Tether and Circle are battling to win the US stablecoin market
wsj.com
wsj.com
How many bad news are you ready to hear?
A more feasible 'attack' would probably be to just make the private companies black list addresses like they did last week with the bybit hack.
What 51% gets you is that 51% of the time, you get to choose which transactions go into the blockchain. This is mostly only useful if you want to prevent someone else's transactions from getting in, or for complicated scams where you want one person's transactions to get in before another person's. 49% of the time, those transactions will still get in, so 51% actually doesn't buy you a lot. At best you cause a short term chain split and people will wait longer before the chain stabilizes.
One ADDR_A accepts your payment, you post your private chain publicly. You coin C cannot be spent to ADDR_A and ADDR_B, so the chain must choose which one is it. Because you have 50%+ of the hashing power, your private chain necessarily has more work (generally simplified to "is longer") than the public chain.
You've now successfully double spent.
In fact: you don't even need 50+% to attempt the attack. I did some math recently I believe something like 40% gets you 75% chance of successfully executing the attack over a 10-block-period. The Bitcoin paper has the exact algorithm to calculate this, it is a random walk.
What happens to Bitcoin when this happens: to "Bitcoin" the software, nothing. Everything just keeps going. To "Bitcoin" as a currency, your guess is as good as mine. It depends on what the "social layer" (the community - devs/users/stakeholders) decide is the best course of action. This would be considered an emergency event.
EDIT: You might be wondering why it is not detectable before it happens. It isn't detectable before because the attack would be privately mining their fork. That is: they would not broadcast the evil blocks.
A double spend via 51% isn't really feasible anyway. A double spend attack, in the simplest case, is to:
1. Pay for good or services
2. Receive delivery of the goods or services
3. Invalidate the original payment once the goods or services are no longer revokable.
For a double spend to be worthwhile the value of the scam must exceed the cost of the scam. Maintaining >50% hashing power is extremely expensive and is more and more expensive the longer you maintain it. Therefore the value of the scam must also be extremely large. For crypto transactions it's common sense to wait for more and more confirmations (additional blocks mined after the block containing the transaction) before delivering the goods or services as the size of the transaction grows. Since it's trivial to wait for N+1 confirmations as the seller of goods or services it's trivial to defend against double spends for any meaningful amount of money.
> In Devasini’s eyes, tether was meant to subvert traditional finance. His wife, an artist, exhibited paintings of dollar bills with the image of George Washington screaming because, she said, they had “no more value.”
uhhhhh
(This is in keeping with the site guidelines - "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" -https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I’m not saying it will happen but it is plausible. The question is what is the effect of that happening to bitcoin.
First of all, it's quite unlikely that this is going to happen at all. There are no signs of significant weaknesses in SHA-256.
But if it's going to happen, in all likelyhood, you'll get preliminary results long before any actual breakage. (For both MD5 and SHA1, you had around a decade of warnings between "this looks insecure / broken in theory" and "we now have an actual collission".) Anyone paying attention and moving away from algorithms already known to be broken was unaffected by the MD5/SHA1 weaknesses.
Of course, there will be those who will wait until an actual breakage, and a few years more, before they act. (As we've seen particularly with MD5.)
If someone broke SHA-256, they could generate blocks directing all coins to their own address and thus destroy the entire system. However, in that scenario it is likely that everybody else would roll the chain back to before the break and restart it with a different algorithm (likely SHA-3).
In summary, an obvious compromise would get caught and neutralized.
So a wily possessor of an SHA-256 break would use it subtly. Most likely they would target “lost” coins that haven’t moved in decades that nobody will notice are missing. Not Satoshi’s though. Too much heat.
Convert it into hard Bitcoin and never worry about it again.
See ya in 10y!
What prevents the XRP team from introducing any arbitrary fork such as a dilutions that are then forced on their nodes ?
Trustlessness is a core feature of a cryptocurrency and XRP seems to require a whole lot of trust/faith. But I guess faith is what makes it perfect for its cult like following.
Serious question, are you also deeply religious ?
It is, however, the one failure mode of commerce the extremely rich actually need to worry about. Bitcoin isn't any less cult-like than XRP, they both are downstream of the whole "sound money" nonsense which exists to sell the regular folk on insulating the rich against this one particular threat.
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/richard-a-chance-illust...
With crypto, the VCs can sell the majority of their tokens after brief lockup period, capitalizing on purely narrative-driven speculative valuations that almost always disconnect from the actual reality, let alone fundamentals.
Crypto VC perfectly embodies the Greater Fool Theory. The VCs profit by selling to later buyers motivated more by speculative momentum than intrinsic value. The joke being that VC involvement in a project is often the only thing even driving that momentum.
This combination of compressed liquidity timelines, minimal regulatory oversight, and a glut of retail investors who have FOMO from seeing their friends 100x or even 1000x, creates an ideal environment for VCs to systematically transfer risk to less sophisticated market participants at often insane valuations.
Term sheets from vcs increasingly include a “don’t do an ico”
There are many VCs in the crypto space, and there are many kinds of liquidity arrangements in the crypto space, a subset of them are coin related and snapshots are the preferred way, now. ICO-type ones are pretty rare but the VCs one debut at extremely high valuations for the crypto space
A VC saying “dont do a coin” which is probably what you meant, is also probably not funding a crypto venture. yeah, that makes sense to say you arent investing in a meme coin, since seemingly everyone with a platform sullies their brand this way
Deflationary, unregulated currency embraced by plutocrats and finance at the expense of the 99%; news at 11.
Idk if there is a social term for the conservation of rug-pulling across a society across time. But it’s almost like we need to get screwed over every generation or so to remember how power and economies work.
You can completely ignore the “merchant adoption” “mainstream adoption” “lets pretend the man cant figure out how to use this” pitches
There is LOTS of value to extract for yourself in a 24/7 borderless global economy with no transaction size limits and already exists
Such a surprise that David Sacks is the crypto czar and now the “reserve” has been expanded to include SOL also
Genuine questions- I don't really understand