200 Years ago and thousands of years before that, gold was the primary source of money. It worked even tho there was no (((middleman))) there to rip you off by stealing the value out of your money.
Bitcoin and other major decentralized cryptocurrencies are built on the same principles as the properties of gold, only digital. Which is exactly why it should work as a drop in replacement to digital banks, same way gold should be the perfect drop in replacement for cash.
It's time to smoke out the (((middlemen))) and reclaim the value of our money.
While I love the idea of getting rid of the middlemen (in everywhere from finance to useless middle management causing bloat in every business sector), bitcoin and digital coins still haven’t gotten there have they? When switching between digital coins, there’s still a fee. Many a time have I heard the digital coin bros complain about the gas fee on X, and the network servers them selves are a middle man. Unless you’re printed out the code to a bitcoin on a piece of paper, and handed it to someone else and exchanged a good or service for that, you need the network as a middle man. Hell, even doing it that way the guy you gave the printed out bitcoin code to still needs to do something on the network to add it to his wallet officially unless he’s just going to trade the paper to the next guy in the chain of trades.
There's a difference between a middleman with control and a middleman without control. The network is simply all the miners competing over the next block, anyone can become a miner and no single miner can censor or surveil particular transactions.
Sure lower fees would be cool, but it's not the money that I'm worried about. I don't mind paying for a digital transaction, as long as I can be 100% sure it arrives in full to where I sent it, without anyone fucking around trying to steal it from me, block it or reroute it.
But you still need trust in that system to be secure. Over 50% consensus of the severs required for a change to be accepted sounds good until some bad actor like a government or two or more working in cahoots decide to subvert it. There’s already work in progress to de-anonymize the TOR network, these agencies love control and there’s no way they won’t attempt the same for digital currencies.
With banks, employees and owners are known and public record and if there’s fuckery, you have someone to go after legally. With the bitcoin network, if a person gets scammed there’s no one to turn to for recompense. You’re just shit out of luck. Exchanges have been hacked and people have lost millions, so you can trust them to be secure. You have to go through hoops and store your coins in offline wallets, and then incur risks when you put them online to use them.
With the network decentralized, there’s no governing body to oversee and provide security, you HAVE to trust that the network hasn’t been compromised. How can you be sure of this? How can you check to see that China hasn’t infected 3000 servers and placed 20000 more online and gained 51% control and now determines what is and what’s isn’t an authorized transaction?
No, you don't need to trust anything, in fact you shouldn't trust the system, that's the whole point. You can verify the distribution of mining hash rate at any time.
And over 50% is certainly not a requirement, think of it as a lottery, you provide 0.000001% of the networks hash rate, then that's your probability to crack the next block if you solo mine, many are mining via pools which gets the reward more often only to share it. Most pools are based and backs down if they become too large to avoid getting close to 50%.
If you have more than 50% of the hash rate you can do a few things to fuck around, but only to transactions, this includes delaying transactions and stuff like that. But why would you? if you control that much, it means you'd just spent billions maybe even trillions of dollars on hardware, you probably own a couple of nuclear power plants dedicated for your miners and a bunch of warehouses to house them. And by doing that investment, you'll earn about $2M dollars per hour just from the mining itself. Why waste so much money to destroy something that will come back moments later with a new mining algorithm that makes your hardware useless.
With the bitcoin network, if a person gets scammed there’s no one to turn to for recompense
Do you really want that? think of how that would work for your gold or your car. You would have to not own it and let someone else guard it for you. Do you really wanna go down on your knees, take your hat off and say "please" every time you wanna use your car? I'd rather take my chances and risk getting car jacked. And if someone tries to steal it, I blow their head off.
Exchanges have been hacked and people have lost millions, so you can trust them to be secure.
Because exchanges is essentially banks, and banks gets hacked all the time. Not your key not your coins. Think of gold once again, if someone breaks into a vault and steal your gold, that's a vault problem and not a gold problem.
You have to go through hoops and store your coins in offline wallets, and then incur risks when you put them online to use them. With the network decentralized, there’s no governing body to oversee and provide security, you HAVE to trust that the network hasn’t been compromised.
There's plenty of indicators showing weather or not the network is under risk of being compromised. Mining distribution is the most important one. So far Bitcoin has never even been close to be compromised.
How can you check to see that China hasn’t infected 3000 servers and placed 20000 more online and gained 51% control and now determines what is and what’s isn’t an authorized transaction?
Bitcoins current total hash rate is about 200EH/s, know your metric prefixes, kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, where Exa is 2¹⁸, for reference, a high end GPU does at most 300MH/s and a intel Xeon high end server CPU with 64 or 128 cores does 20MH/s at most. That's 2⁶. This means: 18 - 6 = 12 hence 2¹², and divide by 2 to get 50%.
Hence you would need 500 billion high end servers or over a million Antminer ASIC devices. But that's not entirely true, because this assumes half of the current hash rate, if you inject more hashrate yourself, the total hashrate must double, hence double this to 1 trillion high end servers, or at least 2 million Ant miner devices. Which would require many Gigawatts of power and lot's of cooling of you run a centralized operation.
I'm sure because I would notice if the hashrate suddenly doubled, but as said earlier, I doubt any government in the world would waste billions and billions of dollars just to temporary compromise the Bitcoin blockchain, seeing that Bitcoin could easily fork and switch to scrypt, or some ASIC resistant algorithm.
200 Years ago and thousands of years before that, gold was the primary source of money. It worked even tho there was no (((middleman))) there to rip you off by stealing the value out of your money.
Bitcoin and other major decentralized cryptocurrencies are built on the same principles as the properties of gold, only digital. Which is exactly why it should work as a drop in replacement to digital banks, same way gold should be the perfect drop in replacement for cash.
It's time to smoke out the (((middlemen))) and reclaim the value of our money.
While I love the idea of getting rid of the middlemen (in everywhere from finance to useless middle management causing bloat in every business sector), bitcoin and digital coins still haven’t gotten there have they? When switching between digital coins, there’s still a fee. Many a time have I heard the digital coin bros complain about the gas fee on X, and the network servers them selves are a middle man. Unless you’re printed out the code to a bitcoin on a piece of paper, and handed it to someone else and exchanged a good or service for that, you need the network as a middle man. Hell, even doing it that way the guy you gave the printed out bitcoin code to still needs to do something on the network to add it to his wallet officially unless he’s just going to trade the paper to the next guy in the chain of trades.
There's a difference between a middleman with control and a middleman without control. The network is simply all the miners competing over the next block, anyone can become a miner and no single miner can censor or surveil particular transactions.
Sure lower fees would be cool, but it's not the money that I'm worried about. I don't mind paying for a digital transaction, as long as I can be 100% sure it arrives in full to where I sent it, without anyone fucking around trying to steal it from me, block it or reroute it.
But you still need trust in that system to be secure. Over 50% consensus of the severs required for a change to be accepted sounds good until some bad actor like a government or two or more working in cahoots decide to subvert it. There’s already work in progress to de-anonymize the TOR network, these agencies love control and there’s no way they won’t attempt the same for digital currencies. With banks, employees and owners are known and public record and if there’s fuckery, you have someone to go after legally. With the bitcoin network, if a person gets scammed there’s no one to turn to for recompense. You’re just shit out of luck. Exchanges have been hacked and people have lost millions, so you can trust them to be secure. You have to go through hoops and store your coins in offline wallets, and then incur risks when you put them online to use them. With the network decentralized, there’s no governing body to oversee and provide security, you HAVE to trust that the network hasn’t been compromised. How can you be sure of this? How can you check to see that China hasn’t infected 3000 servers and placed 20000 more online and gained 51% control and now determines what is and what’s isn’t an authorized transaction?
No, you don't need to trust anything, in fact you shouldn't trust the system, that's the whole point. You can verify the distribution of mining hash rate at any time.
And over 50% is certainly not a requirement, think of it as a lottery, you provide 0.000001% of the networks hash rate, then that's your probability to crack the next block if you solo mine, many are mining via pools which gets the reward more often only to share it. Most pools are based and backs down if they become too large to avoid getting close to 50%.
If you have more than 50% of the hash rate you can do a few things to fuck around, but only to transactions, this includes delaying transactions and stuff like that. But why would you? if you control that much, it means you'd just spent billions maybe even trillions of dollars on hardware, you probably own a couple of nuclear power plants dedicated for your miners and a bunch of warehouses to house them. And by doing that investment, you'll earn about $2M dollars per hour just from the mining itself. Why waste so much money to destroy something that will come back moments later with a new mining algorithm that makes your hardware useless.
Do you really want that? think of how that would work for your gold or your car. You would have to not own it and let someone else guard it for you. Do you really wanna go down on your knees, take your hat off and say "please" every time you wanna use your car? I'd rather take my chances and risk getting car jacked. And if someone tries to steal it, I blow their head off.
Because exchanges is essentially banks, and banks gets hacked all the time. Not your key not your coins. Think of gold once again, if someone breaks into a vault and steal your gold, that's a vault problem and not a gold problem.
There's plenty of indicators showing weather or not the network is under risk of being compromised. Mining distribution is the most important one. So far Bitcoin has never even been close to be compromised.
Bitcoins current total hash rate is about 200EH/s, know your metric prefixes, kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, where Exa is 2¹⁸, for reference, a high end GPU does at most 300MH/s and a intel Xeon high end server CPU with 64 or 128 cores does 20MH/s at most. That's 2⁶. This means: 18 - 6 = 12 hence 2¹², and divide by 2 to get 50%.
Hence you would need 500 billion high end servers or over a million Antminer ASIC devices. But that's not entirely true, because this assumes half of the current hash rate, if you inject more hashrate yourself, the total hashrate must double, hence double this to 1 trillion high end servers, or at least 2 million Ant miner devices. Which would require many Gigawatts of power and lot's of cooling of you run a centralized operation.
I'm sure because I would notice if the hashrate suddenly doubled, but as said earlier, I doubt any government in the world would waste billions and billions of dollars just to temporary compromise the Bitcoin blockchain, seeing that Bitcoin could easily fork and switch to scrypt, or some ASIC resistant algorithm.