U.S. traders are buying 'digital residency' in Palau to skirt restrictions on the amount of cryptocurrency they can withdraw and the exchanges they can use. Major exchanges have already banned the ID, fearing abuse.
Or any proof of stake coin like Ethereum, which doesn’t require any mining at all. The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.
As far as I know GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked.
To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
So a government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get enough Ethereum to disrupt it, before accounting for the price going up by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of Ethereum, and then they’re going to destroy the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested to take the network down, temporarily. Like sure, it’s possible, but once established, it’s not happening.
It would be more cost effective to do a supply chain attack and introduce exploits/weaknesses to try and make people doubt using it, attack the infrastructure and steal coins from exchanges and other off chain services or smart contracts with bugs, and pass laws to restrict it.
edit: Oh and there’s also the queue to activate a valid staker. It will take a lot of time to even begin to be able to do this, instead of hoarding/renting asic hardware and turning it on out of the blue.
Edit: Sorry I’m also wrong, it’s 66% of staked ETH, it’s not half the market cap. So we’d be talking probably upwards of a hundred billion (not hundreds) by the time we account for price increases from having to buy to even start to initiate the attack.
Edit: I also wonder if the future change to allow a staker to stake up to 2048 eth instead of 32 could quicken the attack (as it’s 1 validator in the queue instead of 64) or if they’ll delay larger validators longer, maybe based on its eth amount? I’m not up to speed on that. But in theory the queue would be 64 times quicker if they can join as quick.
Whats also likely is people see the attack coming due to the large validator queue, and they implement some sort of counter measure before the attack can even happen. Unless they let a 2048 eth validator in as quickly as a 32 eth validator, were talking many many months as there’s a massive influx of validators.
Imagine buying all that eth, and the community seeing the attack coming in advance, and instead saying, were going to lock out new validators after XYZ date, and force them to exit instead.
It would cause problems no doubt, but there would be a lot of options before an attack and after if they get that far to address it.
edit: They could also dramatically reduce the allowed validators per day if it was suspected, making the attack take years to even be possible.
Or any proof of stake coin like Ethereum, which doesn’t require any mining at all. The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.
As far as I know GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked.
To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
So a government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get enough Ethereum to disrupt it, before accounting for the price going up by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of Ethereum, and then they’re going to destroy the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested to take the network down, temporarily. Like sure, it’s possible, but once established, it’s not happening.
It would be more cost effective to do a supply chain attack and introduce exploits/weaknesses to try and make people doubt using it, attack the infrastructure and steal coins from exchanges and other off chain services or smart contracts with bugs, and pass laws to restrict it.
edit: Oh and there’s also the queue to activate a valid staker. It will take a lot of time to even begin to be able to do this, instead of hoarding/renting asic hardware and turning it on out of the blue.
Edit: Sorry I’m also wrong, it’s 66% of staked ETH, it’s not half the market cap. So we’d be talking probably upwards of a hundred billion (not hundreds) by the time we account for price increases from having to buy to even start to initiate the attack.
Edit: I also wonder if the future change to allow a staker to stake up to 2048 eth instead of 32 could quicken the attack (as it’s 1 validator in the queue instead of 64) or if they’ll delay larger validators longer, maybe based on its eth amount? I’m not up to speed on that. But in theory the queue would be 64 times quicker if they can join as quick.
Ethereum could literally roll back their chain to negate the attack, anyway. They’ve done it before.
Whats also likely is people see the attack coming due to the large validator queue, and they implement some sort of counter measure before the attack can even happen. Unless they let a 2048 eth validator in as quickly as a 32 eth validator, were talking many many months as there’s a massive influx of validators.
Imagine buying all that eth, and the community seeing the attack coming in advance, and instead saying, were going to lock out new validators after XYZ date, and force them to exit instead.
It would cause problems no doubt, but there would be a lot of options before an attack and after if they get that far to address it.
edit: They could also dramatically reduce the allowed validators per day if it was suspected, making the attack take years to even be possible.