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Comment by aosmith | Hacker News Reader

You're assuming that someone with a significant investment in the space would act dishonestly. That's the only reason BTC fails as the result of something like this. Seem like MAD to me, if they were to act dishonestly they would destroy their own investment and profit potential.

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The point of a distributed system is not having to trust people to act honestly.

If you're perfectly fine trusting a GHASH to act honestly, you should be perfectly fine trusting them or some other entity to run a centralized, non-distributed currency.

Your statement doesn't work out, because even if a single official mining pool doesn't have >50% of the hash rate, a bunch of small mining pools could be secretly colluding, or even just a bunch of individual people.

GHash.io already have acted dishonestly when they had a large but substantially sub-51% share - they launched a bunch of double spending attacks that effectively stole money from a Bitcoin gambling service.

Then why are you using BTC in the first place? The US Fed and US Government has no reason to act dishonestly. The value of the dollar relies on us trusting the US Government / US Fed to protect it.

If switching over to BTC means "trusting GHash.io"... then nothing has changed.

The difference is that if GHash.io launches an attack, miners have the choice to move to another pool. If the US government inflates the currency (yet again) there is nothing to do.

If GHash.io launches a "no one else can mine" attack, then there won't be any other pools to move to.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_... * Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks

Unless we hard fork...

I think you might want to look into the history of disastrous collapses of currencies. To think the US dollar is somehow impervious to the same threats is naive.

I'm criticizing BTC, not defending the dollar. Even precious commodities like Gold (Black Friday, 1869) and Silver (Panic of 1873) have been manipulated and crashed throughout the years.

All currencies suffer through booms and busts, even precious Gold and Silver.

However, BTC is unique in that wielding 51% hashing power grants you powers beyond what has ever been seen before in a currency. A properly wielded 51% can absolutely destroy an entire coin system (RIP Feathercoin).

Do NOT take the 51% attack lightly. This could mean the absolute ruin of BTC in its entirety.

"Seem like MAD to me, if they were to act dishonestly they would destroy their own investment and profit potential."

There's more than a few entities with an incentive to seeing a decentralized network capable of replacing established methods of conducting financial transactions go away.

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