Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

This one may or may not be a big deal, but bitcoin has a number of unknown and poorly understood long-term risks. There are tail events like a SHA-256 attack, 51% attacks while shorting futures, and long-term behavior of an asset where the supply continuously decreases.

andirk · 5h ago

Bitcoin and crypto in general has risks like any other investment, just a lot more of them. SHA-256 attack means everything's doomed though right? And 51% attack with the size of the network is some absolutely insane amount of GPU power right? My biggest concern is if there is a growing lack of interest. I have thought that ever since USD 10k, though, which is kind of what this "drought" is suggesting.

abstractspoon · 27m ago

Shame

hoppp · 7h ago

Its fine, once institutions gobble up all the coins and the block reward disappears the blockchain can just stop. Bitcoin got eaten up by institutions.

JSteph22 · 6h ago

But I bought some early and I deserve to become a gajillionaire overnight without working.

beeflet · 6h ago

Investing is work. You have to spend time researching different opportunities, and even then there is still a risk involved.

If you made money by buying bitcoin a long time ago, you didn't get something for nothing. And if you sell it now, you can profit before the game of musical chairs collapses. So there is a limited window of arbitrage.

A little bit of work multiplied by a lot of risk and time.

wqaatwt · 1h ago

It’s closer to speculation than investing.

Also it didn’t require any real work, just blind faith or forgetting that you even had bitcoin to begin with for a while.

beeflet · 6h ago

I see this as one possible one good ending to bitcoin. The nerds of the world sold the financial institutions magic beans and dipped out.

beefnugs · 8h ago

Well those particular miners should have read the extremely open and specific code before they bought all the hardware.

It is exactly designed this way, power off some hardware for a while if it is no longer profitable

beeflet · 6h ago

Miners have to cover rapid depreciation costs in their equipment due to moore's law. They can't just "turn it off". Every second the ASIC miner is off, it's burning a hole in their pocket.

andirk · 5h ago

In hindsight, I suggest GPUs and hardware that can handle both bitcoin _and_ ML, and oscillate between the two as demand oscillates.

toss1 · 7h ago

For sure! Tho it seems the original BTC design expected huge transaction volumes and transaction fees to take over providing income for miners as mining fees repeatedly halved.

But they didn't anticipate that people are not using BTC to buy pizza and a million other things, the great bulk of BTC is being stashed in financial vehicles like ETFs, generating fewer and fewer transactions.

Seems like a doom cycle. Fewer transactions, less profit, fewer miners, slower transactions, less value.....

beeflet · 6h ago

Satoshi did not anticipate that the block size would be restricted to 1MB by the development team forever, making the base layer impractical for payments.

papageek · 7h ago

Wealth always ends up in the hands of a few.

andirk · 5h ago

So fees being too high is bad for bitcoin, and fees too low is bad for bitcoin?

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Bitcoin miners say fee drought poses existential threat to network

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