Quote from: figmentofmyass on January 08, 2020, 08:16:39 AM

Quote from: Wind_FURY on January 08, 2020, 07:24:51 AM

Quote from: figmentofmyass on January 07, 2020, 09:55:38 PM

even if the chinese government seized farms, miners, pools, chip fabrication factories, etc and performed sustained 51%/censorship attacks.....the electricity, overhead, and production costs would be real. they couldn't just sustain the attack indefinitely. so ideally there would still be no POW change---we could just let the attackers burn themselves out. i just hope that bitcoiners are patient enough to do that.

Would you then say that whoever controls the large mining farms would start acting irrationally/collude to risk money/resources to attack the network, to do temporary damage?

with an attack of this scale, the attackers might believe they are doing permanent damage. actually, that's the only way the attack makes sense: out-of-band incentives for miners, provided by attackers who are more interested in crushing bitcoin than profiting from it.

it seems like a long shot to me, but it's an interesting hypothetical to ponder. let's say they censor the chain so nobody could transact for a month---how would that affect user confidence and adoption? meanwhile, the proposed solution (a POW algo change) would destroy the mining infrastructure. billions of dollars in value in mining gear would be destroyed. after that, don't you think would-be miners would be very skeptical of risking capital on a new operation? not to mention that existing miners would be bankrupted.

That's exactly why I don't believe that someone/group/government who controls hundreds of millions in mining gear would be irrational. Their incentives would simply align with the success of the network.

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how secure (proof of work wise) do you think this new "bitcoin" will be?

I don't know, honestly. It's something to ponder about, but I'm confident the community will come together, and mine altruistically. It aligns with our incentives, or else Bitcoin dies.