[ur-whale]

It most certainly does bother me, and while there are various ongoing efforts to at least mitigate the problem (e.g. coinjoin), I don't know if Bitoin is actually "fixable" in that regard save a major hard fork.

But Bitcoin was designed in '09 and paved the way, that buys it some slack in my book: you can't expect it to be perfect on first iteration.

Bitcoin also has also some other properties that have been amply demonstrated thus far, such as resistance to attackers and forgery, and for which it is rather easy to convince oneself that the chain is solid just by reading the white paper.

As for nano, I'm honestly skeptical. I read the various white papers on the site and haven't found anything yet that looks like a justification that the "block lattice" data structure is in any way resistant to attacks.

[onelastjob]

Do you cut Windows 98 slack and still use it because it was designed in the 90s, or do you use a modern OS? Cutting technology slack because it was the first iteration doesn't make sense to me.

I think Nano is more secure than Bitcoin considering that the majority hashrate of BTC is controlled by mining pools in China. If the Chinese government decides to coerce the owners of those mining pools to perform a block reorg tomorrow, it will happen.

Nano does not have the sort of incentives that create centralization. In fact, Nano voting power is getting more decentralized over time, which is the opposite of what has happened with Bitcoin.

When you consider that Nano txs take under 1 second, are feeless, are scalable, and require no POW mining, it's obviously superior to Bitcoin. All that Bitcoin supporters have left is vague "security concerns" about Nano. But if Nano is not secure, wouldn't it have been compromised by now considering there is an economic incentive to do so and considering that the mainnet has been running since 2014 or 2015?

[alwillis]

I think Nano is more secure than Bitcoin considering that the majority hashrate of BTC is controlled by mining pools in China. If the Chinese government decides to coerce the owners of those mining pools to perform a block reorg tomorrow, it will happen.

Please stop spreading FUD.

The only thing a 51% attack would allow is for them to double spend their own bitcoin. They can't reverse already valid blocks, for example.

"Why Chinese Miners Won’t Stage a 51% Attack on Bitcoin"—https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-chinese-miners-wont-stage...

[onelastjob]

I don't think it's FUD. If the Chinese government wanted to destroy BTC (because it violated their currency control laws), they could do it by coercing the owners of the mining pools located in China and those pools do do currently have over 51% of hash power. They could do a reorg of blocks resulting in a double spend attack, as you point out. A successful double spend attack by China would cause a huge crash in the price of Bitcoin and threaten its future viability. How is this FUD when it could be carried out tomorrow?

[alwillis]

I don't think it's FUD. Of course you don't; you're here promoting Nano.

If the Chinese government wanted to destroy BTC (because it violated their currency control laws), they could do it by coercing the owners of the mining pools located in China and those pools do do currently have over 51% of hash power.

Again, this is FUD. It's not a good look to market Nano by trying to scare people into believing something like a 51% attack could happen tomorrow, when it's extremely unlikely to happen. Nano should be able to stand on its own without these scare tactics.

You're assuming a double-spend attack on a block mined by Chinese miners would destroy Bitcoin when everyone knows such an attach is a theoretical possibility. As mentioned in the article I posted and you conveniently didn't respond to, there are many safeguards that would alert other miners.

Bitcoin is about to pass $700 billion market cap—that's a lot of incentive to stop bitcoin from being destroyed. Even China knows it's better for them to have a non-sovereign store of value that's not the dollar.

It would be pretty easy for the rest of bitcoin to see that the block is not legitimate and ignore it. Don't believe me? Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopoulos said the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM.

It would take a lot of coercing to convince these miners to destroy their lucrative businesses for what would essentially be a one-time stunt that only effected a block these particular miners cared about. I suspect many of them would choose to shutdown their mining rather than destroy their businesses… and since it's not possible to do the attack without all of them onboard, it wouldn't happen.

Now that billionaires are all-in on bitcoin, it'll become in everyone's best interest to increase mining in the United States by partnering will the oil and gas industry, which has already started.

"Oil Companies Will Dominate BTC Mining in Five Years: Marty Bent"—https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b...

[alwillis]

… it's obviously superior to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's $667 billion dollar market cap (and growing) would like to have a word… https://bitbo.io

It certainly is not a superior store of value compared to bitcoin.

[onelastjob]

Blackberry phones once had a lot more market share than iPhones too.

[alwillis]

That’s true—the CEOs of RIM decided that Apple couldn’t follow through on what they announced.

The iPhone was a disruptive, revolutionary device that was 5 years ahead of everything else.

Nano is interesting but not revolutionary. Bitcoin is just starting to hit its stride.