weev on Nostr: In action this kind of mirrors the logic of a failed short squeeze. It’s like ...

In action this kind of mirrors the logic of a failed short squeeze. It’s like Silver Thursday, where the Hunt brothers cornered the market on silver. Their spreadsheet math was correct, there was only so much spot silver and only so much new silver gets mined. All of their accounting was correct, but they still got rekt. Because the social conditions around leverage changed, and also at a certain price everyone begins melting down scrap silver.

In Bitcoin, you have the assumption that people are only going to mine profitably. Because ASIC rigs cost so much and are well guarded, you can generally accept that no significant contributor to hashpower is going to deviate from commercial norms. But Monero, which has a mining algorithm that defies ASIC optimization, has another dimension. In that I have no wish to run a mining business, but I have ideological attachment and fervor for a free economic system based on a fungible currency. And anyone with masscan can come up with ridiculous sources of compute. Millions of IoT widgets and smart TVs can be mining Monero if need be. Lots of people became committed of adding just enough hashpower to fuck over the Russian mining position and make it too costly. They were paying for an obscene amount of compute because they thought there was money to be made double spending XMR. It turned out that there was a lot more hidden depth to Monero’s chain security than they thought. Zero double spends. They spent a whole fucking lot, down to their very reputations, and got no return. If anyone else wants to try in their place, they can put their chips on the table. They’ll end up like the Hunt brothers. I guarantee it.