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Comment by fsflover | Hacker News Reader

But it's easier to attack bitcoin than those...

Isn't it obvious?

An uncensorable store of value/currency is like an amphibious vehicle for most: pretty cool but they are never going to need one.

It's easy to see the utility of food and oil.

The problem isn’t that people are never going to need “An uncensorable store of value/currency”

the problem is that bitcoin is simply video game money masquerading as “An uncensorable store of value/currency”

Bitcoin and friends eat energy (lots of) without producing anything of collective value: there is no more creating businesses, research, jobs, products, that is, progress. A family can easily manage a mining farm that eats the same energy of a business block that normally would provide jobs for a hundred people or more; can you see the implications?

Also, since energy is turned directly into money, it then becomes money, which translates in its price being dictated by the highest bidder. Read this as: building 100 more nuclear plants per country won't solve the problem because the sudden increase in available energy will shortly be defeated by more and more of it allocated for more mining, creating in a few years a new shortage.

This is not a correct analysis. Firstly, Bitcoin is far more price sensitive to electricity than almost any other industry. Remaining profitable requires very low electricity costs, and are usually not competing in the same price bracket as other uses of electricity. Bitcoin mining is most prevalent in places where the energy is already wasted (thus very low price at market). Because Bitcoin miners can act as a buyer of last resort, it actually incentivizes energy development, not only for Bitcoin, but for every use.

Also, Bitcoin miners aren't destined to grow infinitely, consuming all spare electricity. There will be an equilibrium point where Bitcoin mining computers can only get so efficient and so fast.

There will be an equilibrium point - but that equilibrium will be between how many mining computers there can be run on the one side, and how much of the economy is parked in Bitcoin on the other side.

How efficient the computers are is completely beside the point, by protocol design.

Plenty of people have been saying not to eat as much beef or use oil.

Weird, I've been vegan for a while, hopped on the bitcoin train when its energy footprint was negligible, hopped right back off when I read that it used as much energy as a small country. Animal farming also has the characteristic of enslaving animals for the entirety of their lives, and in factory operations, those lives are usually non-stop suffering.

How does one make the argument that Bitcoin is easier to attack?

you say that and yet it's been sitting their out in the open for 11 years without an event with a billion $ bounty

I think OP meant attacking Bitcoin in the disparaging way that HN commenters do as opposed to actually attacking the Bitcoin blockchain :).

We’ll see about that in about 10 years when security budget goes down with each halvening

Ok, you develop a way to break bitcoin keys, and you use it to take satoshi's stash. Now what?

Dumping that will cause massive downward price pressure, reducing the total effective value. See Musk's bitcoin dump earlier this year.

Inactive addresses with large balances are watched closely. Coins moved from those are going to be noticed and followed. It will be very hard to extract meaningful value without compromising your identity. Legal authorities may not agree that your possession of a particular string of digits entitles you to the proceeds.

People follow the path of least resistance - there is much to be made via malware and scams. Soft targets are plentiful, why make life harder on yourself while also taking on greater risk?

Even just 1% of Satoshi's stash at current prices is hundreds of millions USD. It would still be worth an attacker's time, unless you're suggesting that it would go all the way to zero immediately.

Can't eat bitcoin.

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