Actually I was referring to non-zero block subsidy. Referring to the eventual zero subsidy as having zero confirmation security value would be sort of pointless, so I didn’t feel it was necessary to spell it out.
A coin that has shown to be vulnerable to double-spending is a coin people would lose confidence in. If it can be done once, it will be done again. Doesn’t even have to be the same attacker.
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And again, you still haven't explained why same hardware cost in attack/defense == doesn't contribute to security. All I see is flawed reasoning: "X must be worthless because Y is better"-but that doesn't mean X is worthless. Not to mention, Y is not true!https://twitter.com/evoskuil/status/1029229754933624832 …
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I will try to explain: If a 51% attacker obtains some cheap ASIC's, it is true that he has an advantage. However, it is irrelevant to the security model if the 51% defender is willing to bear the cost of the attack by using more expensive miners (prev-gen/GPU).
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Again, this doesn’t explain how hardware cost contributes nothing to security. These 2 things you’re talking about are completely orthogonal.
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Assuming: (a) avg hardware capacity of X TH/s (b) avg efficiency of Y J/GH Combined with: (c) avg block reward
$R/day (d) 10-min-per-block constraint These 4 factors together create a _market equilibrium_ where there is an optimal level of hash rate (& mining hardware). -
Sure, if the hash rate goes above the optimal level (e.g., in case of an attack), it costs roughly the same to the defender & the attacker, for any extra hash rate. No one disputes that. But that is *orthogonal* to the fact that there is an optimal level of hash rate.
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A “majority” attack, by definition, has to take into account this hardware cost in acquiring majority hash rate - that was previously at equilibrium.
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Budish took this hardware cost into consideration - and called it the stock cost (God, does anyone actually bother to read Budish paper?). The only difference between his & my calculation is the question of the price of prev-gen ASICs, not that the stock cost doesn’t exist!
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Budish model, while inaccurate, is still more interesting than this oversimplified economic nonsense.
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Remind me but isn’t the whole point of PoW mining to prevent double-spending in the 1st place? If you don’t care about double-spends, why go thru all this mining trouble?