A 51% attack and having 51% of the hashpower are two very different things.
A 51% attack can cause a fork in the chain, which has happened before, infact it’s effectively how BCH and BSV came into existence. Having 51% of the horsepower does not mean you will be the miner of every block.
If it’s a 51% attack to fork, it does not mean they can change the rules of the chain they forking, they can only change the rules on their new fork, on their own chain.
I’m not ‘strawmanning’ anything, what you are trying to argue as possible censorship is downright bullshit lol, none of your ‘arguments’ matter, because no matter what as long as there are miners on the chain, eventually your transaction will get picked up. Regardless if the biggest pools are trying to ignore your transaction or block.
But hey what do I know… I’ve only lived off of, and developed on blockchains for 8 years.
That’s not true about 51%, it would just mean I may need to wait twice as long for my transaction to go through.
They would need 100% of the hashpower, which is impossible to achieve due to at home private miners, and other large pools.
They cannot remove addresses from the mempool.
This proves my exact point.
Just because they won’t mine blocks with those transactions, doesn’t mean nobody else can.
They are simply only hurting their revenue.
Which is why they stopped doing it.
What you are worried about, would be more feasible in the early days of bitcoin where there wasn’t millions of individual miners not associated to any pool.
It should be noted that Marathon is mining “compliant” blocks of its own volition and that nothing in the current U.S. regulatory or legal code explicitly mandates that practice for miners. >
They are only mining blocks That are compliant, meaning that contain no transactions from known bad actors.
They are just costing their business revenue that another miner will gladly scoop up.
Which is why they stopped:
I did read the article, and if you actually understand the tech behind blockchain, all they are saying is their miners refuse to mine blocks that contain transactions from known bad actors.
That’s literally all they are doing. They are not capable to rearrange the mempool.
In my edited example, he could utilize any no-kyc cross chain swap protocol, back and forth into a fresh wallet. He may have to wait for a miner to eventually mine (they will) his initial transaction, but once they do, and he’s in a fresh wallet, he’s effectively a ghost. Especially if he swaps to monero and then back to bitcoin fresh wallet.
A real argument for why to be wary of crypto has nothing to do with censorship.
The real worry is that in 50 years, quantum computing might be able to crack the encryption used by these blockchains today.
So over time, the encryption model MAY need to become more robust. That is the only real, logical, and maybe even probable, roadblock for crypto in the distant future, and I truly mean DISTANT future.
Marathon is not blocking transactions from specific wallets.
They are simply refusing the try to solve blocks with transactions inside from known bad actors.
Thats fine, it just means that there is more block rewards for the 99% of the mining majority that don’t care what is within a block, and will mine it no matter what.
You have got to remember, there is an over $100,000 reward to mine a block, someone will mine it. All Marathon is doing is saying they won’t mine for those blocks.
They are a mining investment company, they can decide if they do or don’t want to mine a block, they can’t enforce everyone else to not mine that block.
Edit: and one point to add to this, what Marathon is attempting to achieve is nothing more than a regulations and marketing ploy. Any “bad actor” they deem, could simply create a fresh brand new bitcoin wallet with zero historical data, and execute their transaction from that fresh wallet, and then marathon would be mining their transaction with no knowledge of who or what sent it.
Hahahaha you are actually retarded. Miners cannot ban a single wallet.
Also, transactions in BTC network…. Your transaction is combined with many other transactions within the block. The only way they could not include my wallet is to not mine the ENTIRE block, affecting everyone.
None of the transactions are anonymous, that isn’t the point. They are privatized in the sense that the general public will have a hard time knowing who owns what wallet, but if you personally use the same wallet forever and ever then yes the govt will know who owns that specific wallet.
The main point of it is, they cannot do anything to stop you from using your wallet.
They can’t halt only your wallet on the network.
They cannot prevent you from accessing your wallet either, unless they physically arrest you.
Physical security is far more secure? Really? Because last time I checked a guy can’t come to my house when I’m away, and break into my bitcoin wallet to steal my net worth.
They can certainly walk out the door with physical goods, including your entire safe, which they will break into.
Cryptographic encryption is the most secure anything has EVER BEEN in history of everything.
And I think it’s hilarious that you say everything electronic goes to shit, while literally talking to me while using electronic technology. Kek.
There is physical bitcoin… coins.
You can hold your bitcoin wallet on a piece of paper.
You can exchange that piece of paper with someone willing to travel the 50 miles where there’s electricity to cash in the bitcoin.
It’s no different than gold or silver. Anyone in that area will only accept it if they are willing to transport it to wherever they need to go to exchange it into fiat or whatever else they want.
This is the type of stuff that everyone can agree is… crazy.
Those are clearly two different people… yes they have some similarities but so does everyone… I seen the same people … in all people … constantly.
It’s just the way it is lol
The FACTS are this:
Nothing on PLANET EARTH has any intrinsic value WHATSOEVER.
What gives something value is, and always was, is directly correlated to what another person will pay for it. And nothing more.
Other people will pay about $60,000 in electricity cost to earn 1 bitcoin… that is precisely why bitcoin’s price is where it’s at.
I agree that in the future blockchain and crypto will become more of an infrastructure than a speculative asset.
But i don’t see how the overlying assets can ever just disappear… they will always exist if blockchain as a technology exists.
The only really good argument against crypto is the whole power/internet connection is a requirement… but that’s also why I never believe people should put all their eggs into this basket. Something like 1-10% of an investment portfolio being in crypto (mainly just bitcoin…. If any others then ethereum…. Don’t listen to the XRP brainwashed folk… XRP isn’t even a blockchain, and I believe XRP is the one that’s truly tied to deep state actors.)
And what exactly is gold backed by? Precisely nothing.
Bitcoin is actually backed by the electricity cost it took to create it.
But you can continue living in your dream world pal, I’m up 250x off my crypto investment in 2017… couldn’t have done that in ANY other investment market.
I also have plenty of gold… BECAUSE of those investments.
Yes I know gold is a legal tender and thus can be used AS a currency, but that doesn’t make it a currency in and of itself. It just happens to be allowed to be used as a currency, but no store is legally required to accept gold, but they are legally required to accept U.S. dollars.
Bitcoin is the same btw, many countries around the world have passed laws to have it become a legal tender for the country.
Mica is a European regulation, so who cares.
Tether has much bigger problems than that. They need to prove they are solvent.
That being said, they have passed their audits, they have proved the actual money exists.
So for the time being, there’s nothing wrong with tether.
What makes tether scary is that at any time they could go rogue and cause some real chaos… but they would likely not be able to get away with it because their entire leadership is well known now and the doj would be on them in a big way.
It is important to not call BTC a currency, because it ISNT a currency, it’s a commodity if anything.
The same reason you don’t call gold a currency.
Bitcoin cash and bitcoin sv are frauds.
Be VERY weary of Craig Wright.
I promise you he is a fraud.
Yes, the real Bitcoin has slightly deviated from satoshi’s original whitepaper, but the deviations were not just co-opted and changed by big bankers…. The miners themselves are the only ones who can vote on and make a change to the protocol.
These are done through BIP “Bitcoin improvement proposal”
If an improvement is good, and the miners agree it is good, they can effectively trigger this change on the network to take place by directing their mining power to do that.
In the early days of bitcoin, the mining hashpower was so evenly distributed to individuals, there was not these huge mining pools back then… so it was impossible to have enough hashpower to force a vote to pass when the majority of people voted against it, and vice versa.
What BCH did was simply a money grab, they forked the blockchain and created their own coin just to get a 1:1 copy of their BTC, but on BCH.
What BSV did was basically just Craig Dumbfuck Wright’s narcissist plight to assume the role as Satoshi Nakamoto. Until he proves he owns the genesis wallet, he is a fraud.
It is very simple now compared to in the past.
Wait for Trump to be back in office and to drive electricity prices down again.
If you pay under $0.10 per kWh then you very likely can mine for profit.
The company who produces the most efficient and reliable miners for purchase is called Bitmain, they are a Chinese company but have a large factory in the U.S.
There are many other companies too, just none have devices that are as long running as Bitmain’s.
Anyway, there’s a nice website: https://whattomine.com
This website lets you check current profitability for all mineable crypto coins. For Bitcoin, you want to go to the “ASICS” section, since that coin is mined with “asic” miners.
There are coins you can mine with CPU’s, GPU’s, and ASIC’s.
I’ve been mining since 2017. It was much more profitable in the past than it is currently; but that can easily swing back the other way if our electrical costs reduce significantly.
For a long while, ethereum was far more profitable to mine than Bitcoin was, but Ethereum went woke (green) and changed their consensus model to disable Proof of Work mining in favor of a Proof of Stake model.
I’m not refusing to comprehend anything, you are refusing to catch my point I guess.
A 51% attack cannot change the rules of the network. They could engage in a fork and create a new network with the new rules, but it does not mean the original network ceases to exist.
So yes they could 51% attack to fork and create a new network that has abilities to censor transactions.
But the original Bitcoin network that I AM TALKING ABOUT, can not be changed, not without a community consensus to upgrade the protocol and adopt the change. Which is when all miners of the old network would switch to the new network. Any upgrade BIP that involves censorship, is never going to pass the consensus.