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Comment by fshbbdssbbgdd | Hacker News Reader

If it was discovered tomorrow that there was a massive secret bitcoin mine in a cave in Siberia that produced a chain 2x as long as the main chain and we didn’t know about it, and this miner also gave themselves all the coins, the community would choose to ignore that and use the shorter one we have built consensus around.

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Note that this weakness was discovered early on. Bitcoin actually uses a sum of difficulty, not longest chain. You can't just mine more 1 difficulty blocks. But your point stands, if the US Government is mining bitcoin it is plausible that they could invalidate the entire chain.

I don't see everyone going with that chain.

Whats a community? How can it ignore the longest technically valid chain if people come and go, centalized "reference" websites change hands? The Bitcoin is the longest chain, most work burned, it's the definition and trivially verifiable by anyone now or 1000 years from now (if it retains the majority of humanity hashrate)

This doesn't mean that bitcoin is self-referential. It means the consensus model encompasses more information than purely the length of the chain. But that should be obviously true; there have been countless hard forks like BCH and yet we still follow the chain we all call BTC.

The problem with hard forks in the PoS world is that you cannot judge the health of each chain by some external factor.

How do you hide that much power consumption?

You are government. Interesting to consider that governments could even collude.

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