Sure I can.  I'm doing it right now.  It's 33 degrees outside, my electric rate is 7.5 cents per KWH, and my basement needs supplemental heat anyway.  I also mine solo, and haven't caught a block in over a year, but so what?  If I ever catch another, that's just free money.  The need for heat pays for my electric consumption, and my mining rig is already a sunk cost.  If you think I'm unique, you're deluding yourself.


Go ahead and raise anything you like with moderators.  It's yourself who seems immune to reason.

BTW, coinbase rewards don't diminsh to near zero until around 2130.  So I doubt that either of us will live to see resolution here.

Correct but irrelevant because in my attack the transaction fees are withheld, so what is your point about fees can't be spent for some delay? How is that relevant my attack?

I've reported this to the moderator. I will not tolerate posts intended to deceive that have no information in them. This is a serious thread.

That isn't the attack described in this thread.

The OP is about a cartel (or cartels) withholding their customers' transactions from the other miners.

Historicly, cartels rise as a form of regulatory capture.  Said another way, cartels form functional monopolies in a regulated industry, within a country, because governments exist.  What influence any particular govenrment, or all of them together (unlikley), can have upon the bitcoin economy remains to be seen.  However, it cannot rationally be assumed that cartels will rise in an unregulated environment.  They never have before today.

And before you start spouting about Railroad Robber Barons or Standard Oil; the railroads were a government project from the start and Standard Oil was no more of a monopoly than Microsoft was during the 1990's.  They were simply market dominators who had not yet been out innovated by new competitors.


I could prove it, with great effort, but (once again) I don't need to do any such thing.  It's your theory.  In the long run, you could make a fortune betting your side of the theory if you are correct.  I'll stick with my side, and we will see who goes broke first.


You just talked yourself into a circle.  I can easily prove that a mining cartel cannot be the most efficient.  I can prove it with existing examples, and have literally done this more than once over the past three years with nearly identical claims of cartel/monopoly based theories.  The key you're missing is that the protocol doesn't require that miners be paid within the system itself, or even at all.  Fee less transactions exist, and they can be paid for out-of-network.  Beyond that, off-network transactions are not only possible, they already occur quite regularly; even if they remain a small minority of the total economy.  On-network transactions are the high-mark of trustless security, but Satoshi undrstood that not everyone would really require such a high degree of security, nor trustless interactions.  In fact, he was counting on parrallel networks (such as Stratum) to develop without his own help that would handle less perfect transactions among parties that trust one another well enough, and thus remove a significant amount of network traffic from the main bitcoin network.  By the time your attack could even be tested, the majority of transactions wouldn't even be using the bitcoin network at all, and the main network would be more akin to the ATM network banks use today.  More of a backbone of the most risky or sensitive international transactions than what Joe Six Pack uses to order an ebook for his kindle.


Motivation alone is not enough.  There also must be a credible regulatory path.  I don't see one.  If there is one, than government regulation is a greater risk than the rise of a single mining cartel.


Dude, that's not even possible.  Reading all of that, I mean.


I might be clear to you, but you don't understand the system yet.  Amazon can't withhold funding from the network.  They can only delay processing of their own transactions.  Time is definately money, and there is a hidden cost to Amazon to do this under any conditions.  They also open themselves up to a double spend attack if they do this in any significant capacity, and someone is going to use that against them eventually.  If you think that Amazon holding their own transactions so that other miners can't get their transaction fees is a problem, why not just issue fee-less transactions?  The fees would just be going back to Amazon otherwise.  You have not discovered something new here, AnonyMint.  Just because Amazon might refuse to pay other miners a mining fee, doesn't mean that they are denying funding for the network.  Other miners are just as able to ignore Amazon's transactions, and just as able to refuse to forward transactions to them.  In fact, I'm fairly sure that games like this already occur.  I'd be surprised to discover that no miners refuse to process free transactions, except for those who are on some kind of whitelist.  Miner favoritism is expected, but in the aggregate, has zero effect upon the network as a whole.  On the aggregate, the network is, and will remain, impartial towards fee paying transactions.  And fee-less transactions are expected to be ignored by a large portion of the professional mining class.  Why would it be any other way?  


I've already explained two conditions wherein miners can literally "afford" to lose money on mining.  You didn't even bother to respond to them.

Two or more competing cartels is an outcome that functionally prohibits the complete takeover of the currency, which was the endgame of your attack theory.  I can't think of one reason that a consumer should care about any cartels, if the currency continues to function as far as he is concerned.  Cartels aren't the risk, a monopoly is the risk, and that is impossible.


What do you think they will do if it's no longer efficient?  Do you think they will just sit back and take it?  Or do you think that they will contrive to come up with other solutions, with or without Amazon's explict permission?


So?

Ha!  I knew we'd get here eventually.  

Again, Standard Oil was not a monopoly, or even a cartel.  Standard Oil was a temporary market dominator, and could only remain such as long as it was the most efficient provider of services.  As for the dirty tricks, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Ford have all been caught playing dirty trying to maintain a dominate market position that would eventually fall anyway.  No one still considers Coca-Cola to be a monopoly on soft drinks, if they ever did.  I don't know anyone who still buys the meme that Microsoft is, or ever really was, a monopoly for operating system software.

Incorrect. You will find that for example in the case of Standard Oil that the initial stage of the cartel was to be more efficient. The regulatory capture came later once it was such a huge operation that they could do regulatory capture and then later to protect against smaller paradigm shifts. So by the end, Rockefeller was a liar about efficiency. But in the start, he was more efficient for example by moving rails closer to farms (the cost from the farm to the rail was often higher than the long-distance rail shipping rate) and consolidating inefficient managements, etc..


hahaha you argue Microsoft didn't have a monopoly with Windows for decades.


Moving most transactions off the blockchain would indeed be a possible fix to my attack. It doesn't however make my attack wrong, because that is not the case today and no one can guarantee it will be so.


You haven't see the new laws that you can't root your cell phone in the USA?

Don't be too naive okay.


I do my research. And no better place to start, than at the beginning.


I have refuted this same point 2X already upthread. See my latest reply to anth0ny.


Sorry I must have missed that. You can reiterate.


Cartels always functionally merge because it is more profitable, i.e. they can charge higher prices with less competition.

That is monopoly.

Customers do buy from monopolies. They bought Windows like hotcakes up until Linux started to compete effectively recently.

Microsoft was not able to attain regulatory capture to prevent Linux, so monopoly was eroded and now dying.



You may not like it, but they stick with the monopoly. That is the way monopolies work out, unless there is an alternative. Cartels are good at regulatory capture.

And the government and banks have every incentive to go along with it in this case.

Anthony- Your argument reminds me of inane theorizing done in grad school with game system models that seldom work in the real world.

This supposed attack would not work for as many psychological/behavioral reasons as technical ones. Among them:

People want authenticity and will avoid cartels that disrupt the authenticity of bitcoin. Especially given the premise of bitcoin.

Over time, a body of law may come about making the Amazon-type activity you postulate illegal. Even if that does not happen, there will be cooperation by miners, users, and others to have the end result of such a cartel be the same. Failure.

Your theory is seriously lacking in common sense, and your attention to technical detail and pronouncements re. your IQ indicate that, like your theory, your ideas are not informed by any insight into real human behavior.

Fail.

This is not anth0ny's attack. He is arguing against this attack of mine. You must be confused or was that a typo?


Cartels happen often in the real world.


I already refuted this upthread in the early pages of the thread! Dam it read the thread before you post!

The customers of Amazon don't give a rat's ass about your ideological goals. They want their damn goods and click a button and are done with it. They follow what the website dictates.


The government (elite) power comes from control over fiat and you assume they will outlaw the way to take over Bitcoin and capture it?

Sorry you speak nonsense to me.

Fail.

My post was directed at AnthontMint. Sorry for confusion.

The argument just seems so inane and theoretical and devoid of behavioral analysis and common sense.