TIL the scale of bitcoin derivatives in 2020 (hence volatility): ~2T on 2B market activity. Jeepers!
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Starting in late 2020, as shown in The Economist's graphic, the spot market in Bitcoin became dwarfed by the derivatives markets. In the last month $1.7T of Bitcoin futures traded on unregulated exchanges, and $6.4B on regulated exchanges. Compare this with the $1.8B of the spot market in the same month.
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The Eyal & Sirer paper is pretty interesting - they basically point out that there is actually some game theory involved in when miners should reveal that they mined a block to compete most effectively with their fellows. If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage.
It looks like a result with complex implications - eg, maybe making it impossible for new miners to set up unless they have a meaningful advantage in operating costs instead of just parity with the entrenched players. It is hard to tell because market reality is a mess but if there is a meaningful strategic choice to be made beyond simply announcing a block when it is mined then there is a lot of room for weird equilibriums even if the paper's specific analysis turns out to have flaws.
Isn't this the same thing as saying "if everyone just agrees that a dollar bill is actually just a piece of paper, USD becomes worthless"? Albeit at a smaller scale
Fiat money has a difference: an army. It is issued by a government which has the legitimate right to demand taxes, paid in their currency, and deprive you of life and liberty if you don't.
Ultimately the populace could repudiate the whole social contract, which is also just consensus, but that's a far bigger deal than mere money.
This is good analysis. The main longitudinal aspect omitted is that the profitability of the attack goes up as long as the price of BTC doesn't double or more each halving.
In ~6 more years, Bitcoin will undergo two more halvings, so if the price of BTC is not ~400k by then, then attack will have become more feasible.
In the near future every nation state will be vying for the largest stake of the BTC mining pie and the BTC race will be bigger than the Space Race and the Nuclear Arms Race combined and adjusted for inflation.
My first link shows that Bitcoin consumes roughly 40GW and my second link shows that the UK roughly does too.
There are a lot of ifs and buts here ... but the amount of power used to support the BT mechanism worldwide is roughly the same as the power consumption of the entirety of the UK.
Because every unit of electricity causes climate change and burns resources (even renewable sources of electricity - they just burn them slower). From a societal point of view we are dumping huge amounts of electricity and resources into a hole to accomplish nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a database and a trusted third party at a billionth of the cost (or less).
The vast majority of transactions are speculation on what other people might pay for a bitcoin (i.e., a line on a spreadsheet). And even then, that speculation and trading often occurs on secondary markets which rely on trusted third parties - thus rendering the entire ordeal even more pointless.
Meanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin.
"Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively."
I find extremely funny that I came across this spammy comment while sitting on a vulnerability in their code because my attempts of contacting them have been unsuccessful
What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.
Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.
AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.
> What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.
WTF? Hydro is rarely wasted because it's so dispatchable. Typically, it can only happen during high water seasons. Same for the gas power plants.
> Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible.
An interesting point is that any nation state or corporation can focus resources on either AI or BTC, but not both at the same time. BTC is a sure bet in the long run while AI is potentially capable of delivering a faster ROI with no hard guarantees. As BTC FOMO hits every country on Earth it's likely that AI will take a 100+ year backseat to massive state sponsored BTC operations. It's not hard to imagine a situation where governments restrict AI HW manufacture and limit electricity for AI as a means of supporting the national BTC effort.
Top Tip: If you find the orange site's conversation on crypto to be repetitive you can change the top bar. Conversation stays the same but the colour can be changed!
Yeah, always takes me a minute when people say 'the orange site' (especially elsewhere) - it's green if I'm logged in, so I rarely see it orange, and then it's 'wuh, I'm logged out, [logs in]'.
Fortunately I'm not prone to refer to the green site.
Before the AI bubble, Bitmain was only worth ~$1 billion. Now they are worth ~15, because they make chips for AI also.
Either way, you could buy bitmain for the budget mentioned in the attack if it were for sale.
Or bitmain could pull off the attack, if indeed they do "control ... all the major mining pools" as the article alleges.
But who ultimately controls Bitmain? The Chinese state.
So, by extension, bitcoin is controlled by the CCP.
What a shitshow. Crypto needs to move on from bitcoin already, pick something better... anything better. There are so many options, and bitcoin is the worst of all of them.
Like it or not in the end it will just be BTC.
China will stop exporting Bitcoin mining tech. Nation States will dump money into proprietary BTC mining tech and keep it to themselves just like military tech.
The US needs to see this reality and focus on domestic BTC mining tech like the future depends on it.
Too many people have a vested interest in keeping Bitcoin going for as long as possible, sadly. It's going to take a massive black swan of some kind to shake their faith.
Heck, they can embed CSAM into the Bitcoin blockchain and that won't stop anyone from using it, because above all else, line must go up.
The answer to this problem is in the original Bitcoin whitepaper itself. It gives the formula for the required number of confirmations.
The Monero PoW community has had to deal with such nonsense, as have other smaller PoW coins.
With ε=1e-3, the expected number of 6 confirmations works only so long as the largest pool size does not exceed 12%. For a pool size of 30%, at least 24 confirmations should be required in Bitcoin, but 49 in Monero with its stricter ε=1e-6. You can see the table and the math at https://gist.github.com/impredicative/0907e1699f5ff97a9fed5d... and again it's all cleanly reproducible from the whitepaper. Anyone who is still requiring only 6 confirmations then will be setting themselves up for a risk of reversal.
TFA observes that it would be disruptive and socially difficult to move systems to expect requiring 24 confirmations, and expresses relief that other responses are possible.
Perhaps this is more suitable as a response over months or years to a long-term shift in the composition of Bitcoin miners than as a short-term measure when it appears that someone has suddenly acquired 30% of mining capacity today.
Yes: "Not aligning with reality is disruptive." Some lessons have to be learned the hard way if they're not learned the soft way. The problem is not reality.
You will probably end up in court. But you might not get convicted.
Shakeeb Ahmed was convicted of wire fraud for exploiting a smart contract bug.
Avi Eisenberg was also convicted for exploiting a smart contract bug, but he had his conviction overturned on appeal.
The Peraire-Bueno brothers were in court for exploiting a bug in the MEV mechanism but it ended in a mis-trial so we're going to have to wait to find out.
IANAL, but from my understanding, the primary law used to prosecute hacking is the CFAA's broad "without authorization" and "exceeding authorized access" clauses.
That said, authorization implies an entity with ownership rights granting some kind of limited license to others to interact with the owner's property.
For a permissionless decentralized network with no owner, where the attack is against the consensus of which chain is valid, I'd have a hard time arguing that "authorization" as a concept is even applicable or relevant.
As wmf suggested, market manipulation laws may still apply, but I'm not sure traditional CFAA "without authorization" / "exceeding authorized access" hacking charges could apply, though I'd be willing to bet a prosecutor could make a case for wire fraud - a scheme to defraud using interstate communications.
This article is FUD. No one is spending $30B+ for an attack that gasp extends the required confirmations to a few hours until a re-org can be achieved and accounts settled.
In fact, wiping out the derivative markets would be seen as a net-postive by most individual hodlers.
TIL the scale of bitcoin derivatives in 2020 (hence volatility): ~2T on 2B market activity. Jeepers!
--- Starting in late 2020, as shown in The Economist's graphic, the spot market in Bitcoin became dwarfed by the derivatives markets. In the last month $1.7T of Bitcoin futures traded on unregulated exchanges, and $6.4B on regulated exchanges. Compare this with the $1.8B of the spot market in the same month. ---
The Eyal & Sirer paper is pretty interesting - they basically point out that there is actually some game theory involved in when miners should reveal that they mined a block to compete most effectively with their fellows. If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage.
It looks like a result with complex implications - eg, maybe making it impossible for new miners to set up unless they have a meaningful advantage in operating costs instead of just parity with the entrenched players. It is hard to tell because market reality is a mess but if there is a meaningful strategic choice to be made beyond simply announcing a block when it is mined then there is a lot of room for weird equilibriums even if the paper's specific analysis turns out to have flaws.
Isn't this the same thing as saying "if everyone just agrees that a dollar bill is actually just a piece of paper, USD becomes worthless"? Albeit at a smaller scale
I don't think it is the same thing. Everyone agrees that mining the next block is valuable.
Unless they didn’t.
There’s nothing inherently valuable about crypto beyond what value people assign to it in their minds.
Same with all money. Please research more before parroting this argument. You are not the first person to think of it.
Fiat money has a difference: an army. It is issued by a government which has the legitimate right to demand taxes, paid in their currency, and deprive you of life and liberty if you don't.
Ultimately the populace could repudiate the whole social contract, which is also just consensus, but that's a far bigger deal than mere money.
GP was arguing against GGP’s point and I was simply pointing out that the argument was hollow.
What are you referring to with “research more”?
False. Gold and silver have intrinsic value beyond their use as currency.
True, but only a minuscule fraction of it is used for that purpose. If that were the sole source of its value, it would be worth pennies per once.
[delayed]
Not for most people. They aren't going to smelt it down and use it to build electronics or jewelry.
For most people the value is what they can receive for it in trade. Which holds for all money.
It's always hilarious when people who are unclear on the basics themselves tell other to "research more". I suppose it's the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
This is good analysis. The main longitudinal aspect omitted is that the profitability of the attack goes up as long as the price of BTC doesn't double or more each halving.
In ~6 more years, Bitcoin will undergo two more halvings, so if the price of BTC is not ~400k by then, then attack will have become more feasible.
In the near future every nation state will be vying for the largest stake of the BTC mining pie and the BTC race will be bigger than the Space Race and the Nuclear Arms Race combined and adjusted for inflation.
TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying!
EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Since when is incentivizing low cost renewable energy horrifying?
My first link shows that Bitcoin consumes roughly 40GW and my second link shows that the UK roughly does too.
There are a lot of ifs and buts here ... but the amount of power used to support the BT mechanism worldwide is roughly the same as the power consumption of the entirety of the UK.
Wow! Bitcoin must be more valuable than the UK then. Better buy some!
Because every unit of electricity causes climate change and burns resources (even renewable sources of electricity - they just burn them slower). From a societal point of view we are dumping huge amounts of electricity and resources into a hole to accomplish nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a database and a trusted third party at a billionth of the cost (or less).
The vast majority of transactions are speculation on what other people might pay for a bitcoin (i.e., a line on a spreadsheet). And even then, that speculation and trading often occurs on secondary markets which rely on trusted third parties - thus rendering the entire ordeal even more pointless.
You’re right. I’ll setup the database. Everyone can trust me, honest!
Better shoot down the sun then.
Meanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin.
"Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively."
[0]: https://hedera.com/blog/going-carbon-negative-at-hedera-hash... [1]: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160701/
I find extremely funny that I came across this spammy comment while sitting on a vulnerability in their code because my attempts of contacting them have been unsuccessful
Databases either?
What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.
Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.
AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.
> We can't know how much power AI uses.
I call shenanigans on this statement. We can and most certainly can tell how much power AI is using. The upper bound is the total datacenter usage.
> gas that's normally burned off at the well site
Funny thing about that. Civilized governments put a stop to that, by fining flare-offs to make it economical to not do that.
They still do it in North Dakota
> What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.
WTF? Hydro is rarely wasted because it's so dispatchable. Typically, it can only happen during high water seasons. Same for the gas power plants.
> Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible.
Like coal.
An interesting point is that any nation state or corporation can focus resources on either AI or BTC, but not both at the same time. BTC is a sure bet in the long run while AI is potentially capable of delivering a faster ROI with no hard guarantees. As BTC FOMO hits every country on Earth it's likely that AI will take a 100+ year backseat to massive state sponsored BTC operations. It's not hard to imagine a situation where governments restrict AI HW manufacture and limit electricity for AI as a means of supporting the national BTC effort.
I look forward to more open an earnest conversation about bitcoin on the orange site.
Top Tip: If you find the orange site's conversation on crypto to be repetitive you can change the top bar. Conversation stays the same but the colour can be changed!
Readers will want to note that this delightful feature is only available to users above 251 karma, or a knack for UserCSS.
Yeah, always takes me a minute when people say 'the orange site' (especially elsewhere) - it's green if I'm logged in, so I rarely see it orange, and then it's 'wuh, I'm logged out, [logs in]'.
Fortunately I'm not prone to refer to the green site.
Wow thank you, I'm about to be on the blue site. I never knew this and really don't like the orange.
0000FF gang, unite!
Before the AI bubble, Bitmain was only worth ~$1 billion. Now they are worth ~15, because they make chips for AI also. Either way, you could buy bitmain for the budget mentioned in the attack if it were for sale. Or bitmain could pull off the attack, if indeed they do "control ... all the major mining pools" as the article alleges.
But who ultimately controls Bitmain? The Chinese state.
So, by extension, bitcoin is controlled by the CCP.
What a shitshow. Crypto needs to move on from bitcoin already, pick something better... anything better. There are so many options, and bitcoin is the worst of all of them.
Like it or not in the end it will just be BTC. China will stop exporting Bitcoin mining tech. Nation States will dump money into proprietary BTC mining tech and keep it to themselves just like military tech. The US needs to see this reality and focus on domestic BTC mining tech like the future depends on it.
Too many people have a vested interest in keeping Bitcoin going for as long as possible, sadly. It's going to take a massive black swan of some kind to shake their faith.
Heck, they can embed CSAM into the Bitcoin blockchain and that won't stop anyone from using it, because above all else, line must go up.
The answer to this problem is in the original Bitcoin whitepaper itself. It gives the formula for the required number of confirmations.
The Monero PoW community has had to deal with such nonsense, as have other smaller PoW coins.
With ε=1e-3, the expected number of 6 confirmations works only so long as the largest pool size does not exceed 12%. For a pool size of 30%, at least 24 confirmations should be required in Bitcoin, but 49 in Monero with its stricter ε=1e-6. You can see the table and the math at https://gist.github.com/impredicative/0907e1699f5ff97a9fed5d... and again it's all cleanly reproducible from the whitepaper. Anyone who is still requiring only 6 confirmations then will be setting themselves up for a risk of reversal.
TFA observes that it would be disruptive and socially difficult to move systems to expect requiring 24 confirmations, and expresses relief that other responses are possible.
Perhaps this is more suitable as a response over months or years to a long-term shift in the composition of Bitcoin miners than as a short-term measure when it appears that someone has suddenly acquired 30% of mining capacity today.
Yes: "Not aligning with reality is disruptive." Some lessons have to be learned the hard way if they're not learned the soft way. The problem is not reality.
Is it illegal to attack cryptocurrency?
If crypto needs legal protection from attacks, I think that would invalidate most of its value proposition.
Definitely reduces the cost of consensus though.
You will probably end up in court. But you might not get convicted.
Shakeeb Ahmed was convicted of wire fraud for exploiting a smart contract bug.
Avi Eisenberg was also convicted for exploiting a smart contract bug, but he had his conviction overturned on appeal.
The Peraire-Bueno brothers were in court for exploiting a bug in the MEV mechanism but it ended in a mis-trial so we're going to have to wait to find out.
Not legal advice ;-)
Depending on the currency, it's celebrated. (Code is law, etc.)
The attack described in this article might violate CFTC market manipulation regulations.
IANAL, but from my understanding, the primary law used to prosecute hacking is the CFAA's broad "without authorization" and "exceeding authorized access" clauses.
That said, authorization implies an entity with ownership rights granting some kind of limited license to others to interact with the owner's property.
For a permissionless decentralized network with no owner, where the attack is against the consensus of which chain is valid, I'd have a hard time arguing that "authorization" as a concept is even applicable or relevant.
As wmf suggested, market manipulation laws may still apply, but I'm not sure traditional CFAA "without authorization" / "exceeding authorized access" hacking charges could apply, though I'd be willing to bet a prosecutor could make a case for wire fraud - a scheme to defraud using interstate communications.
This article is FUD. No one is spending $30B+ for an attack that gasp extends the required confirmations to a few hours until a re-org can be achieved and accounts settled.
In fact, wiping out the derivative markets would be seen as a net-postive by most individual hodlers.
I believe the article reached the same conclusion you did