This literally means forcing their way into peoples homes all around the world, find the computers hosting the nodes which can be anything from desktop PC's to Raspberry Pi one card computer chips hidden in cleaver places. Nah, that just doesn't make sense. Would make more sense to actually buy 10,000 PC's of their own.
Problem for them is that even if they did, they wouldn't gain any control by doing so because the already existing nodes will still exist and decide the rules. None of those would accept CIA spying on them or doing other nasty stuff.
Just how many altruistic nerds do you think are hashing this stuff?
Mining generates passive income, you don't need to be a nerd to want a space heater that also generate more money than the electricity cost for keeping it running, the information is public: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart
Yet we have ample evidence of those gov orgs doing way worse
I know what they're doing, they're pure evil and sometimes even worse than Nazi Germany. Still, they haven't yet managed to hack or manipulate the Bitcoin protocol, only the exchange rate to the USD which isn't even hard to do.
Last thing, what makes you think that one single centralized server that's 100% controlled by CIA, 100% rigged, censored, proprietary and all that kind of shit would be better than Bitcoin. It's like defending Dominion when paper voting exist.
Yea I mean, we’re clearly getting mixed up in semantics. My 5,001 number was exemplifying how few nodes are needed. As you’re saying now, buying 10k or 20k nodes would probably be way easier. 200k nodes would be easily manageable. They already have access to tech like that. Dell, HP, IBM, they produce millions of servers per month and none of them would look twice at some org buying 20k high spec servers. I have worked for massive companies who buy tens of thousands of servers/workstations/laptops every month just to keep operations running. So I mean, we aren’t talking about high numbers by any stretch.
As for controlling nodes, I’d expect that the regular tech enthusiast (even if he makes a moderate passive income) will expect a large degree of churn. Which’ll filter uncontrolled nodes out of the system fairly frequently. Whereas these guys will have unlimited budget to remain active, not to mention having access to the expertise needed to mask their actions. It’s already done, I’m sure. It’s unbelievable to me to think they haven’t already at least begun attempting to lock in their advantage considering the budgets and personnel they control.
Yeah, no doubt they could easily obtain millions of computers just like that and spin up nodes on all of them, sync with the network. Point is that every Bitcoin node holds a full copy of the block chain which is currently about 200GB in size, so even if CIA created 1M nodes they operate that wouldn't allow them to alter the chain or pose any threat.
They could change the rules for their own advantage but that would only result in a fork, where we get Bitcoin (original unchanged with 10,000+ independent nodes) and a new "CIA Bitcoin" with 1M malicious nodes that nobody would use.
The 51% attack has nothing to do with the nodes, it's about the mining hash rate. The difference here is that while a node could run on a $100 one card computer chip with a HDD attached to it, a mining device (ASIC) which is about 100M times more powerful than a regular PC at solving the SHA256 hash and does nothing else cost about $3000 per unit and provides 110TH/s using about 1500W of energy.
No doubt that CIA could easily cough up billions of dollars and build a huge data center with over 1M mining devices consuming 1.4GW of energy, but even if they did that, all they could do is to delay on chain transactions, causing payments to have a 50% chance to be verified in 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes as they normally do.
Double that setup and CIA could delay transactions to between 10 and 30 minutes. Sure it's annoying with slower payments and all that but that kind of attack isn't really a big threat. Also if something like that where going on for a longer time everyone might just agree to fork into a different algorithm than SHA256, to say something that works best on a GPU.
Monero do this all the time to prevent ASIC units. And with that simple action taken, CIA would suddenly sit there with billions of dollars worth of now worthless Chinese hardware.
It's good to be paranoid, don't get me wrong. All I'm saying is that arguing against Bitcoin is like being afraid of a certain brand of car just because the radio might be produced in China, and then go and buy a 100% Chinese car instead.
I was getting my terminology mixed up: I think I meant hash rate instead of nodes (I thought they were pretty much interchangeable terms, but I guess each node could have a subpar hash rate!).
I guess I should ask your advice about my concerns about crypto then, rather than stating facts, because I’m clearly not as fully up to speed as I thought I was here:
That majority hashrate situation: my understanding of that is that if you control more than 50% of hashrate, you can control the drop rate and game the system to disproportionately award yourself more coins than you should get based on your raw TH/s would suggest. Thus, you’d be able to scoop up a lot more coins than the rest of the pool. Is that correct?
I was told another thing about that majority situation too (not sure if it’s nodes or hash rate though!): if one party controls a majority, they can scupper the built in anonymity and track individual coin transactions down to your personal machine/IP, thus identifying you. Is that correct?
I guess I haven’t looked into crypto in a long time so I may be remembering old out of date concerns, or even just ancient conspiracy theories tbh. I didn’t even know that GPU mining was still a profitable option! So I’m definitely misinformed at the very least!! Thanks :)
No worries :) The development is making fast progress these days.
There are node operators and there are miners, node operators holds a copy of the entire blockchain which is verified by the miners, so there really isn't much that can be altered there, no matter how many nodes one single entity control as a change would just create a fork.
Now mining is what generate profits, 6.25BTC per block is the current payout, in about 4 years from now it'll go down to 3.125BTC per 10 minutes. In any case, controlling more than 50% theoretically allows some tampering with the transactions, but coins that are just stored in a wallet are safe.
It wouldn't go unnoticed tho since the network keeps track of which entities are mining and many people are likely to throw in some more computation power to keep up against whoever tries. Last but not least, most ASIC miners are built in China so the question is will CIA and China cooperate, and how fast could China build them? China has been considered a threat ever since the beginning but they never actually managed to do anything.
Which brings us to the second question, anonymity in Bitcoin is actually a common misconception, machine and IP cannot be traced easily, maybe if you run a full node but since there are light nodes too a hacker wouldn't be able to tell the difference. TOR and VPN can be used as well for additional safety.
Then there's the exchanges who knows your identity, buying Bitcoin from there and transferring to your own wallet before doing say a drug deal isn't very anonymous or smart. If using Monero instead you could get away with that approach since Monero is anonymous by design.
Bitcoin however isn't very anonymous and has never been. Tho with a coin mixer or any simple money laundering scheme involved it can easily be made anonymous. I think the easiest description would be opt-in anonymity, unlike banks where anonymity simply doesn't exist.
So to conclude, there are certain risks with cryptocurrencies still. But they're already far better and safer than any legacy payment system or even cash. It's complicated stuff and requires a huge amount of math and engineering skills to understand, I'm an engineer myself but not even I fully understands how it all works ;)
This literally means forcing their way into peoples homes all around the world, find the computers hosting the nodes which can be anything from desktop PC's to Raspberry Pi one card computer chips hidden in cleaver places. Nah, that just doesn't make sense. Would make more sense to actually buy 10,000 PC's of their own.
Problem for them is that even if they did, they wouldn't gain any control by doing so because the already existing nodes will still exist and decide the rules. None of those would accept CIA spying on them or doing other nasty stuff.
Mining generates passive income, you don't need to be a nerd to want a space heater that also generate more money than the electricity cost for keeping it running, the information is public: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart
I know what they're doing, they're pure evil and sometimes even worse than Nazi Germany. Still, they haven't yet managed to hack or manipulate the Bitcoin protocol, only the exchange rate to the USD which isn't even hard to do.
Last thing, what makes you think that one single centralized server that's 100% controlled by CIA, 100% rigged, censored, proprietary and all that kind of shit would be better than Bitcoin. It's like defending Dominion when paper voting exist.
Yea I mean, we’re clearly getting mixed up in semantics. My 5,001 number was exemplifying how few nodes are needed. As you’re saying now, buying 10k or 20k nodes would probably be way easier. 200k nodes would be easily manageable. They already have access to tech like that. Dell, HP, IBM, they produce millions of servers per month and none of them would look twice at some org buying 20k high spec servers. I have worked for massive companies who buy tens of thousands of servers/workstations/laptops every month just to keep operations running. So I mean, we aren’t talking about high numbers by any stretch.
As for controlling nodes, I’d expect that the regular tech enthusiast (even if he makes a moderate passive income) will expect a large degree of churn. Which’ll filter uncontrolled nodes out of the system fairly frequently. Whereas these guys will have unlimited budget to remain active, not to mention having access to the expertise needed to mask their actions. It’s already done, I’m sure. It’s unbelievable to me to think they haven’t already at least begun attempting to lock in their advantage considering the budgets and personnel they control.
Yeah, no doubt they could easily obtain millions of computers just like that and spin up nodes on all of them, sync with the network. Point is that every Bitcoin node holds a full copy of the block chain which is currently about 200GB in size, so even if CIA created 1M nodes they operate that wouldn't allow them to alter the chain or pose any threat.
They could change the rules for their own advantage but that would only result in a fork, where we get Bitcoin (original unchanged with 10,000+ independent nodes) and a new "CIA Bitcoin" with 1M malicious nodes that nobody would use.
The 51% attack has nothing to do with the nodes, it's about the mining hash rate. The difference here is that while a node could run on a $100 one card computer chip with a HDD attached to it, a mining device (ASIC) which is about 100M times more powerful than a regular PC at solving the SHA256 hash and does nothing else cost about $3000 per unit and provides 110TH/s using about 1500W of energy.
No doubt that CIA could easily cough up billions of dollars and build a huge data center with over 1M mining devices consuming 1.4GW of energy, but even if they did that, all they could do is to delay on chain transactions, causing payments to have a 50% chance to be verified in 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes as they normally do.
Double that setup and CIA could delay transactions to between 10 and 30 minutes. Sure it's annoying with slower payments and all that but that kind of attack isn't really a big threat. Also if something like that where going on for a longer time everyone might just agree to fork into a different algorithm than SHA256, to say something that works best on a GPU.
Monero do this all the time to prevent ASIC units. And with that simple action taken, CIA would suddenly sit there with billions of dollars worth of now worthless Chinese hardware.
It's good to be paranoid, don't get me wrong. All I'm saying is that arguing against Bitcoin is like being afraid of a certain brand of car just because the radio might be produced in China, and then go and buy a 100% Chinese car instead.
Hey thanks for such a detailed reply!
I was getting my terminology mixed up: I think I meant hash rate instead of nodes (I thought they were pretty much interchangeable terms, but I guess each node could have a subpar hash rate!).
I guess I should ask your advice about my concerns about crypto then, rather than stating facts, because I’m clearly not as fully up to speed as I thought I was here:
That majority hashrate situation: my understanding of that is that if you control more than 50% of hashrate, you can control the drop rate and game the system to disproportionately award yourself more coins than you should get based on your raw TH/s would suggest. Thus, you’d be able to scoop up a lot more coins than the rest of the pool. Is that correct?
I was told another thing about that majority situation too (not sure if it’s nodes or hash rate though!): if one party controls a majority, they can scupper the built in anonymity and track individual coin transactions down to your personal machine/IP, thus identifying you. Is that correct?
I guess I haven’t looked into crypto in a long time so I may be remembering old out of date concerns, or even just ancient conspiracy theories tbh. I didn’t even know that GPU mining was still a profitable option! So I’m definitely misinformed at the very least!! Thanks :)
No worries :) The development is making fast progress these days.
There are node operators and there are miners, node operators holds a copy of the entire blockchain which is verified by the miners, so there really isn't much that can be altered there, no matter how many nodes one single entity control as a change would just create a fork.
Now mining is what generate profits, 6.25BTC per block is the current payout, in about 4 years from now it'll go down to 3.125BTC per 10 minutes. In any case, controlling more than 50% theoretically allows some tampering with the transactions, but coins that are just stored in a wallet are safe.
It wouldn't go unnoticed tho since the network keeps track of which entities are mining and many people are likely to throw in some more computation power to keep up against whoever tries. Last but not least, most ASIC miners are built in China so the question is will CIA and China cooperate, and how fast could China build them? China has been considered a threat ever since the beginning but they never actually managed to do anything.
Which brings us to the second question, anonymity in Bitcoin is actually a common misconception, machine and IP cannot be traced easily, maybe if you run a full node but since there are light nodes too a hacker wouldn't be able to tell the difference. TOR and VPN can be used as well for additional safety.
Then there's the exchanges who knows your identity, buying Bitcoin from there and transferring to your own wallet before doing say a drug deal isn't very anonymous or smart. If using Monero instead you could get away with that approach since Monero is anonymous by design.
Bitcoin however isn't very anonymous and has never been. Tho with a coin mixer or any simple money laundering scheme involved it can easily be made anonymous. I think the easiest description would be opt-in anonymity, unlike banks where anonymity simply doesn't exist.
So to conclude, there are certain risks with cryptocurrencies still. But they're already far better and safer than any legacy payment system or even cash. It's complicated stuff and requires a huge amount of math and engineering skills to understand, I'm an engineer myself but not even I fully understands how it all works ;)