
Litecoin founder talks about cryptocurrency risks - viraldocks
https://viraldocks.com/litecoin-founder-cryptocurrency-risks/
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justifier
Was encouraged but disappointed that proponents still ignore the risk that
cryptographic hashes are reliant on unsolved mathematics

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vmarsy
That's one worrying part. The one I'm more scared about is: it's not all clear
to me what would happen if the network gets suddenly partitioned. With China
apparently having a big chunk of the mining power, what would happen if they
decide to isolate all those miners via the 'Great Firewall'? And what happens
if they keep mining, and after a few months the Firewall gates get re-opened?

My understanding is that the miners are important, without them you can't have
a 'liquid market' of transactions, is that right? What's the risk if you loose
a huge chunk of miners overnight?

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amq
The real problem would be if some group of people gathered a mining majority.
Losing a huge chunk of miners overnight would have just a short effect, till
the network adapts the difficulty.

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vmarsy
Yeah the famous '51% attacks'.

I read some of the online resources in the subject, including the one
swinglock mentions[1]. And yeah the answers are a bit outdated, like the 2013
on: 'As for the merge, this is still being discussed and we do not have a good
contingency plan'. The answer seems to be the 'longest chain wins' ... so
that's not a 100% convincing answer.

Is there a way to know the distribution of nodes per country?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172)

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tehlike
One must-have feature of all cryptocurrencies should be privacy. Only a few
support full anonymity today.

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omgbananas
_a few support full anonymity today._

And of those, one more than others.

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kim0
Monero ftw

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tehlike
Didnt want to promote any, but yes, monero is better than others.

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mancerayder
Maybe someone's anticipating some massive selling by folks who own a lot.
Perhaps some of those folks are known personally to Lee, or includes Lee
himself. I suppose he'll be able to say, I told you so.

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KasianFranks
Lets upvote a postive article on crypto, not always the negative ones.

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Frogolocalypse
It's nice to see some big warnings about the volatility of crypto from such
established players, and the type of corrections that are envisaged. It is
really important to understand how risky an asset class they are.

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vkou
I am not a bitcoin fan by any means, but this is an incredibly low quality
article.

"Good regulation would be good. BTC is really volatile. People use it to
speculate, not transact. ICOs are a great way to get burnt."

I suppose it's worth saying, but I don't think it'll convince the faithful.

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Timbaker
I agree with you. These days, the situation changes dramatically but, the
world's trend go "Virtual Currency market" This article said, "virtual
currencyt gaining popularity" [http://www.galesburg.com/news/20171215/virtual-
currency-gain...](http://www.galesburg.com/news/20171215/virtual-currency-
gaining-popularity)

