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33 sats \ 4 replies \ @ramenbased 26 Jun 2023 \ on: Daily discussion thread
dear diary,
i feel people are confusing censorship resistance with security and use it interchangeably which leads to incoherent conversations.
bitcoin can be secure and still be censored, or be permissionless while insecure. it seems to me the two have very little in common.
i see security as backwards looking while censorship resistance as forward looking. what irritates me is when people argue about the "security budget", that you have to allow all data/tx onto the blockchain for "the sake of" security. its an argument most probably would agree but it falls apart rather quickly.
if i was the government, i could pay miners a premium per block for that they censor certain on-chain conduct. this would increase the "security budget". thoughts?
I have heard this potential attack on transactions discussed. While this could be done what would likely happen is that other miners not being paid would pick up the "censored" transactions. This is one of many reasons keep mining dispersed through different jurisdictions. In general bitcoin's approach is based on incentives and if you want to do things like this it will be very expensive to do so and even if you can do them you can't do them for long.
Someone wrote a great article a while back that outlined many attack vectors that could be taken on bitcoin. I can't recall who wrote it or where.
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but the “for profit” incentive can be distorted. no company will deny the holy water that is public funds, so that very incentive is what makes bitcoin open to attack. ethirium has like what 50-70% of their blocks effectively sanctioned and people are okey with it.
it seems to me geographical distribution is probably the most important PoW metric?
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This isn't the article I was thinking of but it is worth looking at. Attacker has a lot of computing power.
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If you think every miner (including individual bitcoiners) will take dollars from the US to censor transactions I don't know what to tell you. Public companies would for sure.
I agree with you on Eth but if you haven't noticed bitcoiners are very different from eth heads. If you believe there is a future with eth you really don't understand why bitcoin is even needed.
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