[Octokiddie]

Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves. This pay cut was baked into Bitcoin protocol at the launch of the network (mostly, see "BIP 42" [1]). The OP link gives information about the block in which this pay cut was made.

I get that HN comments tend to dismiss Bitcoin. But the fact that for the fourth time this pay cut has happened without a hitch speaks volumes to what makes Bitcoin interesting: It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. Nobody can stop it. And it's extremely resistant to change. It requires no governmental approval. All attempts at subversion or interference have failed. There aren't many systems that come close to that kind of record.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawi...

[michael_vo]

As someone who's travelled to about 30 countries in the last 2 years, I used to dismiss until I went to Turkey few months ago. It is the only country I've been to where there are BTC ATMs and signs everywhere. At the Airport there are bitcoin company logos on hangars, and in the terminal. On the streets you see the bitcoin logo everywhere.

It's very useful for Turkey as it has 100% inflation yearly and the ATM fees are 10-20% to withdraw money. Apparently (from other travellers), it's very useful for the Russians to withdraw money in Turkey as well.

[Arainach]

>it's very useful for the Russians to withdraw money in Turkey as well.

"This product makes it easy to illegally bypass international sanctions" is not the compliment you think it is.

[grishka]

Those sanctions that do nothing for their alleged purpose (to make the war economically harder for the Russian government) yet disproportionately affect those people who can do absolutely nothing about them, right.

I say that a very disgruntled Russian who hasn't had a sane, predictable life since 2020.

[anonzzzies]

So it seems to work then? Get the population angry enough at their leaders to cause an uprise is part of the goal I guess.

[grishka]

This is based on the fundamentally wrong assumption that the government listens to their citizens.

[anonzzzies]

Uprises can be and often are violent. The listening is not required after a coup.

[kube-system]

> I say that a very disgruntled Russian who hasn't had a sane, predictable life since 2020.

Seems that it is has made it politically more difficult, if not economically so.

[scrollaway]

What’s your source on the sanctions doing nothing to make the war harder for Russia?

I’m asking because how on earth can you claim that? I’m close to the ecosystem involved and the sanctions work incredibly well. They’re not sufficient and there are bypasses but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.

[cft]

They work incredibly well for drawing nigh the end of dollar as the reserve currency, and nothing else. More and more countries are divesting of it, because it's used as a political weapon.

[scrollaway]

Sanctions aren’t only USD based and you’re not providing any evidence for your claims.

[throw0101c]

> Those sanctions that do nothing for their alleged purpose (to make the war economically harder for the Russian government) yet disproportionately affect those people who can do absolutely nothing about them, right.

Sanctions work by reducing growth and the economy of its target—usually a pariah state—over time by reducing growth year over year, which compounds (negatively) over time to make the target less and less influential.

> I say that a very disgruntled Russian who hasn't had a sane, predictable life since 2020.

And the alternative to economic sanctions would be… ?

[cdchn]

>who can do absolutely nothing about them

There is a _bit_ of hope you'll do something about it.

[grishka]

You seem really naive to think that this government has any feedback mechanisms whatsoever left.

[throw0101c]

> You seem really naive to think that this government has any feedback mechanisms whatsoever left.

The oligarchs could arrange to put something extra in the breakfast one day. Or there could be a chance meeting with a window.

[brokenmachine]

Of course there's feedback mechanisms. You just don't want to use them for whatever reason.

[anjel]

Looking at Russian history for the last 200 years or so, your hoping for a historical first, unless you want to consider 1917

[cdchn]

1917 could be considered comparatively recent if you compare that event to similar ones in other countries.

[trappist]

Do you think that the world is a better place if ordinary Russians can't access their own money?

[janalsncm]

The point of sanctions is as a disincentive against bad behavior at a national level. The bad behavior here is invading a sovereign country. If the sanctions worked it would cause internal pressure and shorten the war.

Of course no one wants hardship for everyday Russians, but we should be able to say the same about everyday Ukrainians, many of whom have had their whole lives upended.

The war is continuing because of only one man on the planet, and since violent options are off the table, functioning sanctions are the next best thing.

[Dalewyn]

>The point of sanctions is as a disincentive against bad behavior at a national level.

There is an argument to be made that sanctions don't work. Maybe they used to in the long distant past, but they don't now.

Russia doesn't give even half a fuck, Iran gives negative fucks, North Korea gives no fucks, and China is turning the sanctions back against us, to name some prominent examples.

I appreciate the west's desire to settle diplomatic problems using something other than war, but sanctions aren't the solution (anymore?).

[janalsncm]

To the extent that they don’t work, a lot of that is because of bitcoin. North Korea steals enough bitcoin to cover half of their military budget.

Given that this thread concerns whether the legitimate use cases of Bitcoin outweigh the illegitimate ones, I think this is an argument strongly against the position.

[aardvarkr]

You claimed this based on vibes without citing any sources. Do you really think North Korea is thriving right now? How about Iran’s booming economy? The mighty Russian bear is so crippled by sanctions that China effectively owns them, with Russia entirely dependent on them to for everything besides oil.

Every day that these sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia are in place those countries fall further and further behind. Every day their economies become less and less competitive

[startupsfail]

The same ordinary Russians that voted for the person that was clearly a dictator on the raise? Or the same ones that are cheerfully sending their children to kill innocent people in Ukraine? Or the same ones that were completely apathetic to the political opposition being arrested, poisoned or killed?

I’d say yes. That’s the point of the sanctions. And somebody should be tracing that Russian money on the ledger and getting the ill gotten properties traced and arrested.

[janalsncm]

I don’t think many people would agree that Russia has free and fair elections. Russia declares political opponents to be terrorists, effectively narrowing the Overton Window to be perfectly Putin sized.

Of course Russians don’t deserve economic hardship, but they don’t deserve to live in an autocracy either. And Ukrainians don’t deserve to be invaded. The lesson here is probably that the “great man” theory of history kind of ignores the everyday people whose lives were ruined by leaders who didn’t have to deal with the worst consequences of their decisions.

[startupsfail]

It’s the people that empower and enable. They are given guns, tanks, military aircrafts, missiles. They are manufacturing the weapons.

It doesn’t look like any of these get accidentally launched onto Kremlin. Or turned against conscription. Or used in any kind of resistance.

There are people there that are sacrificing their lives. Only for some reason, they are sacrificing these lives on the wrong side. On the side of supporting the dictatorship.

[nullityrofl]

This is the entire premise of sanctions, yes.

[grishka]

To punish people for someone else's decision?

[scrollaway]

I wish to remind you that many everyday Russians participate in the war in a variety of ways, from diffusing propaganda, to a variety of associations with the Russian military complex, to being on the frontlines themselves.

Those many everyday Russians punish people (Ukrainians mainly, Europeans in general) for someone else’s decision (Putin’s power trip).

I also wish to remind you that hardship in Russia does not compare to hardship in Ukraine right now.

I say this as someone with relatives in both countries today.

[mopsi]

Someone else's decision, and you are just following the orders?

It doesn't work that way. Putin is not working in a factory building tanks and artillery shells. He is not in an office programming which cities ballistic missiles will hit. He is not piloting bombers or manning guns shooting at Ukraine. He is not sitting in tanks ravaging through Ukrainian countriside, he is not in cellars raping and torturing civilians, he has not personally committed any of the tens of thousands documented war crimes in Ukraine. Millions upon millions of "ordinary Russians" choose to do this every day. Without the majority of Russian society actively working to carry out Putin's ideas, or passively sitting on their asses and trying to pretend they have nothing to do with it, Putin would be just a raving madman without any influence on the world like Hitler in his final days.

USSR collapsed when "ordinary Russians" simply stopped following orders. They were told to go there and do this, and they said NO in large enough numbers that the leaders were simply unable to do anything, because eventually even police and military stopped listening them. Russia has not yet reached this breaking point, and millions upon millions remain Putin's willing executioners, and bear the guilt that comes with it.

Every day, Ukrainians put their lives on the line, and hundreds die, in a desperate attempt to stop the curse on the world that Russia has become, while "ordinary Russians" are unwilling to even stage a large protest.

[wizardforhire]

Do you think the world is a better place if ordinary Russians are nuked along with ordinary people all over the world?

Why beat around the bush? The reason we’re playing the sanctions game, or the proxy war game, or any other bullshit games nations are playing is because the alternative is worse.

[nerdwaller]

Just wait until their home banks interrogate them about how they want to spend their local currency they wish to withdraw or banks shut off withdrawals entirely due to systemic issues.

Bitcoin may not be the end all solution, but it's a great current option.

[raincole]

Yes, it's a much bigger compliment than the parent comment suggested. It's the sole point of cryptocurrency -- working around limits set by authorities.

[dj_mc_merlin]

The entire premise is money without a central authority. This is a feature not a bug..

[wddkcs]

"When can't shut off their money!" Would be a great Bitcoin commercial, except there's no one to make it.

[jMyles]

> "This product makes it easy to illegally bypass international sanctions" is not the compliment you think it is.

It feels like this is a wedge across the community here at HN right now.

If the goal of the technology is to draw sovereignty from math and implement it in a way that's useful, then the capacity to trivially bypass legacy bugs (such as illubrication occurring in places where states assert their boundaries) seems like an enormous and meaningful compliment.

Maybe you think those are features and not bugs, but that's a different discussion (one I'm happy to have and about which my heart sings true).

[2muchcoffeeman]

I think it’s a problem if you have to point to a poorly functioning country and go “see? Bitcoin works!” Meanwhile the poor locals need to somehow get enough technology and understand Bitcoin. And in developed countries, no one really wants it or only buy it to speculate, not to actually make transactions.

Bitcoin ATMs used to be on the rise where I live many years ago. And I could make purchases. Now they are all gone.

Seems like the people adopting crypto don’t have many choices.

[Ferret7446]

It doesn't sound like a compliment until one day you become "illegal". I don't think you'd be happy with most laws that have existed throughout history.

[michael_vo]

That was not a compliment, just reporting the way btc is used.

For a regular human in the real world they will make very rational economic decisions in their best interests.

If the ATM fees are taking 20% of my money, of course I'm going to look for alternative systems of payments. If I can't use my Russian Rubles, of course I'm going to use BTC.

[akira2501]

"International sanctions" makes it sound like it has some legitimate worldwide weight that should be automatically respected by all people. Which works right up until you look at the exceptionally large list of things they want to sanction and you recognize that as the sole tool of "diplomacy" it can never work and might even qualify for crimes against humanity.

Which actually is a huge compliment because it means that government permission is no longer required to spend your money how you please.

Otherwise you're implicitly suggesting that Russia is somehow able to weather these sanctions only because bitcoin exists, or that bitcoin should be "reigned" in some way to make it compatible with arbitrary foreign government sanctions.

[dartos]

Depends on who you ask

[kaliqt]

Russian citizens aren't criminals. The sanctions are wrong.

[aforwardslash]

Like it or not, in a democracy, all citizens bear responsability for the actions of their state. I'm not saying people are individually accountable for every little detail, but they are for the collective of their misdeeds.

Either it is a democracy and the majority of the population is on board with it - explicitly or by ineptitude - or it is a dictatorship and they are cumplicit by inaction.

If we were discussing nazi party sympathizers in 1940 you wouldn't be even giving them the benefit of the doubt; the truth is, many people got onboard with what was going on because it wasn't with them directly. They got on with the party because it was what every one was doing at the time.

Turning a blind eye to the atrocities performed by the leaders your motherland elects when you lived there just because you got out is the worst cowardice I can think of.

[blackoil]

So, you are suggesting that if someone believes US has waged illegal war in Iraq, he has moral/legal authority to punish US citizens??

[aforwardslash]

If a US citizen believes the US has waged an illegal war, he is also responsible for it. Thats how democracy works.

Thats why when countries have mandatory drafts, you cant just say "no thanks, I didnt vote for it".

[catlifeonmars]

I think two parties can have opposing opinions on this. That’s the whole reason wars are fought: disagreements over moral or legal authority. Otherwise why resort to violence?

[Ferret7446]

> I'm not saying people are individually accountable for every little detail, but they are for the collective of their misdeeds.

That has been used to justify a lot of atrocities throughout history. Which is to say, if you're using that to justify an action, you'd better take a dozen steps back and take a couple months to think about what you're doing.

[aforwardslash]

> That has been used to justify a lot of atrocities throughout history.

Yes, it has. Because it is basically true. Thing is, there is a huge difference between what separates you from your enemy from the things you may have in common, but totalitarian governments tend to point to the differences (that are few) instead of the points in common (that are many).

So, if your government, your fellow men, mistreat a woman in Africa in some military operation, is that acceptable? Does that make the news? No. If your government, your fellow men, take decisions to invade/bomb/starve a country, is that acceptable for you?

Lets just say it isn't, because if it is, you're just an ahole.

Do you benefit* from the prosperity bestowed upon you by such government - such as using roads, having healthcare or basically being a productive member of the society? Lets assume you do. What is the difference between the government you tolerate for yourself and the government that mistreats a woman in Africa, or that bombs a syrian family, or that kills by -just being absent - thousands in Sudan?

None.

Isn't it the same government? How aren't YOU against of that?

> you'd better take a dozen steps back and take a couple months to think about what you're doing

American? Either that or a bot. Either way if you can't tie your own shoelaces OR you're living for the first time the fear of a 3rd world war, please refrain yourself.

[richrichie]

This absurd. If extended it applies to citizens of all democracies including possibly you. FYI, US waged multiple illegal wars and has been responsible for deaths and injury of millions in the middle east. So has Israel and UK. That does not make them targets.

[aforwardslash]

It definitely applies to me. My government, as a NATO member, supported multiple US-led operations, targeting nations not related with NATO interests (such as eg. Iraq). Was I in agreement? No. Am I responsible for the actions of my government? Obviously. Living in a democracy is not cherry-picking what you want; is understanding that a majority may have a different opinion than you, and may even listen to you; Responsibility is shared in both the good parts and the bad parts.

I understand this may be a shock to a US citizen, as it would be for me if I ever lived in a country where truth, facts and people interests matter little to nothing. And yes, I've also been in the military, so I was also coached in the art of defending the right of people having diverging opinions from my own.

[devbent]

Countries that feel the US has acted wrongly are free to impose sanctions against the US.

That is how these things work.

[gosub100]

That same argument could be used to target civilians then. "you're all part of the collective so you all have an equal chance to die".

[aforwardslash]

Who elects the government in a democracy? Civilians. Who is the drive force for any meaningful change in the regime? Civilians. So yes, its not a surprise civilians of a given regime suffer the consequences. In fact, that is the main premise of terrorism - bring consequences of the collective decisions closer to home.

What, did you expect to be morally above any other faction labelled as a "terrorist"? You aren't. I, as a citizen of a NATO country, obviously avoid countries where myself can be confused with the actions of my government. That is common sense.

You may argue "but I didn't agree with X or Y decision" - yes, but did you present yourself to scrutiny? Did you try to change things? Did you do any meaningful action to actually change the political course? Of course not, like most of us (myself included) don't. But don't try to skip on the responsibility - you, your people as a whole are responsible for the actions of your government.

[monero-xmr]

This has been happening for many years. There is a lot of commerce in Lebanon and Argentina conducted in crypto, usually USDT or USDC (dollar-backed stablecoins).

At this point to argue crypto has no utility with a straight face is just being willfully blind.

[antoniuschan99]

How does that work? It seems to make a lot of sense in Lebanon as they were freezing or only allowing $150 a month withdrawals. Do people really self custody their funds? When they need local currency they just go to the bitcoin atm’s to withdraw? Also fees would be somewhat high so do they use something Monero?

[aforwardslash]

"commerce". There is a reason why its performed in cryptocurrencies

[lazyasciiart]

An interesting story on bitcoin in Turkey that I just read: https://www.wired.com/story/faruk-ozer-turkey-crypto-fraud/

[JohnTHaller]

It keeps chugging, but it's not terribly useful for a typical person. Close to $20 for a transaction that takes an hour or so to complete is kinda rough.

[smallmancontrov]

When was the last time you bought groceries with a bank reserve? If tradfi can have two layers above the reserve assets, why can't crypto?

[brigadier132]

It's digital currency without counterparty risk and no inflation risk. Similar to why gold is useful as a store of value. You can hide it, and if nobody knows it exists nobody can take it from you. The downside is if people know you have it you can be robbed.

If you are a normal person in a stable country it's not terribly useful. If you are a normal person in a not so stable place, it can be very useful to you.

[skybrian]

It's odd how people say "no inflation risk" when the price of Bitcoin goes down sometimes, and it's the same thing. Inflation is a price change.

The difference, of course, is that the price of Bitcoin also goes up sometimes.

[brigadier132]

Look, I'm not talking about it as a speculative asset, I'm just stating why it can be useful. And by inflation risk I meant risk of being devalued due to artificial increases in supply.

[skybrian]

The thing is, users don’t care why the currency lost value, just that it did. Fixing one reason for that is only a start.

Inelastic supply means the price depends entirely on demand, so it will shoot up and down when demand changes. This is a speculator’s playground.

But another word for the situation causing a price increase is a shortage. Stability comes from elastic supply that responds to demand. Algorithmic stablecoins are snake oil, but they do appear to have more stable prices until they collapse.

To prevent that, there needs to be someone willing to buy back the currency when demand collapses (losing a lot of money in the process) rather than running away like everyone else.

Does Bitcoin have enough die-hard believers to do that? So far they’ve been able to stave off complete collapse and come back stronger, but in the future, who knows. When investors get spooked and sell off Bitcoin ETF’s, what happens?

[throw0101c]

> It's digital currency without counterparty risk and no inflation risk. Similar to why gold is useful as a store of value.

Not being able to reverse transactions is itself a risk, and a deflationary currency that is susceptible to hoarding isn't a great idea IMHO. And given gold's fluctuating value (though better than BTC's), I'm not sure I'd consider it a good store of value; it certainly isn't a good inflation hedge:

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789

Neither in the short-term, nor the longer-term:

> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.

* PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram...

* https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/

And being gold-backed does not help with price stability either:

* https://archive.is/FWKcL / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...

In fact, having a currency / monetary base that cannot be easy grown can hinder economic growth:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine

The sooner countries abandoned the gold standard, the sooner they started recovering from the Great Depression:

* https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/the-great-depression-...

[brigadier132]

I'm not arguing for the US to replace it's currency with bitcoin. I'm saying why it can be useful and it's not purely a scam. I would never advocate for someone to put all their money into bitcoin but if you reach a level of wealth in your life (that does not have to be that high) maybe you start to think about what happens if your country suddenly becomes a dictatorship and it makes sense to store a very small percentage of your wealth so that if the worst does happen your family can be protected.

[jkoudys]

Crypto "currency"

[kaliqt]

Think about this: wire transfers. It has happened many times banks hold up the transactions and skim off the top with fees.

Bitcoin has no such issue, it's completely transparent and far cheaper.

[JohnTHaller]

I send wire transfers via Wise for about $4. I can receive ACH payments for free. I do both with PortableApps.com. The transaction fees for Bitcoin are so high, most of our users stopped using it for donations and things.

Back in 2013, we'd get a BTC donation every week or two. Now we get one maybe every 3 months. In 2013, the average BTC transaction fee was about 3 cents. Today, the average fee was $19.76.

[dzhiurgis]

For a secure long term store of value thats kinda fast and cheap

[bpye]

It may be technologically secure, but it is still very volatile compared to more traditional options. That doesn’t seem to be a good thing.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yeah. Way to move the goalposts from the praises that Bitcoin evangelists historically, and currently, sing though.

[Ferret7446]

Define "typical person". The average person does not live in a first world country with relatively stable banking systems.

[nailer]

Most modern L1s have transaction fees of a fraction of a penny and confirmation times similar to tapping a credit card.

[nailer]

Not complaining about moderation but it’s interesting to note that something factual and easily verifiable is being downvoted. It’s very much the ‘my bags’ crypto culture.

[whimsicalism]

yeah the uses will be on the l2s

[stale2002]

And here comes the argument about the lightning network that I literally have been hearing since 2017.

For as "inevitable" as it's supporters claim it to be, it sure is taking a long time for anyone to care about it, outside of bitcoin maxi twitter influencers.

The rest of the crypto industry has moved on. It simply took to long for bitcoin to be used for anything outside of speculation. And other chains have taken up the actual transactions usecase.

[whimsicalism]

oh i just meant this in general about transaction cases, i actually think bitcoin sucks compared to ethereum

[talldayo]

They call it Lightning because it's a last-ditch attempt to Frankenstein Bitcoin back to life!

[talldayo]

...which themselves are unique projects that might as well separate from the L1 chain entirely if they intend to actually solve the transaction bottleneck issue. Stuff like Lightning is cute on paper, but it really only stands to make you realize how horribly doomed the main currency is conceptually.

L2 chains are where I stopped being interested in crypto. It's like reading the plaque of Ozymandias and thinking to yourself "Ah, the desert. What a lovely place to build my next palace."

[whimsicalism]

I mean I think that bitcoin is a dumb project, but layer 2s clearly make sense and are an inevitability - another chain has custody and keeps track of its own state and lets you do custom things there.

[shuckles]

> It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. Nobody can stop it.

About as rare as email spam? Or SEO content farms? There's a lot of phenomenon that are hard to control in a distributed network; Internet Protocol was designed for exactly this.

[jMyles]

> About as rare as email spam?

This strikes me as a defective comparison: are there people who are trying to receive email spam, but are unable to do so due to international borders?

The health of the internet in resisting censorship is well-documented, as you point out - and it has ramifications both desirable and otherwise. The innovation of blockchain tech is that it adds a mechanism for transmitting value in this censorship-resistant environment.

[shuckles]

People circumvent currency controls and financial regulation over the internet with gift cards, airline miles, WoW gold farms, and more. Bitcoin's notable quality is not technology; it's the social psychology which drew enough speculation that it covered for laundering black market financial transactions at unprecedented scale. Some of that illegal volume might be sympathetic oppressed citizens; my guess is the vast majority is old fashioned crime and terrorism.

Notably, there is nothing technically notable about Bitcoin's censorship resistance. It's no more resistant than the internet itself. What's notable is the scale and efficiency at which it attracts clean money to wash dirty money, and none of that is about Proof of Work or Merkle DAGs.

The argument I was responding to falls apart when you notice that The Pirate Bay, Libgen, and Scihub are all extremely resilient despite lacking all the Game Theory gobbledygook which BTC adds.

[nailer]

Oddly enough if email had adopted proof of work (spam was the original incentive for PoW, originally called ‘hashcash’) spam would be less of a problem

[tromp]

The notion of PoW predates hashcash. Hashcash is just the simplest PoW algorithm. There are PoW that work entirely differently from Hashcash, such as finding fixed length cycles in random bipartite graphs.

[phantomathkg]

> Nobody can stop it.

Hypothetically, government can with severe enough punishment. Governments will do anything to squeeze tax from things, and as long as any digital transfer is not being taxed, it will find way to stop it or squeeze tax out of it.

[lanstin]

I think many governments could buy enough compute to mine most blocks and not have any transactions in them. If they wanted to. And isn't GenAI attentional deep networks the currently more interesting way to use excess compute now?

[latchkey]

Nope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM

[whimsicalism]

There are tons of countries with severe capital controls where crypto is thriving.

[XorNot]

There's also an endless stream of very surprised crypenthusiasts who owe large tax bills. The tax department may not get you on any given year, but they will eventually get you.

[whimsicalism]

There are thriving dollar and crypto black markets in Nigeria and Argentina. Government does not appear to be getting them.

I am not talking about the irs as you seem to be imagining.

[nullityrofl]

Right but _they_ are talking about the IRS. If the US government wanted to end crypto, they would give it a whole lot better shot than Nigeria and Argentina.

[smallmancontrov]

There are countries that can mount credible attacks by partitioning the largest mining operations and shutting down the largest on/off ramps, and there are countries with severe capital controls where crypto is thriving.

The test doesn't enter hard mode until the venn diagram grows an intersection.

[mbesto]

"tons"...which?

[wslh]

> Nobody can stop it.

Simple answer: yes, they can. For example a state actor or a crazy billionare could spend enough money to launch a 51% attack. Indeed the theoretical attack requires only around 20% of mining power.

Also, the next generation of people could choose another blockchain, Bitcoin turns irrelevant because another blockchain surpasses it in the audience.

[yownie]

It would now requires more like a trillion and they would also have to KEEP spending or everyone could just switch chains at point.

[zooq_ai]

Delusional, The cost of energy to carry out 51% attack is a few millions / minute.

[cdchn]

Delusional is also thinking "oh they'd just hard fork and roll back the transactions." And then they just keep doing it over and over again.

[bufferoverflow]

Even if you had the money, there's not enough hardware for sale to get 20% of mining power. Not even 2%. High-end mining hardware (most efficient) is almost always sold out.

[wslh]

State actors could build those ASICs or use proxies.

[bufferoverflow]

It's not that easy. Russia has been trying to build their own competitive chips for decades with no luck. All their attempts lag modern chips by multiple generations.

You would need to duplicate TSMC to create enough ASICs.

[worik]

> speaks volumes to what makes Bitcoin interesting:

Yes It is interesting

It is not useful

It is a huge waste

[zooq_ai]

Governments, Big Corps can easily co-ordinate a 51% attack on any proof-of-work networks.

If BTC's marketcap is $1T and it'll only take $5B for a 51% attack, there can be some arbitrage opportunity for a large hedge fund determined enough.

The only thing preventing this is the attacker must execute this flawlessly including attacking all the forks that may happen.

[monero-xmr]

The problem is the government has to acquire the hardware. There isn’t 51% of the hash power in spare mining equipment lying around. It’s all decentralized.

[aforwardslash]

You're assuming you dont have state sponsors heavily invested in it already - and have been for years. Which is actually kind of hilarious, as it also assumes the blockchain is safe from other threat models. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant chunk of bitcoin movements were state sponsored; its the next logical move - first you build a brivate internet, then you build a private currency.

[zooq_ai]

Ummm really?, is that your counter-argument for governments that have Trillions in their budget?

[monero-xmr]

The US government could spend trillions to surreptitiously manufacture extremely specialized equipment without anyone knowing, turn it on to do a 51% attack, and when it’s over the network will just fork and reverse the transactions. It’s illogical

[nullityrofl]

I think it's fair to say that western cryptologic agencies could likely repurpose hardware, perhaps to a degree unknown in the public space.

[zooq_ai]

delusional to think, the western governments can't attack the forked version too.

Also, who decides which transactions to reverse? and why would an entity with 51% power agree to that?

No one in crypto has thought through this

[monero-xmr]

Yep you’re the first person to ever consider this - tell the world!

[ramchip]

There's also a legal risk for private entities, as the conviction of Avraham Eisenberg showed recently, and I think a strong possibility that a successful attack would crash the valuation of BTC and make it impossible to recoup costs.

[jbverschoor]

That’s not what a 51% attack can do. It doesn’t allow you to “steal” money

[tromp]

It allows you to double spend, which is pretty much stealing from the first recipient...

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves.

I fully understand what "the havening" is, and this statement is grossly misleading. Yes, the mining rewards for each block were cut in half. That does not mean "miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves". A lower block reward means some combination of (a) transaction fees will go up, (b) mining competition goes down because it doesn't make as much sense to spend electricity on a smaller reward and (c) the overall deflationary economics built into Bitcoin mean while the rewards are nominally less, they are worth more.

[bytearray]

What happens when the last coin is mined and there's no incentive for people to run the network of computers that validates transactions? It seems like at that point the value would go to zero.

[foldor]

Miners would still collect transaction fees.

[spenvo]

This is the inevitable outcome.

And yet it is (extremely) improbable that individuals will pay many many billions of dollars/year to move money around (which is what it takes to secure the network).

The only way the network's security does not collapse is if bitcoin's value goes up faster than it declines over time (50% every four years (the halving)).

No one does the basic napkin math on this and it drives me nuts. Unless the code changes, Bitcoin inevitably fails.

[brokenmachine]

So some miners would decide to not mine anymore, and the difficulty would automatically lower?

[nostrademons]

The financial industry is 20% of US GDP, and its sole purpose is "moving money around" (including forward in time, which Bitcoin isn't all that good at, but Ethereum is pretty effective for). That's about $5T that people pay.

[tromp]

You don't need the price to keep going up, if you have a permanent backlog of high fee paying transactions. Which is what the Bitcoin design is counting on...

[mrb]

"And yet it is (extremely) improbable that individuals will pay many many billions of dollars/year"

And yet it is happening right now ! You should have looked at the data to see what fees are being paid :-) Looking at the average over the last 10 days: bitcoin users have been paying about 1 BTC in fees per block, so 6 BTC of fees per hour, or $8M per day, or $3B per year (yes, billion with a B): https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transaction-fees-...

I can't locate a source that calculates exact fees spent over the last 12 months, but per the chart above it seems to be around $1B per year.

[basementcat]

Presumably at that point the network would be entirely funded by transaction fees.

[matvore]

  > Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves.

Miners don't decide the consensus rules. The nodes validate blocks, and the miners generate them.

The halvening timing was coded a long time ago, and in order to change it, the nodes would need to adopt the new code by installing updated clients, and at that point, you have a hard fork, because there will be nodes on the old rules, either accidentally through not updating or intentionally through using a modified core distro, and you have the new rules' valid blocks is a disjoint set from the old rules'.

The new rules' block set being a subset of the old rules' is a strictening of the consensus rules. A strictening consensus scheme is a soft fork and can keep the network in one piece.

So, there is no real way for the miners to avoid the halvening without a hardfork and a great risk to the network.

[throw0101c]

> It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging.

The "economic incentive" is a deflationary currency that rewards hoarding.

[hwbunny]

But it's unusable in a warlike scenario. During war there is no internet...

[l0ng1nu5]

Bitcoin doesn't require internet, the blockstream satellites broadcast the block chain as well.

https://blockstream.com/satellite/

[kube-system]

Approximately nobody will have that during wartime either.

[kobalsky]

this is hilarous, I mean, there's a literal satellite constellation beaming the blockchain and the argument is "nuh-uh!"

I guess that until a satellite shoots a wad of bills through your window some people won't give it credit.

[kube-system]

A satellite constellation is only half of a network. And a system that nobody can actually use is not a useful or functional system. Approximately nobody has a receiver for this network today. The receivers won't fall out of the sky tomorrow if war breaks out.

And even if everyone did have receivers, commercial satellites are highly regulated by most nations, likely will be targeted during any future major war, and there's no guarantee they won't be coopted for other uses by their host nations. Blockstream is a tiny company and doesn't even own or operate any of these satellites. You might as well just use viasat or iridium.

[cdchn]

No Internet required - just a $500 "Blockstream" Satellite receiver device!

[kobalsky]

IIRC you could build your own kit with a software defined radio device.

you just needed a recycled satellite dish and some other off the shelf components.

[kube-system]

If people need to put in that much work, it won't be of much use to buy groceries with it, as the kid at the grocery store can't even spell SDR. If it were me, I'd spend my effort rebuilding terrestrial IP networks over copper instead. It would be more useful.

[EternalUsenet]

This is why Bitcoin maxis are ultimately delusional. They think the world revolves around them and, no matter what happens, they will always be at the top.

[cableshaft]

Stocks and bonds and commodities and 401ks and CDs aren't useful in that scenario either, but it doesn't stop people from putting most of their money into those.

[kube-system]

But they are backed up by SIPC/FDIC which is effectively backed up by the world's most powerful military.

The US's financial power is strongly linked with their ability to project military power.

[cableshaft]

When the war has gotten so bad that there's no internet? That's what the parent was arguing (and yeah, sure, bitcoin can't really work that well without the internet).

I've got a little precious metal in case of a SHTF situation, although I'm not sure how useful even that would be.

People probably care more about food or fuel or maybe some pills than they do about bartering for silver or gold in that situation. Might be able to convince a few people to go for it, but still might be difficult.

[aforwardslash]

Internet is hands-down the most fragile communication backbone a country can have; you can easily blackhole a whole country (satellite included) by just propagating "configuration". Most physical communication can easily be disrupted by cutting cables or by dragging an anchor at the bottom of the ocean.

In contrast, a vlf transmitter can cover the globe consuming the same power as an old tv set. Its not high bandwidth, but enough for teletype.

Everything that requires stable power is able to function in modern warfare scenarios, as long as UN rules apply; ukranians have internet, palestinians have controlled internet, and sudan victims have neither.

[cableshaft]

> ukranians have internet, palestinians have controlled internet, and sudan victims have neither

Well in that case, there are people in Sudan that are using bitcoin[1], especially to help others escape the region.

And there are people in Africa using bitcoin without reliable internet access[2] (not just Sudan) using various methods mentioned in that article.

So it seems that bitcoin is not totally useless for a region that has limited or no internet access, as long as it's operating elsewhere.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/07/05/how-b...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/03/15/how-a...

[cdchn]

I think the US government/military is stronger than the Internet. Shit the Internet isn't even that strong.

In a real "collapse of the US government STHF situation" you're going to want to invest in beans and bullets, not crypto.

[cableshaft]

I guess my point is our world is so intertwined with the internet that if it permanently goes away we're pretty much in a 'the next war will be fought with sticks and stones' situation anyway, so what does it matter how well the military can defend those bonds and fiat.

Re:SHTF for sure, which is why it's not really worth considering, unless you're so sure it's going to happen and you're already accumulating those beans and bullets (also nothing is stopping you from doing that while also buying other things in case it doesn't happen, or takes a lot longer to happen than you predict).

[kube-system]

Yeah, 401ks and CDs are stores of value and not spending mechanisms, so it was a bad comparison to begin with. But physical paper cash, backed by an organization with many nukes and the means to use them, is probably the best thing to hold during war. Besides useful commodities.

[cableshaft]

You can buy and hold bitcoin and eventually cash it out just as you can a 401k or a CD. Now that there are bitcoin ETFs many people and organizations are treating bitcoin as if it's a store of value (whether that's wise or not is arguable, but that doesn't stop people from seeing it as such).

But if there's no internet, there's no way you can eventually cash it out.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yes but techno-anarchist fetishists don’t line up to spout the immovable perfection of government-controlled fiat currency.

[cableshaft]

Maybe not techno-anarchists, but there's plenty of people on the internet that are loud and vocal advocates of stocks and 401ks as well (nothing against them, most of my savings are in that myself).

[lowkey]

Bitcoin transactions work via satellite, ham radio, or cellphone. If there is any form of working communication you can send or receive Bitcoin.

If comms are temporarily disabled, your Bitcoin is still safe on tens of thousands of nodes.

[MadnessASAP]

Would you mind sharing any examples of somebody accepting transactions on behalf of the Bitcoin network over HAM radio?

Obviously it's possible, if you can make a TCP connection over carrier pigeon, you can make it over anything. I'm curious to see a working example however.

[lowkey]

https://survivedoomsday.com/how-to-send-bitcoin-over-ham-rad...