here the thing, if they were to have enough incentivised people to buy 2,500,000 asics at $6.3k each ($16b)
.. then there is no point doing a 51% attack if the only aim is market manipulation... they can just market manipulate using the $16b without wasting money on hardware
did you know you can produce billions of market trade volume without needing billions of dollars to trade with
think about it
if you swap ETH->BTC and then sell BTC->USD and then buy USD->ETH
you can get back to ETH and if timed right only cost you some small % los in trade fee's and still have 9X% of funds back as ETH to then repeat
whilst the very act of doing it you can crash the bitcoin price(and raise the eth price) by the selling btc to USD and by the act of buying ETH with said USD.. and not need to throw $16b as a deposit into the market.. by instead depositing $200m and repeating that circle(arbitrage) many times(80x) and then deposit another $200m the next day
again please run the scenarios and realise how there are better ways to crash a market far cheaper than a 51% attack and far faster
again please run the scenarios and realise doing a 51% attack is more costly, slower and less market affecting, and less guaranteed to work
...
i know you want others to run through all the scenarios for you and give you the conclusions.. but sometimes when people act like they are unable to feed themselves and want to be spoonfed, and they reject what they are fed,, its time you learn to feed yourself and if you truly wanted a real answer you would take the time to work things out for yourself in about 10 minutes, rather then waiting multiple days for people to tell you things you dont want to hear
This is a turn of events.
You now seem to finally accept that a 51% attack could cause severe damage to the value of Bitcoin, thus ending our long discussion on this thread.
And not only that, you even claim that there are other, more efficient ways of doing this, and for someone (e.g. an investment fund) to easily and rather quickly make
billions, at a low risk, starting with $16B in capital.
In fact, these ways are so trivial that someone like me (with a background in physics and computer science, by the way) should only spend
10 minutes in order to figure them out.
Maybe I'm blind, but I'm not too convinced about these latter claims myself quite yet. Feel free to elaborate. Also, I wonder what other people on this forum thinks about them?
However, I'm glad we finally seem to agree that a 51% attack could cause severe damage to Bitcoin.
Perhaps you (and others) would be interested, then, in discussing what Bitcoin could do, if anything, to mitigate such an attack?
User @d5000 has already given some suggestions above in this regard.