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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

Well, if you had to pick one to build a standard on in the modern world, I'd certainly pick bitcoin.

Unlike gold, bitcoin is a network protocol available to anyone on the planet with an internet connection, can be programmed and improved, and you can secure in a way such that it's impossible to steal through simple violence.

But obviously gold or bitcoin is a false dichotomy.

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“Impossible”

Meet

“Beat him with this $5 hammer until he gives up the keys”

It's possible to create N of M multi sig keys held by multiple people, making it literally impossible for any one person to comply with coercion.

And the more important point is that while yes, you can still use violence, the violence becomes more complicated and costly. This is unlike the situation with gold where you can break into my house, shoot me in the head, and carry away my gold. With bitcoin, you need to negotiate with my mind to acquire my consent, even if that negotiation is torture.

Many ways to deal with this.

1) fake wallets (give them a key to some coins but not all) 2) multisig - someone else has to provide the other half of the key or what you can give them is worthless etc

That is just the key access problem. You can’t beat a time locked multisig out of a guy. There are systems to protect key materials against violence. It’s kinda an old art in the military.

You can break into a multi-keyed vault of gold given enough time. You will not break multisig ECDSA with all the computers on earth.

If you have all the computers in the world, you can just create a dominate fork of the blockchain and own all the coins

That is not how it works. Even if you could usurp all the mining powers, the Coins are still owned by the keys. You only have the ability to censor future transactions. Mining controls the future, key holders control the past.

You control future transactions with majority computing power i.e. double spend coins

Double spend your coins only. And even then, you wouldn't because doing this kind of attack would destroy the value of the network and all your investment in mining ASICs would be destroyed.

Here's how it goes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjyJhKpLUBU

This discussion is originally about comparing bitcoin to gold. OP is saying bitcoin's security is equivalent to the underlying crypto protocols which is clearly false as there is a finite amount of computers on Earth to render it worthless.

Nation states don't bother attacking bitcoin because there's little payoff relative to the cost. However, if we suppose there's a hostile country that held their central bank reserves in bitcoin, wouldn't that make a compelling case for the US government to invest in such infrastructure so that they can cripple them like they did with Russia?

Sure, but they could not. Watch that video above. Andreas is right on the money as always. This was designed this way. No government can stop this. It is a force beyond that which can be controlled. Some people find this thought troubling, and look look to suppress it. It is ultimately futile.

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