Using just over 4 million antminer S9's at 3.2 cents/kWh (bulk cost of coal power) to generate the 1,350,000 TH/s required to get 50% control of the network would cost you $3.8 billion over a 3 month time period.
At 7 transactions a second, it would take 54 million transactions to flood the network over a 3 month time period, meaning you could spend $71 on each transaction fee.
If you wanted to stop the bitcoin network and wanted to save money on the attack of mining, you could force everyone to make a "minimal" fee of up to $71 to make one Bitcoin transaction.
As the costs of mining increase, this is only going to increase as well.
Bitcoin is also traded off-network so the market would remain liquid and you'd be paying miners an extra $300,000 per block so they could easily afford the transaction fees to settle large amounts.
Yeah, and the cost to do that in this scenario is $72. Comparatively expensive, but you're flooding the network with money...
Anchoring a sidechain just increases the resources needed to tamper with it, as if it itself had a higher proof of work. It doesn't need to happen every ten blocks or any set number. As often as possible is good enough. Sidechains can even have sidechains. If the $72 was too expensive that chain can support hundreds of other chains anchoring into it, spreading the costs.
But most people would still just use exchanges and as long as the exchanges settle often enough that their government-mandated floats cover the difference, what do they care if the underlying network itself is slow?
On a side chain, 10,000,000 transactions between 2 people costs $72 and takes ten minutes, but 2 transactions between 10,000,000 people costs $72,000,000 and takes over a month.
"Most People" in the market for cryptocurrencies will just switch to ethereum or monero.
> "Most People" in the market for cryptocurrencies will just switch to ethereum or monero.
That's fallacy one - assuming nobody notices the attack and realizes that if one coin falls, the next could too. You can't assume an unaware population. This isn't politics, people are paying attention because their money is on the line.
Also, in this scenario you're dumping a ton of money into the coin to make it die ... that provides a tremendous pressure to make it live.
> Again, side chains do _not_ scale with users.
This is a blanket statement that may apply to one or more pathological sidechains, but does not generalize.
The scaling of sidechains depends on the structure of the chain, trust requirements, and other usage decisions. This is utterly independent of what it's linked to, and only partly related to how often you link to the upstream chain.
> On a side chain, 10,000,000 transactions between 2 people costs $72 and takes ten minutes, but 2 transactions between 10,000,000 people costs $72,000,000 and takes over a month.
Which fallacy is that? The "fallacy" of substitute goods?
Burden of proof is on you at this point. Maybe in your haste to cry fallacy you just forgot to mention an actual Bitcoin side chain that would be competitive with Ethereum or Montero in that situation?
> Which fallacy is that? The "fallacy" of substitute goods?
That your opponents won't notice this happening to the first currency. You're trying to starve the system with billions of dollars of transactions!
You're discussing taking on the coins in order, but you only get one element of surprise.
> Maybe in your haste to cry fallacy you just forgot to mention an actual Bitcoin side chain that would be competitive with Ethereum or Montero in that situation?
No, I did but you didn't notice. The off-network exchanges. They're already what 90% of coin holders think of bitcoin as, so they wouldn't notice or care that big transactions between exchanges took a long time to settle. Like I don't care where or when my physical bank trucks the paper money.
Also, the $1B / month you're injecting would fund a lot of work on the ecosystem.
> Burden of proof is on you at this point.
No, it doesn't swap back and forth every post. When I discount your vampire-bats plan by pointing out the sun, I don't suddenly have to prove the existence of the sun.
> Again, off-network exchanges still require the network to verify,
I'm referring to totally off-network exchanges. Most people (sadly) are happy to own bitcoin via an intermediary. They wouldn't notice this attack at all.
And the exchanges, settling 10,000+ bitcoins at once, could easily pay any plausible transaction fees, so nothing would even grind to a halt.
The attack would prevent me using the local Bitcoin vending machines for $4 purchases, but wouldn't impact the overall settlement of large amounts.
> I'm really not sure what you're getting at with "elements of surprise".
You say people would migrate off Bitcoin because of the attacks. But really, people would detect and analyze the attack and recognize the intent. They'd make informed decisions in how to respond, given that an adversary of this class wouldn't be likely to give up with only one currency destroyed.
> You do need to prove that pink unicorns exist by giving examples, rather than describing it.
The only reason to believe that all sidechains must scale badly is one unsourced claim of yours, based presumably on your examination of a subset of the ones that exist. If you care to present a broad proof that the entire concept is impossible, go for it.
