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.
Why would you fuck around with translations and delaying and cancelling them? These are people who love and covet control, the money to them is simply a number on the screen. They don’t have to work and toil in a coal mine to make a living, they can just type on a keyboard or more likely tell an underling to approve the project and poof the money they need into existence. They don’t play by the same rules we’re forced to.
I think something was lost in translation in regards to owning my car or a gold bar. If I place money in the bank, and someone steals that money, the bank is responsible for ensuring I get my money back via their insurance or other holdings they have. There’s people to sue or charge with fraud. My car or a gold bar in my possession I have no need for anyone so permission to use so not really a fair analogy. Try getting money back from MtGOX if you had coins stored there.
If I place money in the bank, and someone steals that money, the bank is responsible for ensuring I get my money back via their insurance
No, see this is the exact point I'm trying to make. You just assume they will be nice and fix it for you. This is still relying on a middleman, which is the exact thing you should not do, if you really prefer freedom and control over your own assets.
My car or a gold bar in my possession
Yes, because you understand how stupid it would be to let someone else guard it for you. This is why you still have full control over your car and your gold. Now treat your crypto wallet just like your car, I'm not asking you to build a garage for it and polish and vax it every year but make sure it's a hardware wallet or on a slip of paper or sheet of metal, something physical you can hide in a good place. And don't forget backups.
Try getting money back from MtGOX if you had coins stored there.
MtGOX has paid back everything that got stolen already, this was done a few years ago, and it's a perfect example of why you shouldn't trust or rely on middlemen. People who had their coins there learned the hard way.
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.
Why would you fuck around with translations and delaying and cancelling them? These are people who love and covet control, the money to them is simply a number on the screen. They don’t have to work and toil in a coal mine to make a living, they can just type on a keyboard or more likely tell an underling to approve the project and poof the money they need into existence. They don’t play by the same rules we’re forced to.
I think something was lost in translation in regards to owning my car or a gold bar. If I place money in the bank, and someone steals that money, the bank is responsible for ensuring I get my money back via their insurance or other holdings they have. There’s people to sue or charge with fraud. My car or a gold bar in my possession I have no need for anyone so permission to use so not really a fair analogy. Try getting money back from MtGOX if you had coins stored there.
No, see this is the exact point I'm trying to make. You just assume they will be nice and fix it for you. This is still relying on a middleman, which is the exact thing you should not do, if you really prefer freedom and control over your own assets.
Yes, because you understand how stupid it would be to let someone else guard it for you. This is why you still have full control over your car and your gold. Now treat your crypto wallet just like your car, I'm not asking you to build a garage for it and polish and vax it every year but make sure it's a hardware wallet or on a slip of paper or sheet of metal, something physical you can hide in a good place. And don't forget backups.
MtGOX has paid back everything that got stolen already, this was done a few years ago, and it's a perfect example of why you shouldn't trust or rely on middlemen. People who had their coins there learned the hard way.