Posted on 07/28/2024 2:27:34 AM PDT by RandFan
The bitcoin count cannot be increased.
It is divisible up to 8 digits.
Much like gold, it is not meant to buy groceries with it. Think MUCH larger, interbank, intercountry, transactions.
Well it is bigger than that really as it will bring about a Global currency and Global control and that will be the final nail in Mankind on this planet.
Why does anyone need to “control” it. If you want to be a miner, you can.
People are so used to a regulated and “controlled” economy, they think it’s normal and right.
It IS the Wild West, but much less so today than when i first started following it. There is no FDIC looking out for the consumer. At the same time, I can keep bitcoin in my own wallet and do transactions without engaging with any bank who wants to take a piece of the action every step of the way.
Yes, there are inherent risks. Yes, there are scams. But, with freedom comes risks.
Bitcoin is used to escape capital controls. The use case in China is the oligarchs transferring wealth from China to the West via bitcoin. It’s then converted to even more hard assets like real estate in Canada and Montana.
“Yeah, sort of like your stocks and bonds and your debit card.”
All of those except maybe the debit card existed in a pre-internet world and were managed just fine. Credit cards have been around for many years. Those systems could return to be implemented in their original form. Balances can be kept track of in paper form or a local computer. Not so with bit coin. Even now they do not gobble up mass amounts of power to access. Simply shut down the internet or access to it and there no longer is any bit coin.
My point isn't that it "needs" to be controlled, but that a potential for "control" exist because miners are required in processing of transactions.
Isn't this the reason for concern about a small number of miners or mining pools controlling a majority of the network’s hash power, and thereby (theoretically) colluding to manipulate the blockchain (e.g., a 51% attack).
Nonsense. At least my comment was not derived from such thinking. And I don't think anyone likes to have their assets controlled.
Baloney. Nobody holds physical bonds today. Do you have stock certificates for your investments? Nope. Your bank account ledger will not give you a dime when power is out and banks are closed. Think anyone will take a check when the banks have no power? And btw… Bitcoin springs immediately back to life when power comes back on. And I have yet to hear someone realistically explain how power goes off everywhere… or forever, and not just for a week or two.
You new word order modern non thinkers are incapable of seeing reality as it really is. The world existed without the digital world and it could exist that way again. But even as the world falls apart around you there is such arrogance that you believe that there will always be power, there will always be internet, and that people will always have access to all of it. That it can’t be taken down by war, or energy issues, or a communist government just denying you access. In the old system you could actually manage currency exchanges face to face and hand to hand. And it was also private. With whats coming then that will all be gone.
You might want to review your sources if you think that is the case.
Exchanges have been hacked. But that is akin to bank robberies; it doesn’t mean the dollar is bad because Jesse James hit the banks.
The problem with that concept is that from a purely technological standpoint, the blockchain system invites so many more Jesse Jameses to rob so many more banks. The scale of thievery is exponential, and almost infinite. Physicality is no longer needed - just computers and coding. (but it's decentralized! 🤣)
This article is from February 2019 - five years ago.
Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked
More and more security holes are appearing in cryptocurrency and smart contract platforms, and some are fundamental to the way they were built.
Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange going on in Ethereum Classic, one of the cryptocurrencies people can buy and sell using Coinbase’s popular exchange platform. Its blockchain, the history of all its transactions, was under attack.
An attacker had somehow gained control of more than half of the network’s computing power and was using it to rewrite the transaction history. That made it possible to spend the same cryptocurrency more than once—known as “double spends.” The attacker was spotted pulling this off to the tune of $1.1 million. Coinbase claims that no currency was actually stolen from any of its accounts. But a second popular exchange, Gate.io, has admitted it wasn’t so lucky, losing around $200,000 to the attacker (who, strangely, returned half of it days later).
Just a year ago, this nightmare scenario was mostly theoretical. But the so-called 51% attack against Ethereum Classic was just the latest in a series of recent attacks on blockchains that have heightened the stakes for the nascent industry.
In total, hackers have stolen nearly $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency since the beginning of 2017, mostly from exchanges, and that’s just what has been revealed publicly. These are not just opportunistic lone attackers, either. Sophisticated cybercrime organizations are now doing it too: analytics firm Chainalysis recently said that just two groups, both of which are apparently still active, may have stolen a combined $1 billion from exchanges.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Blockchains are particularly attractive to thieves because fraudulent transactions can’t be reversed as they often can be in the traditional financial system. Besides that, we’ve long known that just as blockchains have unique security features, they have unique vulnerabilities. Marketing slogans and headlines that called the technology “unhackable” were dead wrong.
That’s been understood, at least in theory, since Bitcoin emerged a decade ago. But in the past year, amidst a Cambrian explosion of new cryptocurrency projects, we’ve started to see what this means in practice—and what these inherent weaknesses could mean for the future of blockchains and digital assets.
...Still, most of the recent headline-grabbing hacks weren’t attacks on the blockchains themselves, but on exchanges, the websites where people can buy, trade, and hold cryptocurrencies. And many of those heists could be blamed on poor basic security practices. That changed in January with the 51% attack against Ethereum Classic.
Susceptibility to 51% attacks is inherent to most cryptocurrencies. That’s because most are based on blockchains that use proof of work as their protocol for verifying transactions. In this process, also known as mining, nodes spend vast amounts of computing power to prove themselves trustworthy enough to add information about new transactions to the database. A miner who somehow gains control of a majority of the network's mining power can defraud other users by sending them payments and then creating an alternative version of the blockchain in which the payments never happened. This new version is called a fork. The attacker, who controls most of the mining power, can make the fork the authoritative version of the chain and proceed to spend the same cryptocurrency again.
Aside from 51% attacks, there is whole new level of blockchain security weaknesses whose implications researchers are just beginning to explore: smart-contract bugs. Coincidentally, Ethereum Classic—specifically, the story behind its origin—is a good starting point for understanding them, too.
As the hack illustrated, a bug in a live smart contract can create a unique sort of emergency. In traditional software, a bug can be fixed with a patch. In the blockchain world, it’s not so simple. Because transactions on a blockchain cannot be undone, deploying a smart contract is a bit like launching a rocket, says Petar Tsankov, a research scientist at ETH Zurich and cofounder of a smart-contract security startup called ChainSecurity. “The software cannot make a mistake.”
There are fixes, of a sort. Though they can’t be patched, some contracts can be “upgraded” by deploying additional smart contracts to interact with them. Developers can also build centralized kill switches into a network to stop all activity once a hack is detected. But for users whose money has already been stolen, it will be too late.
The only way to retrieve the money is, effectively, to rewrite history—to go back to the point on the blockchain before the attack happened, create a fork to a new blockchain, and have everyone on the network agree to use that one instead. That’s what Ethereum’s developers chose to do. Most, but not all, of the community switched to the new chain, which we now know as Ethereum. A smaller group of holdouts stuck with the original chain, which became Ethereum Classic.
Nevertheless, hundreds of valuable Ethereum smart contracts were already vulnerable to this so-called reentrancy bug, according to Victor Fang, cofounder and CEO of blockchain security firm AnChain.ai. Tens of thousands of contracts may contain some other kind of vulnerability, according to research conducted last year. And the very nature of public blockchains means that if a smart-contract bug exists, hackers will find it, since the source code is often visible on the blockchain. “This is very different than traditional cybersecurity,” says Fang, who previously worked for the cybersecurity firm FireEye.
But making sure code is clean will only go so far. A blockchain, after all, is a complex economic system that depends on the unpredictable behavior of humans, and people will always be angling for new ways to game it. Daian and his colleagues have shown how attackers have already figured out how to profit by gaming popular Ethereum smart contracts, for instance.
In short, while blockchain technology has been long touted for its security, under certain conditions it can be quite vulnerable. Sometimes shoddy execution can be blamed, or unintentional software bugs. Other times it’s more of a gray area—the complicated result of interactions between the code, the economics of the blockchain, and human greed. That’s been known in theory since the technology’s beginning. Now that so many blockchains are out in the world, we are learning what it actually means—often the hard way.
Theft is theft. Whether the blockchain or an exchange - somewhere...someone is getting ripped off.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58163917 (August 2021)
Hackers have stolen some $600m (£433m) in what appears to be one the largest cryptocurrency heists ever.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/hackers-steal-around-100-million-cryptocurrency-binance-linked-blockchain-2022-10-07/(October 2022)
Binance-linked blockchain hit by $570 million crypto hack
https://decrypt.co/32853/hacker-reveals-how-he-cracked-a-bitcoin-address (June 2020)
Hacker reveals how he cracked a Bitcoin address
Bitcoin developer John Cantrell checked over a trillion combinations of words to unlock the Bitcoin address and take the money.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/01/mt-gox-about-to-unload-9-billion-of-bitcoin-what-it-means-for-btc.html(July 1, 2024)
A bitcoin exchange that collapsed 10 years ago after being hacked is set to return billions of dollars’ worth of the token to users — and it has investors worried.
In a few days, bankrupt Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox will begin paying back thousands of users almost $9 billion worth of tokens. The platform went under in 2014 following a series of heists that cost it in the range of 650,000 to 950,000 bitcoins, or upward of $59 billion, at current prices.
The payout follows a protracted bankruptcy process that’s involved multiple delays and legal challenges.
It will be interesting to see the responses to your comment.
The bitcoin blockchain hasn’t been hacked. Period. There has been 100% uptime.
The Fed doesnt come close to that reliability.
Any cryptocurrency that isn’t Bitcoin is referred to as a sh**coin. And usually rightfully so.
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The bitcoin blockchain hasn’t been hacked. Period. There has been 100% uptime...Any cryptocurrency that isn’t Bitcoin is referred to as a sh**coin
The main article points out serious vulnerabilities in blockchain technology overall. Ethereum - the subject of the article, is not sh**coin.
While technically it may be true that the Bitcoin blockchain itself hasn't been hacked, we can't just ignore the BILLIONS of dollars in theft and laundering that have occurred on the Bitcoin exchanges. An argument can be made that Bitcoin, cryptocurrency in general, and the creation of blockchain technology, have given a unique gift to technically savvy thieves.
We're talking about scale - the ability to do a great amount of damage, stealing vast amounts of currency/assets, through (proportionally) little effort - that is, for the people who have the technical expertise. An argument can be made that it is precisely the 'openness' of the blockchain that invites the criminality.
Beating the drum of 'decentralization' isn't going to cut it either. People are just naturally wary of something that is generally too complex for an average person to understand, especially when it comes to their money and financial welfare.
It's hard to understand how in 2024, anyone believes the credibility of the argument that Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency - will be used as a peer-to-peer payment system on a global scale. No government, no central bank - will EVER allow this to happen. If anything, the average person has to deal with more government oversight when it comes to their finances (see the IRS $600 rule). As it pertains to the global financial system - the citizen has no power. We don't even own the assets that we think we own.
The system being built is CBDC - with oversight and regulation.
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