American Economics Thread

[AndrewS]

But if bitcoin becomes worthless, all the investment into mining pools etc becomes worthless.
They would also piss off their partners like Iran, Venezuela and Russia.

I don't expect Chinese miners to go full joker on a 1 trillion plus asset

Chinese citizens are already banned from holding bitcoin, and most bitcoins are held in the US.

So if there is a war, why not destroy Bitcoin?

It's not like Chinese miners have would any choice.
Plus it would be cheap for the Chinese government to compensate the miners for their equipment.
A real war will cost far more.

Bitcoin market capitalisation is already $1200 Billion. So imagine the economic chaos in the USA if this was all worthless.

I would also expect that Russia, Iran and Venezuela would join in this Bitcoin attack.

EDIT: The Chinese bitcoin miners might actually walk away with a profit. A single bitcoin block is worth $120 million today.

 

[AndrewS]

But in a real war scenario, US gets its Asian vassals to cut the submarine cables and basically isolate China from the rest of the global internet...

(or less drastically they can simply drop all routes and IP coming from China from their routers and cut off all BGP routes connecting to China)

This means those nodes drop off and US can take back control of bitcoin lickidy split

Instead of scamcoin, the average joe should be converting dollars to gold, silver, food MRE, water storage containers, power generators, solar panels, ham radio, emergency go kits, survival book, survival gear, guns ammo, etc etc etc

A bitcoin block is only 1 Megabyte in size.

So as long as there is some sort of connectivity, it should be straightforward to keep Chinese miners hashing bitcoin blocks.

 

[quantumlight]

A bitcoin block is only 1 Megabyte in size.

So as long as there is some sort of connectivity, it should be straightforward to keep Chinese miners hashing bitcoin blocks.

The full node is way more than 200gb now

 

[AndrewS]

The full node is way more than 200gb now

I don't think you really understand how bitcoin works.
You don't have to download the entire 200gb blockchain all the time.

Here is my understanding of how it could happen.

In a 51% attack, all the Chinese bitcoin farms will be working on an alternative solution.
Also remember that all the Chinese bitcoin farms still have unlimited bandwidth to each other.

Chinese miners account for 80% of global capacity.
So they come up with the 51% attack solution first, and then send that block to the rest of the world.

It'll take 10-120 seconds for the block to reach 90% of the entire network.
Then that block will be added to the blockchain.

 

[quantumlight]

I don't think you really understand how bitcoin works.
You don't have to download the entire 200gb blockchain all the time.

Here is my understanding of how it could happen.

In a 51% attack, all the Chinese bitcoin farms will be working on an alternative solution.
Also remember that all the Chinese bitcoin farms still have unlimited bandwidth to each other.

Chinese miners account for 80% of global capacity.
So they come up with the 51% attack solution first, and then send that block to the rest of the world.

It'll take 10-120 seconds for the block to reach 90% of the entire network.
Then that block will be added to the blockchain.

You need the full blockchain to run as a node... Its you that be mistaken

 

[AndrewS]

You need the full blockchain to run as a node... Its you that be mistaken

Nope.

Think about it. If you're mining, do you need to download the full blockchain every 10minutes when a block is completed?
You already have a copy of the existing blockchain, and just need to add the new parts.

The whole point of a blockchain is that it is a fixed and publicly viewable record of all past transactions which cannot be changed.
So why would you need to download the entire blockchain all the time?

 

[quantumlight]

Nope.

Think about it. If you're mining, do you need to download the full blockchain every 10minutes when a block is completed?
You already have a copy of the blockchain, and just need to add the new parts.

The whole point of a blockchain is that it is a fixed and publicly viewable record of transactions which cannot be changed.
So why would you need to download the entire blockchain all the time?

The 51% isnt referring to miners but the nodes that do the verification (proof of work) of the bitcoin transaction.... if you send me a bitcoin transfer, at least six other people running full bitcoin nodes need to verify it first before that transaction hits the blockchain and replicates to all other copies out there.

Now lets say the bitcoin you sent me was a virgin coin you mined yourself in 2008... never used before. If the nodes are not full blockchain copies how can they possibly do verification? just think about it

Each block gets a sha hash function, everytime a node connects it compares hashes with the list to do integrity check of all its blocks...

200gb times 24/7 and 3600 seconds in an hour you do the math

All US has to do is get its backbone network companies to drop all routes to China and the traffic would never make it over to US.... bitcoin depends on Internet/BGP to operate at transport layer. The metrics like bandwidth, throughput, latency etc largely irrelevant

 

[AndrewS]

The 51% isnt referring to miners but the nodes that do the verification (proof of work) of the bitcoin transaction.... if you send me a bitcoin transfer, at least six other people running full bitcoin nodes need to verify it first before that transaction hits the blockchain and replicates to all other copies out there.

Now lets say the bitcoin you sent me was a virgin coin you mined yourself in 2008... never used before. If the nodes are not full blockchain copies how can they possibly do verification? just think about it

I never said anything about not needing a copy of the full blockchain to verify a transaction.

But you already have a copy of the full blockchain, so only need the newest changes to add to this, in order to verify.
So data transfers between nodes is limited to the newest blocks and working data. You don't need to transfer the entire blockchain every 10 minutes after a block is mined.

---

There are more than 6 bitcoin full nodes in China. 80% of all hashrate, remember?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/dhko9d

 

[AndrewS]

@quantumlight

Think about it. You can run a full bitcoin mining node on a home broadband connection. There's no way it can support huge data transfers of the full blockchain.

Based on this article when the Bitcoin blockchain was 113GB in size, you only needed an internet connection of 400 kilobits (50 kilobytes) per second

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[gadgetcool5]

Retail sales surge 9.8 percent in March, spurred by stimulus​

Retail sales in March surged 9.8 percent as $1,400 stimulus checks were issued, the weather improved, and vaccination rates increased.

The

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was well above the 6.1 percent economists expected, and was a return to form after major storms in February led to a 3 percent drop. That figure was revised upward to 2.7 percent.

The $619.1 billion in sales was a whopping 27.7 percent higher than last March, when the pandemic hit in earnest and lockdowns took hold across the country.

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Comment: US retail sales are now running at 12.8% higher than January 2020.