The thing about 51% attacks is they're hard to pull off in secret. And once they happen, who's going to accept the coin anymore? Plenty of potential for sheer destruction, but it seems pretty counter-productive to value.

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chaboud 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

If only someone offered derivatives contracts that could be used to make money from destruction...

https://www.kraken.com/en-ca/features/derivatives/monero

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SilasX 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Reminder: if you want to bet on an asset's demise (i.e. short it), you don't need a derivatives market, you just need to be able to borrow the asset and sell it. So you could accomplish the goal there by borrowing Monero and converting it to USD. A lot of smartcontract platforms let you do this -- including on other chains, where they hold a token convertible into the original chain's native unit.

I bring this up because people are always asking what platforms are allowing me to short cryptocurrencies, which seems to miss that it's enough to just have a debt denominated in what you want to bet against.

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loxs 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, but the moment that happens they will confiscate/block the funds of the shorters.

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dbdr 4 days ago | parent [-]

Based on which specific law or rule?

	▲	loxs 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Based on how the crypto world works 100% of the time.

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this_user 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's Game Theory problem. If you are getting more value out of the system by maintaining it in the long-run, it would make no sense to attack it and destroy its value. However, once you can extract more value in the short-term through the attack than by being a long-term participant, it becomes attractive.

With BTC's block reward continually being reduced, TX fees will have to increase in order to avoid reaching the point where large miners could become tempted to attack the network.

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dyauspitr 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Monero has been under constant attack from its inception. It’s one of the only truly anonymous, untraceable payment systems so there has been a huge push to make it unviable. It was unexplainably delisted from major crypto exchanges in the past and now is under direct attack.

	▲	cassonmars 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not inexplicable, they just don't want to explain that their asset listings are effectively beholden to banking partners in the same way that steam was forced to remove certain games because of Visa and Mastercard.

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taylorius 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe destruction is their goal.

	▲	seanw444 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of people would like to see Monero burn.

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dehrmann 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unknown crypto vulnerabilities and 51% attacks are crypto currency risks that are theoretically out there, but we mostly haven't seen play out.

At some point, someone doing AI might amass enough GPUs to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin. You're right that it destroys confidence in the coin, so if you short Bitcoin futures before the attack, you might make money.

	▲	15155 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> At some point, someone doing AI might amass enough GPUs to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin. This is electrically impossible for Bitcoin specifically, modern ASICs exceed 3 orders of magnitude more hashes/Joule and hashrate/chip than a RTX5090 and cost $2-40 retail per chip.
	▲	Sohcahtoa82 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		People haven't mined Bitcoin on GPUs in over 10 years.