What do you mean by implode?
@infinitesunrise I mean no longer have any, or have severely reduced value, possibly because the system that underpins them (maybe the security features) breaks or is compromised, or because data centres become unreliable. It’s not likely, I know ….
It’s not unlikely that it’ll decrease in value in the future. Bitcoin’s internal dynamics have historically driven a four-year price cycle, of which we are currently nearing the top. However many are speculating that wider institutional and governmental adoption might “decouple” the price from those historic trends this time around - We’ll see.
But as for systemic issues causing price fluctuations, that seems incredibly unlikely. Bitcoin is one of the largest open source projects in the world with thousands of developers scrutinizing it, billions of dollars collectively invested in it’s continued maintenance, designed primarily for resilience and longevity. Right now theoretical quantum computing attacks on bitcoin’s traditional cryptography are a popular concern. Though such attacks don’t yet exist the US Department of Defense wants to be “quantum-resistant” by 2035, so the bitcoin community has echoed a similar timeline and there are already several proposals (BIPs - Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) published to do so. Would involve replacing the current SHA265 algorithm with an equivalent quantum-proof algo through a soft fork, which is a transition in the way the network operates that doesn’t cut off users who’ve yet to update - Something that has already been done a few times in the past.
@infinitesunrise @lucyweirphd if the bitcoin maximalists are correct, and “proof of stake” has security issues, why haven’t any of the flagship proof of stake cryptocurrencies been hacked yet?
I’m not aware of any security issues with PoS, and I would describe myself as a bitcoin maximalist. My issue with PoS doesn’t concern cybersecurity, but network dynamics. PoS divorces a crypto from the holistic, self-correcting, fully automated paradigm envisioned by bitcoin. This doesn’t make it literally worthless, it just means it’s no longer fundamentally any different from any other centralized payment network that came before it.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs seem interesting and sound like they might provide the independence and decentralization of PoW alongside the speed and energy savings of PoS, but I haven’t educated myself on their math just yet.
@infinitesunrise it would seem to me that Ethereum, with it’s 13,900 nodes and 1 million validators isn’t too decentralised. Vs approx 22K bitcoin nodes?
Although “in theory” bitcoin can run as rugged individualist solo miners etc in practice the miners work together in pools giving up their power to the pool operators.
Yeah, mining pools are a conversation topic of concern in the bitcoin community. Because a 51% attack has always been a known vulnerability, and such a possibility even coming to pass means that you’ve essentially failed as a community at actually being decentralized. One good response to this that I’ve seen in the past year has been the rise of “decentralized pools”, where the individual miners still pool to get a shares of the total payout, but the block templating also gets done in a deterministic and decentralized fashion such that there is no human party coordinating the operation, and thus nobody to commandeer the pool’s power. OCEAN is an example of this arrangement.
