It’s just grift all the way down with crypto, isn’t it? Scams layered on scams layered on scams.
I’d say you’re right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that’s genuinely useful.
Please elaborate on what this magical 1% that you feel is useful and worth expending the same amount if energy as Australia
My first question to you would be, how much energy does the banking sector use to run bank branches, haul physical money back and forth, bring employees to and from work, etc?
Next, not all blockchains require extreme levels of computation power for proof of work. Take Monero, for example, which deliberately makes ASIC chips impossible to use and is therefore mined only on CPUs, which are extremely common.
Or any proof of stake coin like Ethereum, which doesn’t require any mining at all. The electricity argument is extremely out of date for most coins besides Bitcoin itself.
As far as I know GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked.
To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
So a government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get enough Ethereum to disrupt it, before accounting for the price going up by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of Ethereum, and then they’re going to destroy the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested to take the network down, temporarily. Like sure, it’s possible, but once established, it’s not happening.
It would be more cost effective to do a supply chain attack and introduce exploits/weaknesses to try and make people doubt using it, attack the infrastructure and steal coins from exchanges and other off chain services or smart contracts with bugs, and pass laws to restrict it.
edit: Oh and there’s also the queue to activate a valid staker. It will take a lot of time to even begin to be able to do this, instead of hoarding/renting asic hardware and turning it on out of the blue.
Edit: Sorry I’m also wrong, it’s 66% of staked ETH, it’s not half the market cap. So we’d be talking probably upwards of a hundred billion (not hundreds) by the time we account for price increases from having to buy to even start to initiate the attack.
Edit: I also wonder if the future change to allow a staker to stake up to 2048 eth instead of 32 could quicken the attack (as it’s 1 validator in the queue instead of 64) or if they’ll delay larger validators longer, maybe based on its eth amount? I’m not up to speed on that. But in theory the queue would be 64 times quicker if they can join as quick.
Ethereum could literally roll back their chain to negate the attack, anyway. They’ve done it before.
