Comment by scottyah
5 days ago
I think people conflate decentralization with redundancy or resilience. IMO it just means you have multiple points of failure instead of one.
5 days ago
I think people conflate decentralization with redundancy or resilience. IMO it just means you have multiple points of failure instead of one.
10 years ago the talk of hackers partitioning the internet to double spend BTC all seemed a bit far fetched. But now crypto has trillions in market cap and governments involved -- governments that sometimes cut network cables just to send a message. The "means" and "motive" exploded by 100x, did anyone find a way to close the "opportunity" or did people just stop talking about it lol?
You'd also need to take down fleets of satellites in space. Double-spends aren't really easy to profit from either.
No, you just have to give Elon a call and ask him politely to disable Starlink on your side of the partition. If he refuses, mention the size of your antisatellite arsenal. He won't, though, because he has already had this conversation and made this calculation and chosen to capitulate several times before.
It might be difficult for you or I to profit from double spend, but remember, the threat profile is entire countries, and if any of the heavy-hitters wanted to kill BTC the logistics of conducting a big gnarly double-spend would barely register on their existing cyber budgets.
Back in the day, these scenarios were fanciful because crypto was small-league and the viable threats were big-league. Since then, crypto made it to the big leagues, but I don't think it ever became capable of handling big-league threats. At some point it will have to reckon with that.
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