Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
I think you’re missing a critical part of how blockchains function: If Bitcoin was running on only 100 Mac Minis, there is nothing stopping someone buying 101 more Mac Minis, becoming dominant in the network and suddenly they can decide to just print their own bitcoins for themself.
The profitability of running Bitcoin miners is proportional to the market cap and the value of Bitcoin itself. For Bitcoin to remain stable, the total value must remain less than the cost of hardware to dominate the consensus algorithm.
Can you elaborate on how one could print bitcoins if they controlled 50% of the network?
One couldn’t, somebody who controls 51% might get away with a few double spends until they are caught, that’s all.
“A few double spends” is underestimating the impact. When this has happened in the past, the whole network gets fragmented, and at some point everyone needs to decide which version of history to throw out, allowing potentially anyone to double-spend in that time frame. A bad actor with enough compute could cause a network split and put whatever they want in the ledger. Getting caught isn’t really a concern if it’s all anonymous wallets, and it only takes 1 unnoticed transaction to move millions.
The entire basis for trust in Bitcoin (and any proof of work blockchain) is that the network is so big, no single actor has the resources to become a majority and influence the ledger.