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Comment by yrral | Hacker News Reader

I think under these circumstances, the economic majority of bitcoin users will fork to use, eg a new hash algorithm, rendering the seized mining farms useless. Remember, bitcoin is a collective trusted network based on agreement between users, miners and developers. If the miners turn, just switch to a set of new miners.

You mention that this wouldn't work in your article. Can you explain why?

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Yeah it seems like the real defense of an obvious attack is "This Ethereum proof of stake chain with all of the wallets from right before the attack is the new Bitcoin".

Ethereum doesn't store Bitcoin wallets. I'm assuming you mean tokenized BTC (wBTC/rBTC)?

No, he means if something bad happens to Bitcoin, there are thousands of other cryptocurrencies for users to migrate to.

However since most cryptocurrency prices are denominated in bitcoin, a crash in bitcoin historically meant a crash in all of the rest.

In order for change in hash function to work, it would require remonitising to a significant hash rate. Why would anyone invest in mining equipment on that new hash function if they already know how the game ends? (ie. their equipment being written off)

Theres no need to start at a huge hash rate. You can fork and then reset/reduce the difficulty, or adjust the difficulty in the way BCH does. You can also use POW algorithms that can be done only on commodity hardware like GPUs or CPUs so that the community can do it in a more distributed way.

If the difficulty is low then re-attacking the forked chain is inexpensive so you have exactly the same problem. Additionally, reducing the hashrate reduces the settlement assurances increasing the number of confirmations required to be sure your transaction is finalised.

Human beings already know how our game ends (we die), and yet we do all sorts of things on this earth in the ~80 years before that, even knowing that everything we do for ourselves becomes meaningless once we're gone.

Time preferences are a thing. Lots of folks do things with a time horizon much lower than their equipment being written off. Whole companies are destroyed for quarterly earnings, relationships are destroyed for a promo that lasts only for the ~2-5 years that you've got remaining at the company, people get married even knowing that 50% of them end in divorce, parents birth children knowing that they'll leave the nest and develop their own opinions and say they don't love you and eventually die.

The same reason they got into it in the first place; you can make money by doing it.

No or flawed governance in bitcoin, check decred

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