Nope. This is where your theory falls apart. Out-of-band transactions exist, and they exist because fee-less transactions are permitted.
Offchain activity is irrelevant to my attack. You can't predict the future. If offchain becomes the dominant mode of commerce, then my attack will be less useful. But it doesn't make my attack not exist for as long as onchain activity is the norm. You can speculate all you want about the future being not on the blockchain, but I deal with the reality as it stands today. Please don't argue this point further because I will ignore it as it is not relevant. It is a strawman.
[/quote]
You can speculate as much as you like as well. Once again, I don't need to disprove your theory. You need to disprove my objections. Thus far, you have failed to disprove any of them. Not one, and I have provided at least 6 market forces that undermine your theory. I have not even touched upon the technical/protocol reasons your theory is flawed.
The cartel can't grow, because it needs to have a dominate position among miners to start with. It can't happen. Currently, the bitcoin network is more than a 1000 times faster than the fastest unclassified supercomputer on Earth. It would take nation-state level resources for Amazon to even match one of the top 10 mining pools, and they would have to commit those resources to this end for an indefinate period of time.
Nonsense. Amazon controls more servers than the largest mining pools today.
What part is nonsense? First, show me that Amazon has control of 58,000 petaflops of computational power. Then show me how they would be able to commit same to such a project without completely starving their existing businesses for resources. I know that you can't show either, because while Amazon certainly has quite a network, they are actually
using it for a great many other business functions.
Furthermore, the 33 petaflop supercomputer sits on more than 40 acres. Amazon doesn't possess 40,000 acres of server farms.
Besides that is irrelevant and shows you don't understand this attack well.
Amazon controls a significant AND GROWING percentage of global commerce (heck I even order from them from Asia), plus there are other large outfits they can merge with in other countries, and thus they can starve the network of transaction fees when the coin rewards are insufficient.
I understand your attack better than you do, you just don't know it yet. The percentage of global commerce that Amazon may control is what is irrelevant. You don't know enough about the protocol for me to even explain why this is.
Thus they can shrink the hashrate that they have to compete against by starving the pools of income.
Won't work. It's been tried already. It didn't work for them either.
Please don't make me repeat this again. I've stated it too many times already upthread.
You've never actually stated anything of substance. If you ever did, you'd have to admit failure when others ate out your substance. Personally, I'd like to see it.
You refuted nothing of the sort. What you are describing is an intentional network split, although asyncronous. The small side of the split always loses, there is no exceptions. No cartel would be willing to commit the resources to acheive this end, because it would be a money pit until they hit 51% of the hashing. Over 58,000 Petaflops. The fastest supercomputer on Earth is 33 Petaflops. And that is now, what will it be in 20 years?
Incorrect. I will let you figure out why that is nonsense.
Prove it.
The cartel can give 0-confirmation transactions to its customers, because these are going to be repeat customers because the cartel covers so much commerce.
Everyone can give 0-confirm transactions to their customers. That's a question of business risk, not capacity. It happens now. Please search for the fast-transaction problem and/or the vending machine problem.
Don't play dumb just to obfuscate the point.
The point is the cartel
doesn't have delay transactions for its customers when it withholds them from the other miners.
The nature of the protocol requires that the cartel delay transaction processing for it's customers
because it withholds them from other miners. There is no way to avoid it! That's what you can't wrap your head around!