All productive output doesn't stop during a lockdown. And not all of the world is locked down, including China, the second largest economy in the world.
You are right, we have at least 20-30% productivity in lockdowns. But most large economies are in lockdown and China is just 15-16% of world economy. It is export oriented and only essentials have demand and functional supply chains in these lockdowns. Even with all the best case scenarios, that 3% number does not feel right
Monero is a privacy coin. I.e., all transactions are obfuscated by default. This makes it infeasible to follow such a money trail if the attacker is trying at all.
This is a totally misleading calculation for the largest currencies. It's literally quoting the spot price for what's available on NiceHash and then dividing by the fraction you'd have of the total hash rate.
In reality, as you continued buying up hashing power, the price of the remaining hashing power would go up precipitously. This is basic supply and demand.
It's still a good proxy for how easy it is to do. The attacker could buy hardware, rent from people not on nicehash, etc.
It's like how companies' market caps are determined by the the last few trades, even though the last few trades probably represent .01% (or less) of the shares in the company.
Probably best to read the numbers a bit qualitatively. A coin that is 2% nicehashable would require substantial efforts (probably negotiating with a few private pools) to mount an attack; perhaps impossible for a not-connected miner. Wheres coins approaching the double digit percents probably is quite possible if you have even lukewarm connections. And those near 100% or above are likely super vulnerable.
There's already a GPU and ASIC shortage with prices skyrocketing - even without someone attempting a 51% attack. Being a PC gamer is tought right now - you often can't even find a GPU in stock!
Can't imagine how difficult it would be to hoard a ton of hardware.
That is why I included the NiceHash % for each coin. NiceHash offers fixed price contracts, typically for ~30% of their supply that you can lock in for up to 24 hours.
It's definitely a lot less do-able for the larger currencies - I still think PoW is a good option for them honestly. This was more to show that 51% attack risk is problematic for smaller coins, and I'd love to hear a discussion on the best way to fix this.
> I'd love to hear a discussion on the best way to fix this.
Proof of stake (still problematic for very small cap) or proof of ID (my favorite) using something like the e-estonia crypto ID system. You can prove every miner is a unique person, award them coins on a deterministic pseudo-random order.
If you're going to use proof of ID, doesn't that kind of remove any need for a blockchain?
How do you suppose you can have a censorship resistant currency if all a bad state actor has to do is punish anyone who mines a transaction they don't like.
I like crypto, but the greatest danger of it seems to be the potential for economic enslavement(we don't like you, therefore you can't buy bread anymore) through censorship and oppression.
Centralized government only provide means for a person to ID themselves, possibly through pseudonymous means.
If you are worried about targeted censorship, I seem to recall from the first days of BTC that there are ways to "shuffle" IDs: participate in a pool P, get a new ID that is untraceable to the original one but that is traceable to pool P and offers the guarantee that there are no duplicates.
But note that no cryptocurrency is "censorship-resistant" (I am of the opinion that financial transactions are not free speech, so calling it censorship is not the appropriate word and confuses issues). BTC can be (and has, in China) be forbidden. Forbid mining, jail people who do it. Easy in a country that bans also VPNs and Tor.
BTC is only as strong as Tor is and Tor is dependent on the governmental goodwill to let people use strong crypto. Keep in mind that until 2000 US companies were banned from exporting crypto tools that the NSA could not break [1] and even to this date, restrictions exist for some material and countries. USA is just one executive order away from making Tor, VPNs, and thus, anonymous BTC mining, illegal.
And I think that many countries will ban BTC. China is more energy-constrained than most of us, but the energy needs of the BTC netword is gargantuan. I think they have a year to solve that issue (I think they will use proof-of-stake) before states starts pulling the plug.
And always remember that as cool as crypto is as a tech, it does not exist in the vacuum. While it allows to navigate against an incompetent but permissive state, it does not fare well against a competent hostile one.
A part of the problem of maintaining cryptocurrencies (or anonymous networks) is political, not just technical. I too, as a geek, love the prospect of being able to solve political problems with technical solutions, but it only works up to a certain point.
Something like proof of ID would be amazing, but like you said it requires a secure digital id system to exist first, which few countries have. Is there anyone building something like this?
E-estonia will provide a certificate to anyone presenting themselves to an Estonian embassy with a valid passport (and, IIRC, $300). They thought many other nations would provide this service but to my knowledge they are still alone.
Estonian citizenship is not required. May crypto-geeks have an estonian ID certificate. If I were still into crypto I would have made one for myself I think.
For ID systems, I have yet to find a way to do registration in a decentralized way. Until we get cheap unspoofable genome sequencing devices (which may never be a thing), we will have to trust some authorities.
Once registered, you don't need to trust the Estonian government at all: you get an IC card and a reader (all open source IIRC) and you can autonomously authenticate. If memory serves, you can even authenticate pseudonymously.
Note that you don't have to trust everyone, you have to trust the e-ID registration system as a whole. That is, a single flawed individual won't be enough to corrupt the whole thing.
Which is fine, but than don't talk about cryptocurrencies. These are supposed to be trustless, not trustless-except-we-all-have-to-trust-the-government. Just talk about some new state system that uses some cryptography somewhere.
I wonder if we could see a spiral that effectively kills off smaller coins?
> Exchanges respond to these `weak` coins by increasing their confirmation requirements. Some of the really small coins would probably need huge numbers of confirmations.
> Lots of confirmations, which would likely damage the value of the coin.
> Lower price would reduce the miner hashrate
> Lower hashrate would further lower cost of 51% attack.
> Exchanges increase confirmations further
>This is a totally misleading calculation for the largest currencies.
That's not the only way it's misleading. Peercoin is listed as 8,559% available on nicehash, but peercoin is a proof of stake coin. It doesn't use hashpower to secure it's transactions, so it's not vulnerable to a 51% hash power attack (although it is vulnerable to other kinds of 51% attack).
What are the graph representations that are used at larger scales? They're not adjacency lists at bottom? Can you point toward some resources to read up on?
I've noticed this is an unfortunately common trope on HN.
"If they actually cared about X, they'd Y!"
I think what you mean to say is: "If they really cared about X, and only X, and had no political/financial/strategic impediments, they'd do Y! Therefore they clearly don't care about X."
Let's not have the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is a good thing, let's encourage more of it, yeah?
I grant your point, but disagree with your framing of the problem.
I think a good analogy here is to compare to American settlers. You're going to have a few waves: the explorers who move into totally uncharted territory and take on significant risk by using smart contracts. These are kinda crazy people who love the innovation, and I'd argue this is the majority of people in the space right now.
Eventually there will be the settlers, who start finding early uses for this technology that can significantly lower costs. Basically collecting on low-hanging fruit. J.P. Morgan, many finance companies, some savvy governments will step in to capitalize on easy wins.
Then there will be the long tail of normal uses. By the time the average company invests in smart contracts, there will be very well-understood battle-tested templates and toolchains for creating smart contracts, as well as consulting firms that are specialized in writing them for you with provable security guarantees.
Right now it's early. Your average company should not use smart contracts, that's a no-brainer. But someday the economics are going to make it a no-brainer for certain things, like incorporation, or issuing shares, or doing payroll, or complying with import/export regulations, or doing corporate taxes, or whatever it is that ends up more efficient through blockchains.
> Basically collecting on low-hanging fruit. J.P. Morgan, many finance companies, some savvy governments will step in to capitalize on easy wins.
You think a lack of technology is what's keeping these giants back from innovating? There's a reason many banks still have mainframes powering large portions of their internals. Lack of new tech is not holding them back.
> There's a reason many banks still have mainframes powering large portions of their internals.
There are many reasons. Institutional inertia for one, a lack of sufficiently knowledgeable people another. Banks are not innovating because you can't get around them anyway. And personally I don't mind, I'd much rather have my $ parked with an entity that moves slowly and predictably than with some 'move fast and break stuff' outfit that gives me a heartattack 3 times per year by showing me a $0 balance and no support department to call.
Serious question: How can smart contracts create the "proper" trustless environment for most workplace contracts?
For example, stock option agreements are usually pretty straightforward... until a termination date has to be decided on. How does the termination get put into the contract?
Though I suppose smart contracts could exist as an automation mechansim , but there's a "wrapper contract" that provides "real deal" legal protection against abuse?
Bringing trustworthy real-world data into a blockchain in a decentralized manner is a known and important challenge that is being worked on by several projects like Augur. The prevailing answer is to incentivise humans to insert it correctly by appropriately aligning rewards for doing so, and making it difficult not to do so (schelling points). That's what the Augur project is really about, the prediction market they are building is just the first application of that system.
They can't do that on their own - interaction with the physical world requires a trusted party to decide/verify if a particular real world condition has been met or not.
Coincidentally, that's (part of) the role our court system plays in contract disputes; but there are other existing systems e.g. arbitration.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence