash paper dates from 1982 ... the idea has been around for a long time. The two companies beanz and flooz mentioned in the article have, of course, gone bankrupt long ago.

One way to destroy Bitcoin would be to convince governments to launch a 51% attack against it.

An organized, worldwide campaign against BTC, complete with double-spends, would flatten the price.

I wonder if it's still feasible? Eventually it will be too hard to mine, but perhaps not yet.

A benefit of this attack is that once executed, other miners will switch away from BTC. Meaning BTC won't be able to spring up again: no one will be able to get more than the ~90% hash rate the government controls.

16,946,489 terrahashes per second right now for the BTC network. According to some website I found you can get an ASIC that does 4.73 Terrahashes for $500. That means you'd need 17638182 TH/s at least to get 51% hashpower. That means you'd have to buy 3,729,003 of those $500 miners which would cost $1,864,501,313.80. Let's double that and call it 3.6 billion for facilities and energy costs. So yes, totally possible for a government to create a cluster with 51% of network power if they chose to. I imagine there would be pushback against spending billions to destroy people'a assets though.

Also in such a situation, consensus could be reached easily on doing a hard fork. Government's effort would go waste on the original one. They can repeat, but it will take some time, and the hard fork can happen again, until govt gives up.

A better approach by any government could be to declare it as illegal (just like drugs). By doing so, they can't eliminate it, but just curtail demand.

They could certainly cause a lot of trouble, but rather than continuously hard forking I bet people would just add hashing power to the network like crazy. It's basically the government vs everyone in the world. If the value of BTC was threatened, I'm sure a lot of hash power could get added into the network. Can the US government outspend and outpace everyone else in the world teamed up against them? It would be challenging logistically for sure, even if you had the money.

Do you think miners can switch faster to the hardfork than the government? The government can just redirect their entire mining pool at once to a new hardfork wheras miners are independent and convincing them to switch will take time.

also worst damage such a government could do would be to double-spend some coins. That is if the 51% is somehow undetected and that the rest of the bitcoin community doesn't fork the chain upon detecting such an attack.

.. but why? Why not just go after the exchanges?

https://bisq.network/

Won't work. They'll just migrate to countries without financial controls. (BTC-e et al.)

Cool story bro, but most governments would consider that a win -- it pushes the whole thing out of the mainstream.

(edit: A win if the goal was to ban cryptocurrencies.)

You know BTC-e no longer exists and was replaced by a clone called wex, which is linked to a domain in a five eyes jurisdiction (new Zealand), right?

Exchanges are a de facto part of every cryptocurrency protocol, you cannot avoid exposure to their downside risk even if you never put a single coin on any of them.

A lot of crypto fans would say you could avoid the exposure once all commerce is conducted without conversion to fiat. To include wages.

Doesn't the FBI already own one of the largest wallets after seizing Silk Roak assets?

Bulgaria has a 3 billion wallet. What's the reason then to attack bitcoin.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-08/bulgaria-government...

They should sell those.

And? It doesn't matters how many coins you've got to perform a 51% attack, only thing that matters is how many hashes you can perform per second.

I think they’re asking: why destroy value of an asset that they currently hold/own?

Well, it's a relatively small sum. And if it grows into a large and valuable asset relative to the government's budget, that's a bad sign: it means the government-backed dollar is losing steam relative to crypto.

It's in the government's interest to lop off the head of its biggest existential threat.

Also, Satoshi presumably passed his coins to his heirs. Who controls 6% of all wealth? I wonder.

They were rushing to sell it a few weeks ago, hopefully they managed before the decline

Yes, but that simply raises the price and encourages BTC adoption.

Governments will need to become active miners to destroy it. And unlike miners, they won't care whether they can mine faster than everybody else. Their objective is to ruin BTC.

Can someone please explain how exactly a 51% attack would actually cause double-spends to be accepted?

All the miners do is accept transactions into a block. We don't trust any given machine to validate that there were no double-spends. For that, each client would have to check the entire history before accepting payment. So, how would mining the blocks cause double spending to take place?

Don't bitcoin miners have to SIGN their blocks? If so, then broadcasting two different histories would quickly be discovered.

I guess the only thing they can do is make a bitcoin fork, something that is possible anyway, by enough miners agreeing.

Perhaps they can alternate the two forks length growth, making the clients thrash and re download the two forks over and over.

https://notehub.org/nz8d0

Basically, the longest chain is considered correct. And it has to work that way. It's why BTC is sybil-resistant.

So the attack is to get >51% of the hash power together, then mine in secret, creating a perfectly valid longer chain with a different tx history.

Publish it, and watch the world burn.

I wonder what would be needed to gain 51% hash power? How many super computers would that be?

>How many super computers would that be?

you're asking the wrong question. mainly because bitcoin mining is done with ASICs and not general purpose computers. I would be surprised if the bitcoin network hashrate isn't higher than all the general purpose computing power in the world combined (converted to double SHA256 hash rate).

I have been wondering recently... how unlikely is it that a major IT failure/hack/whatever occurs which produces a tremendous lack of faith in our existing traditional-currency-backed systems, leaving cryptocurrencies with the only PROVABLE form of money? Walmart says they made $5 billion? Why should we trust that they're telling the truth about that? They rely completely upon swiss-cheese computer systems built on sand and wishful thinking. They build their empire on slapped-together garbage full of holes and push it further than it was ever intended to go, adamantly refusing to slow down or devote the resources to building a dependable, reliable system. How unlikely is it that this will eventually bite them and the mathematical provability of cryptocurrency becomes of paramount, and nigh sole, value? Not as unlikely as those who have convinced bank computers to read large numbers for their balance, I expect.

I really think for normal people the chance is close to zero... Walmart’s accounts have to reconcile to their bank’s, the bank’s accounts need to reconcile with their accounts at the central bank... There are checks and balances, fraud tends to be found out eventually when things don’t match, and at the end of the day, 99% or the population don’t understand proof-of-work or proof-of-stake anyway...

I think some of the problems of the current system are overstated (dare I say some are even imagined?) by crypto-enthusiasts. There’s no doubt that blockchain is fascinating and useful technology, but the idea that it’s a perfect and complete replacement for a crumbling system just doesn’t actually map to reality...

Crypto currency also relies on slapped together systems; it makes it easier to lose all your money to a browser flaw or wallet problem.

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