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by hudon 2335 days ago
If you're capable of playing a long con, it costs much less than the stated dollar prices.

With Bitcoin, for example, a smart malicious actor could infiltrate the Core development team and through their social capital make certain malicious pull requests get merged. This way, if the chain ever splits (let's say, due to a bug you planted), you can actually also influence miners to hop onto a minor chain without you ever owning any hashing power!

To see how this is done, look at the 2013 Bitcoin fork and see how a couple developers steered large miners away from the majority chain: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

The only counter-argument to this is how code reviews should catch this, but history has clearly shown that bugs (including supply-inflation-causing ones) make it into cryptocurrencies all the time: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

Hash Rate is security theatre.
1 comments
qertoip 2335 days ago
The double spend is only possible against specific counter-party, for example an exchange or a merchant.

For very large value transfers exchanges are expected to wait for 100 confirmations (~17 hours) until they credit balance.

It's all probabilistic.

Finally, Bitcoin PoW is not security theatre, it is just one piece of the complex security system.

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hudon 2335 days ago
The most recent bug (that we know of) that allowed double-spend was in production for over a year [0] (~Sept 2017 to ~Sept 2018). I don't think it is possible to accurately determine the probability of this bug being exploited (because you are right, it is "all probabilistic"), but this inability to determine the probabilities is precisely why PoW is security theatre. PoW has always been painted as a mathematical model of the security of the system (see featured article), but in reality this model is not accounting for the much more realistic attack vectors. Hence it fails to be an accurate model.

If you're just saying that PoW isn't painting the whole picture, I agree with you.

[0] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/

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