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by heavenlyblue 2455 days ago
You know, my first foray into the world of Big Corpo people was when I met this guy studying at <pretentious arts uni in London>.

He was looking for ways to use blockchain to help regions with unstable currencies. Well, he was doing his Ph.D, actually on that topic.

So he would approach people and suggest they all meet up and have this think-tank somewhere in North London.

Now imagine you've got about 20-30 people sitting in the same room: and they are all engineers, regional managers, financiers. Not a single person has _any_ idea what blockchain is.

They were all meeting weekly to have this hours-long discussion about how they could possibly apply this thing blockchain to solving issues in the third world countries.

> There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work.

One of his ideas was to create virtual money. But they forget that _secure_ proof-of-work-based money would require the same amount of initial investment (mining hardware) as if you simply went and bought several tons of gold and then issued a currency supported by that gold.

1 comments

Bitcoin didnt require initial investments of mining hardware, initially it was mined with normal computers. Mining hardware is more like a running cost that goes up with usage/value.
The specialized mining hardware is a red herring.

The security of the Bitcoin network isn't a function of its hashrate or the number of nodes, though these things correlate; it's a function of the cost of running it.

Regardless of whether the network is run on specialized hardware, old desktops, or TI-83s, the network is only secure so long as it costs enough to run that any motivated attacker would have to spend more money than they can leverage to attack it.

There is even a site that tells you how much money you'd need to run 51% attacks on different cryptocurrencies. (It looks like the site used Nicehash payouts as a data point but Nicehash is down/being updated so those values are no longer there, but I found an article with a screenshot from May last year.)

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/05/30/heres-how-much-it...