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Comment by bouncycastle | Hacker News Reader

It's a fallacy that high hashrate means high security.

What matters is the % of miners that are honest. (See bitcoin.pdf)

High hashrate just means higher difficulty. (The difficulty controls the average time between blocks, so it's always targeting to be 10 min on average).

Also, for heating your home, mining bitcoin could end you up with a loss. For example, your heater needs an internet connection, and your heater is will become out-of-date very quickly as new more advanced bitcoin mining gear becomes available. You would also need to have your heater on 24/7 to break even, this it will cost you to turn off the mining heater due to warm weather or to cool it.

Not to mention the noise.

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What matters is the % of miners who don’t collude.

Honesty isn’t the issue, collusion is. The entire concept of Bitcoin assumes dishonest players.

The only real attack is for miners to combine hash power to get over 50% of the network hash rate so they can execute double spends - and even that is self defeating as doing so degrades confidence and by extension price.

Only once it gets publicized. You have a window to sell and make an enormous profit before people notice and then the entire bit-conomy gets wrecked. I hope this happens as it is a much better outcome to this mess we've created than wrecking the biosphere.

Yeah, it's a really really tiny window though. chain reorganizations and 50% attacks are really easy to see on the chain and people do watch for them.

They've happened on smaller chains that don't have much hash power attached to them, but even there, they're caught very quickly.

A) 100% honest miners, 1 hash per century. B) 55% honest miners, 1 googol hashes per second.

What is more secure in your view?

hashrate is absolutely necessary for high security.

Read bitcoin.pdf

do you want to cite a specific paragraph?

You can search for the word "honest" and read everything around there…

Section 6 about incentives discusses about why nodes may be honest rather than collude to attack the system. This is the main pillar of bitcoin's security.

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