Sabotaging Bitcoin
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The debate around Bitcoin's environmental impact rages on, with commenters weighing in on the cryptocurrency's energy-intensive computations and their devastating ecological footprint. While some, like candiddevmike, lament the "useless computations" and "ponzi scheme," others, like OutOfHere, point out that the US military's energy consumption dwarfs Bitcoin's, putting the issue into a broader perspective. A surprising insight from Zaskoda suggests that a significant portion of Bitcoin's energy usage might be attributed to "waste power" that's normally burned off or goes unused, adding nuance to the discussion. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that the thread is relevant now because it taps into the growing concern about the environmental sustainability of emerging technologies.
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Dec 30, 2025 at 3:53 PM EST
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If we ever get to the point where bitcoin or what people are doing on servers is the most pressing problem in the world worthy of our outrage, I will cheer you on.
"Anon yells at cloud" isn't worth anyone's effort or time.
Burning firewood actually immediately releases an extensive set of carcinogens, also causing depression.
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.
Funny thing about that. Civilized governments put a stop to that, by fining flare-offs to make it economical to not do that.
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.
7 transactions per second is NOT a sure bet.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk...
We have no idea what's happening in private data centers around the world.
You've drank some kind of kool-aid. You've been gaslit. Don't do it to the rest of us.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564#
Cmon you remember supply and demand right
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.
And 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.
(*) Approaching no-one on a global scale.
The "horrifying" just seems like a hard frame to support. What about the energy to support the traditional finance system? It burns a lot of energy to move money around and the profits of running the thing usually end up going to support various wars. At least most of what is involved with the CBECI is voluntary unlike the fiat systems where anyone trying to opt out as, eg, a protest against the military is going to make some exciting new discoveries about how traditional finance works.
Is the energy spent on the entertainment industry horrifying? Literally ergs being consumed being burned just for fun.
I have nothing against bitcoin being the money of the future, but if it is to become that, this is the sort of trial by fire that it should endure.
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 another commenter suggested, market manipulation laws may still apply, but I'm not sure traditional CFAA "exceeding authorized access" hacking charges could apply.
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 ;-)
0000FF gang, unite!
Fortunately I'm not prone to refer to the green site.
This site self selects for dishonesty because only dishonest people are inclined to moderate away dissenting viewpoints.
Perhaps HN's collective TDS has anchored onto to color orange? Would explain the hate for Bitcoin, one of the world's most valuable assets.
collective disgust for racism and sexism and fascism and raping children and covering for pedophiles and deranged senile leaders
FTFY
- Evade sanctions, launder money untraceably
- Drive investment money away from productive endeavors, like financing companies that actually make stuff
- Have an easy switch to blow up the enemy's economy when needed, like as part of a hybrid strategy in preparation for hot war
- "Rot the brains" of people who are smart enough to stay away from gambling but not from Ponzi schemes.
The real trojan horse is the 3% inflation each year that the government subjects us to with their moneyprinting. It compounds one's savings into nothingness. That's before it ultimately blows up altogether with hyperinflation which is its only possible long-term outcome given the debt.
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 verifiable from the whitepaper. Anyone who is still requiring only 6 confirmations then will be setting themselves up for a risk of reversal.
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.
So 240 minutes for Bitcoin, and 98 minutes for Monero.
So even though Monero is more strict, it is still "faster".
"Democratizing finance" my a**.
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.
There’s nothing inherently valuable about crypto beyond what value people assign to it in their minds.
What are you referring to with “research more”?
But I do wonder if the abstract nature of it will forever hinder its ability to do so universally.
I’m also interested why Bitcoin Cash wasn’t more successful after the fork.
you mean besides it being run by a bunch of crooks and scam artists like CSW?
If it were only worth pennies an ounce, numerous industries wouldn't be paying what they do for it. The fact that many industries value it at several thousand dollars an ounce is self-evident from their continued use of it.
Some bitcoin advocates will talk about how useful it is as a currency, and I wonder how much bitcoin is actually used for purposes other then to hope you can sell it to someone else for more than you paid.
For most people the value is what they can receive for it in trade. Which holds for all money.
Ultimately the populace could repudiate the whole social contract, which is also just consensus, but that's a far bigger deal than mere money.
The answer is "no, it's not the same". The attack does not require everybody to agree that the bitcoin is worthless.
Obviously if everybody agrees that the bitcoin is worthless, then it is worthless. But that's a separate topic.
I don't know if I have a good comparison here, but maybe something like "if the bank keeps your money for a little longer before validating your transaction, they can use your money for a little longer and make more money from it". Of course if your bank says that a transaction takes 1 year, you will go to another bank. But if they say it takes a day...
How is it wasted if they work on the current chain? If they find a block during those X seconds, they'll propagate it before the waiting pool does. The waiting pool will then just lose the revenue from the block they put on hold. They're the ones wasting mining time when that happens, while the others never do.
A finds a block after 1 minute, then powers off and waits for another minute. They reveal the block after 2 minutes.
B searches for the block for 2 minutes.
After 2 minutes, A has used 1 minute of their compute, and B has used 2.
If B finds a block between minute 1 and 2, they start working on their competing chain, but A is already working on theirs. And A had a headstart because it started working on it somewhere between minute 1. So it's more likely that A's fork wins the race in the end.
I'd even say that B is slightly more likely to keep their reward because they started propagating their block earlier, so it's more likely other miners are mining on this block.
If A finds a second block between minute 1 and 2, then they win, but it would be the same if the didn't withhold their block.
When A is mining on their hidden block, they mine for a potential height of 2 that would win against a miner only able to push a height of 1. But by doing that they put the block they found at risk of being abandoned because another miner found a block in the meantime.
So if you find a block, you get almost 100% chance it'll stay if you publish it immediately. If you withhold it and find another one you get 100% chance of keeping your 2 blocks. If you don't find that 2nd one, you get <50% chance of your block to be the main chain (depending on time of reaction of another block being published, and connectivity). On the other hand, if you don't withhold it and find 2 blocks in a row, you also get almost 100% chance of keeping your 2 blocks. I fail to see how withholding is profitable.
Because you keep ignoring the part where it is profitable :-).
> If A finds a second block between minute 1 and 2, then they win, but it would be the same if the didn't withhold their block.
Except that by withholding their block, they got a headstart so they are more likely to find the second block. So it's not the same.
And you keep ignoring the fact that they don't necessarily have to wait until someone else finds a competing block. Maybe a winning strategy is to always withhold the block for 5 seconds. If you slightly increase your likelihood to find the winning block, you increase your profit, and that's the whole point.
With the interesting consequence (and that's the game theory part) where if everybody starts withholding their block for 5 seconds, then it changes the winning strategy.
Withholding their block (5s or whatever) doesn't make them more likely to find the second block. The probability of finding a block is always the same, given a hashrate.
They are the only ones mining on this particular chain, but that's not an advantage either. How mining on a hidden chain is an advantage?
On the other hand, withholding certainly makes them more likely to lose the reward of the block.
And you would sill have 10% chance of mining another block if you don't withhold.
What advantage does withholding give you?
It's easier to see the argument if you have a head start. Imagine you've somehow created a private chain that's 10 blocks ahead of the public chain. You could publish that now and earn 10 blocks of reward, or you could continue mining until the lead diminishes to 0 blocks, earning the same 10 blocks of reward plus however many blocks you've mined in the meantime.
If you have 50%+ε of the hash rate on the network, this argument would have you bully other miners out by almost always stranding their blocks, since in expectation you'll mine blocks faster than your competitors.
The insight is that this same situation can happen probabilistically with a finite but non-majority fraction of the hash rate on the network. With 49% of the hash rate you'll still be able to build a private chain some fraction of the time, so waiting a little bit to see if this occurs might have positive expected value.
So, you have to risk a lot of rewards, and for what potential gain? If you win you get to discard some blocks of others. You don't get more rewards, you just make others earn less (and you push the difficulty down a bit).
I can see how you get a chance to double spend, though. If you want to double spend a transaction with N confirmations, you've to be N+1 blocks ahead in your hidden chain, publish your first transaction, wait for N confirmations on the public chain, and you publish your chain that's still 1 block ahead (and includes your double spend transaction).
Indeed, it's not "51% expensive", but it's still very expensive because of the rewards lost during the failed attempts before you get ahead enough. Actually, it might even be more expensive, because with 51% you're guaranteed to get ahead enough at some point, so you don't really risk your rewards (if you can maintain 51%).
I think you are missing something very basic here: the longer you compute, the higher the likelihood that you will find the hash before the others.
The extreme case being that if you can try ALL the possibilities before the others can start, then you are guarantee to find the solution before them.
Your advantage is having exhausted a fraction of the search space. But that fraction is tiny.
You're trying to find a hash with a value below a certain threshold (simplified said, a hash starting with a certain amount of zeroes). You do this by trying random inputs to the hash function. Every input has the same probability of getting an output that is low enough in value. You are not advancing by having tried other inputs. It's practically equivalent to rolling multiple dices until enough of them show a one. Every roll has the same probability of succeeding regardless of the rolls before.
The benefit there is that if another miner released a block before that 3 minutes this miner still can release their first block and has already spent 2 minutes working on a block that could better validate their first block now that there are competing chains.
1. They don't have to wait until another miner finds a block, they can just wait "for some time" and then release their block. All that time gives them the edge for the next block.
2. My understanding is that if two different blocks are found concurrently for the same head, then the network waits for the next block to select which "new head" is accepted. I.e. when there are competing chains, the longer chain wins. So I could imagine that a strategy could be to wait until some other miner announces their block and release yours precisely at that time, hence creating two competing chains. But you presumably have an edge because you have already been mining for a while on top of your block.
It's a race. Starting earlier obviously gives an advantage?!
It would be like saying you've an edge if you start earlier at the roulette.
On the other hand, if someone finds a block while you're keeping yours secret, it's very likely you'll lose the reward of your block.
So, you get a chance to discard the block of another miner, but you have to put your own block at risk of being discarded. Maybe there's a gain here, but it's not clear.
So you can get a head start on the next block from the likely new head block you've found.
It only works on average of course, you might be the one wasting resources if someone else published a block while you're withholding yours, but the trick is for you to gain an edge on average.
Now what happens if everyone is doing that calculation? That's where you need to do the game theory analysis (which I haven't and don't claim to understand).
Finding a block relatively early doesn't affect the odds of others finding a block soon. The odds are always the same, each hash is an independent event.
I don't see why withholding would get you an edge on average. If the others find a block while you're withholding, you lose your reward. If you find another block before them, you get the rewards of 2 blocks, exactly like if the same happened but you didn't withhold.
The only way for you to have an advantage is if you find a 2nd block at the same time as another one finds one on the other chain. You can then publish a height of 2 vs a height of 1, so you win. But to do that you have to first put your first block reward at high risk by withholding it. I don't think the odds are in your favor here.
It doesn't have to be arbitrary. You know when a block was "lucky" and you found it ahead of average by a given percentile. You leverage those blocks.
Thus, the time spent mining block is directly dependent on the logarithm of number of transactions in the block.
If one can mine a block with 3000 transactions (11-12 hashes to the header) in 10 minutes, one can mine a block with one transaction (1 hash to header) about ten times as fast.
The construction of the block is negligible if we talk about complete block mining time.
Huh? Surely the attempts for both take exactly the same amount of time after you've initially constructed the block, you're calculating only a single hash for each attempt.
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.
Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments about liquidity issues, shutting down the rails, making it illegal to trade, etc. but that's beside the point and depends on a thousand future variables to play out. So I don't know if btc will make it or not, but I do know property rights mean everything to humans. They literally determine whether not one is a slave (I am my own property). So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.
Bitcoin doesn't enforce property rights. The only thing you own is your bitcoin. The fact that I "own" my house and the land it is built on is enforced by the state with guns.
It's more like saying a hypothetical car which moves itself by using gasoline as a propellant rather than fuel for its combustion engine would have negative value.
Proof of Stake is an absurd security proposition. Stakeholders are immediately centralized. In every single PoS coin, the governance immediately becomes the exchanges because they always hold the most coins. They can and have used this to guide PoS coins towards governance unfavorable to the users, like as happened with Steem.
In fact, wiping out the derivative markets would be seen as a net-postive by most individual hodlers.
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