"Large customers for ASICs will be contacted and told there is a problem with their order..." what will the price do in this case? Will the ASICs become cheaper or more expensive?
If this is done for...
True enough.
Perfect markets rest on many assumptions - a large number of buyers and of sellers, perfect knowledge, zero collusion, fungible product, ability of capital to switch production at the margin etc. etc.
Markets are robust to deviations from some of these assumptions.
But at the current level of concentration of pooled hashing power, the double-SHA256 ASIC market likely violates all of them.
Bitcoin's huge scale is enough to protect it against smaller threats, but the Chinese government only has to coerce three pool operators to win. If they decide to.
What will happen to the price of ASICs then? If the market doesn't find out immediately, nothing. Then when word trickles out, it will be dismissed as FUD by many, and actively covered up by others for no reason other than protecting their stack. Then it might suddenly collapse when the dam bursts.
Bhutan, El Salvador, Iran might like to build ASICs, but they don't have the tech, the scale or the capital to fab anything with a feature size under 300nm. So competing with China is far beyond them.
Monero has far more decentralised mining, and a more fungible product, but otherwise shares Bitcoin's vulnerabilities, while having a total network hashing power orders of magnitude lower, like bitcoin in ~2013 :/
IDK man, I'm just hedging my bets holding both, and hoping greed, division and laziness among elites prevents coordinated action against us...
Perfect markets rest on many assumptions - a large number of buyers and of sellers, perfect knowledge, zero collusion, fungible product, ability of capital to switch production at the margin etc. etc.
Markets are robust to deviations from some of these assumptions.
But at the current level of concentration of pooled hashing power, the double-SHA256 ASIC market likely violates all of them.
Bitcoin's huge scale is enough to protect it against smaller threats, but the Chinese government only has to coerce three pool operators to win. If they decide to.
What will happen to the price of ASICs then? If the market doesn't find out immediately, nothing. Then when word trickles out, it will be dismissed as FUD by many, and actively covered up by others for no reason other than protecting their stack. Then it might suddenly collapse when the dam bursts.
Bhutan, El Salvador, Iran might like to build ASICs, but they don't have the tech, the scale or the capital to fab anything with a feature size under 300nm. So competing with China is far beyond them.
Monero has far more decentralised mining, and a more fungible product, but otherwise shares Bitcoin's vulnerabilities, while having a total network hashing power orders of magnitude lower, like bitcoin in ~2013 :/
IDK man, I'm just hedging my bets holding both, and hoping greed, division and laziness among elites prevents coordinated action against us...
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