Topic: 51% Attack (Read 1899 times)

Generally there's no serious with IBD duration since technically they still syncing or not part of the network yet. But the real problem is whether the node can keep up with verifying huge block or deep reorg. For example, you can't use HDD to run full node since block generation is faster than time to verify a block and make changes on the HDD.

Okay, sure, any pool mining on any coin could change block headers to appear to be mining on another pool, and a single entity could mine on multiple pools. This applies to all coins, including bitcoin.

Do you have any specific evidence or informed speculation that the creators of BSV are a substantial percentage of the hashrate? I have heard this before, and I don’t doubt it, but I haven’t seen specific evidence, nor specific amounts of hashrate that the creators are using to mine BSV.

The thing about pools is that the reports use the coinbase string to know which pool mined which block. If one pool simply changes the string to something else it looks like another pool mined that block. Eg. Pool-X mines block-1000 with string="Foo" and mines block-1001 with string="Bar". Now the reports says block-1000 is mined by pool X and block 1001 is mined by pool Y.
Also pools are just servers that can be owned by one company and these 3 appeared all at the same time and distributed their hashrate at a coordinated move and they are working with each other.

Do you have any sources, or informed speculation to support how much of BSV mining is being done by the creators of BSV?

Blockchair reports two major pools with 44% and 19%, and "unknown" at 34%. This is horribly centralized, as even if these were made up of 100% miners not associated with BSV creators, there would be few choices to go if one pool started acting in a nefarious way. Unless the other 3% is what makes up miners not associated with BSV, at a minimum, there would be a potential savings of 22%.

Right, at a minimum, exchanges will require additional security before accepting BSV deposits if they receive a deposit that gets double-spent.

First you have to figure out how many "individual miners" are mining BSV and how much of it is centralized (owned by the creators of this shitcoin). The miners in second group are not going to leave no matter what you do. From what I gather majority of hashrate comes from the second group in which case your theory about revenue is not correct.

The double spend won't work, at least not for long. Exchanges catch these things moderately fast and will disable deposits and withdrawals right away, later on they require huge number of confirmations (eg. 1000+) to credit the account.

I would discuss Aliens in a different thread. The TLDR is that I think it is unlikely that Aliens (if they exist) and humans will never meet peacefully, even if CSW turns out to be satoshi.


It will cost close to zero if you spam BSV, regardless if you are mining or not. Any spam attack will not have any long-term effect on the network as blocks can be ridiculously large.

If you can 'starve' other BSV miners from their mining revenue, the majority of them will stop mining BSV, so it would be possible for you to utilize less hashrate to be guaranteed to mine all BSV blocks. This means that it could potentially be +EV to 51% BSV, sell the resulting coin from these blocks on an exchange, withdrawing from said exchange, and creating an alternative blockchain that double spends these deposit transactions (and selling the originally mined coin again, on another exchnage). Your cost estimate rounds up. If you remove the rounding up, it would cost about $235k per day to be guaranteed to mine all BSV blocks. I would not be suprised if some of the current BSV miners are renting on nicehash, and would stop doing so when they can no longer mine any blocks (any block they found would get orphaned), so the $235k figure may actually go down.

You can earn about $135k per day mining BSV is you are only selling your coin once, so if you sell your coin twice, you can earn $270k per day.

According to coinmarketcap, the #1 exchange for BSV is huobi global, and it it unclear what they actually receive from traders in trading fees, but a lower bound rate of 0.05% is probably a safe assumption. Assuming volume is consistant throughout the year, they have made about $6 million in a year from BSV trades.

Even bitfinex, the #5 exchange for BSV, has made about $192k in trading fees over the past year, assuming they actually receive 0.1% of trading volumes, and their 24h volume (that is entirely made up of a weekend) is consistant over a year.

I am not sure if a $100k loss would even be sufficient to get the #5 exchange to drop the coin. It would probably not be sufficinet for the #1 exchange to drop it. This probably would be a different story several months after BSV was released.


This may actually be a good opportunity to review how bitcoin handles very long reorgs, and possibly improve how it handles them. BSV nodes were obviously able to handle the initial block download, so there shouldn't be any reason why they can't handle downloading a few hundred blocks at once. The current UTXO set is stored in RAM, but I am not sure if the UTXO set as of any prior block is stored anywhere -- my guess is it is not because doing so would duplicate data already in the database, for example, you can know the UTXO set as of block 1000 by querying all transactions where the block number is less than 1000.

It might not be a bad idea to store the UTXO set from the last 10 blocks in storage, in case there is a reorg up to 10 blocks deep that involves a double spend transaction, changing the UTXO set.

They “can”, but no they won’t, and never will.


No, he is thinking about the most practical and the most probable way to “kill Bitcoin”. It has obviously now become “too big”, that simply accepting Bitcoin as one of those “brands” we humans have to live with. Like Apple products, not all like them, but they live with people who own them.


Then give him the BSV, tell the criminal it’s the real Bitcoin. Haha.

I'm sure there are many ways to attack it-- but because it iss obscure, worthless, and you can't even deposit/withdraw it pretty much anywhere-- why would anyone bother?  The low hashrate alone makes it completely insecure.  The conmen promoters make it into a joke.

It's like asking if anyone has haxored Craig Wright's speak & spell, I'm sure people could but... why would anyone bother?

Interesting makes you wonder if you do another long reorg with empty blocks and then a few mega sized ones at the end what would the chain do. Epically if then they have to go back and re-download all the 'legit blocks' how many times would that have to happen before people stop trading it.

OR

Bloat their mempool, release the fork with no transactions that starts a few blocks before you added the bloat, then release the bloat you created before on their chain. So the nodes start to stall due to your bloat, then they invalidate your block and they stall again trying to get back on their chain.

As I said before this has always been in the back of my head with the few crap alts I play with. There is no money in them so if someone really does something it's a shrug and walk away. No real money or time lost. But, lets face it, how many people really want to bother forking and destroying 'Dave's itchy left testicle coin'  ^{[ And the thought of my itchy left testicle is going to live in your brain now   ]}


Or if they are using something that DOES exist on BTC, but they are using an older version, with bugs, that they have not updated.

-Dave

I heard that most of transactions on bsv network are coming from their weather app, so it's basically something like spamming to show more transactions.
Calvin Ayre in the same time didn't miss to brag on twitter how FluffyPony was arrested, and that is some kind of punishment because he was against Craig Faketoshi...  

Nobody is crazy enough to waste time on this, and this is probably some miner war or some weird clan fighting to take full control of that shitcoin.
Meanwhile hashrate is still declining according to bitinfocharts.

If the world governments wanted to destroy bitcoin, they would fire hellfire rockets into any dwellings that housed bitcoin miners.
Problem solved.  

You're thinking like a nerd instead of a soldier.


FYI:
No different than thinking your bitcoin is safe , because no computer can crack your secret password.
While the criminal thinks he will just keep hitting you with the $8 plumbers wrench until you talk. 
 

I dont think the government will waste time to buy ascii miner. The 51% attack thing is just a FUD. The government is secretly buying crypto why would they attack their investment? They will only cast fear to make people sell off.

Good point, a bunch of old (disabled) OP codes were re-enabled and some useless OP codes such as OP_NUM2BIN were added, although they don't seem to be doing much but it could be interesting to look deeper and see how it could be abused.

You're missing the point, i don't care about the usage. My point is with higher chain limit, an attacker could create more transaction within short time before hitting the limit or run out of coin.


If someone plan to do it, i would suggest them to look for any operator, cryptography or feature which not exist on Bitcoin. I expect it's less tested or audited.

I wonder if anyone has tried spamming this shitcoin's network with transactions that take too long to verify. Although I haven't checked BSV's code to see how much standard rules they enforce to prevent it, I know it inherits a lot from bitcoin (since it is a copy); for example the SHA256 exploit can't be used since by default BSV uses BIP143 (Transaction Signature Verification for Version 0 Witness Program) sighash algorithm for all signatures.

The network hashrate won't grow because the rogue chain is mining alongside the honest chain but the chain isn't revealed until the attack has started and even then, it would be good for a single attack because precautions would be taken by the merchants or the stakeholders on the network.

It will only grow if the rogue entity mines on the honest chain aswell, before taking it offline but even then the growth will probably be gradual.

Obivously it would be noticed if the network grows over 20%+ within a short timeframe

FWIW my friend running a BSV node to try to get some real facts about these reorgs had several gaps in his monitoring coverage when the BSV node software attempted to use more than 40 GB of ram as part of a reorg...  Probably some of the issues they had with these reorgs were due to miners crashing due to running out of memory while attempting to reorg.

And this was without any spamming beyond the baseline spam performed by Ayre and his companies to try to fake there being interest and usage of BSV.

No THAT is possibly the best sentiment ever about BSV. Will you be believing the stuff on Ancient Aliens too?


Eliminating the cult of personality surrounding Faketoshi, and it's lack of hashrate, and the lack of refinements in it's code. The lack of a blocksize cap on BSV and it's vulnerability to spam attacks makes it more vulnerable to spam. Once again from people who want to screw with it. I play with a few alts. All of which can be forked and blown out of existence for probably less then $500 at nicehash. Their marketcap would plummet from $10 all the way to $0.50 oh no, not that.

Now the mining attacks on BSV probably cost a fair amount of money. BUT there was no corresponding spam attack. Picture the damage that would be done if really did the following.

1) Mine (legit) a few hundred coins
2) Move coins to 1 address.
3) Start building your fork chain
4) Move coins to largest BSV exchange
5) Begin spamming the BSV chain and keep it up
6) Sell your coins
7) Release your fork chain without your move to the exchange or any TXs for that matter
Now above EXCEPT for #5 this is a classic double spend attack
Keep spamming the BSV chain

Now in addition to having to roll back the chain you can in essence make the nodes have to deal with 100s of massive blocks filled with crap.

I can see 2 things happening.

1) The largest BSV exchange takes a hit, will they stick around or drop the coin. Might be worth it to do to #s 2 & 3 instead of #1 since they might not be as friendly about it.

2) Watch all the BSV nodes scream in pain as 100's of GB of data has to be dealt with. With many of them dropping off since the time they took to deal with the non spam filled re-org was very long. Which was what caused a few of the other issues they had.

Now, once again, this is a massive waste of resources and since you are essentially stealing from the exchange it's probably illegal too. BUT it would probably get BSV out of our collective hair.

At this point I think we should be discussing this on a different thread since it's just about BSV and not BTC.

-Dave

I am already vaccinated, however, if I had to get the covid vaccine through BSV, I would likely become an anti-vaxxer, flat earther.

According to the article you cited, the 1000 limit of chained unconfirmed transactions is to allow things such as games to be played on the BSV blockchain. While interesting, I don't think there is a benefit to having every move every player makes in a game permanently recorded on a blockchain. As I noted, the miners should be able to quickly confirm many chains of 1000 unconfirmed transactions or any other spam attack on the BSV network.

Difficulty dealing with spam attacks is not limited to BSV or even altcoins. Bitcoin nodes run by 'normal' users had difficulty dealing with previous spam attacks against bitcoin. Even some of the major businesses had difficulty dealing with previous spam attacks.

I have already posted in BSV ANN that their community should be saying, “THANKS SATOSHI”, after their developers “borrowed” Adam Back’s Bunker Mode Mitigation Scheme.

https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1222461452310720512

They replied with memes, and some name-calling. Hahaha.

While limited, there are ways to exchange coin between altcoins (or to bitcoin) without revealing your identity. Also, if you did something like prevent any other miner from finding a block that actually gets confirmed, it would be difficult to prove you were actually behind any kind of attack. If you make a futures bet, I don’t think there would have to be a connection between your bet and your attack.

---

I don’t see BSV getting stressed via a spam attack as it has a large max block size so any spam will be quickly mopped up by the miners.

For a lot of them yes. This one is a special case, people who use it / believe in it really drunk the cool aid so to speak IMO.


Ohhhh, I like it. Make a pool, mine a few blocks, send more then dust to 1000's and 1000's of addresses, then start forking the chain. Wait for them to revert the chain again and block all coins that come from that address. Forcing everyone to use some form of coin control.

I guess they could also just target exchanges one by one and dump the fresh coins into one then another and swap for other alts. If you pull the coins out and they revert then the exchanges loose money. Sooner or later the exchanges will stop allowing deposits. The down side is they may bring forward more legal headaches then it's worth.

-Dave

Along with service (such as NiceHash) if the attacker use those service and BSV developer for not preventing the attack (Faketoshi already sue BTC, BCH and BSV for different reason).


Or the coins used to taint all address and strees the network.

I cringe at how plausible and easily imaginable this scenario is, but it also would be pretty damn hilarious.

It's quite interesting that despite everything BSV's price is still holding up and pretty much in lockstep with the rest of the market. Pretty telling really about how little fundamentals matter when it comes to altcoins.

The interesting part is that Craig Wright will probably threat people with legal cease and desist letters for those using mining power for the 51% attack.
This is the epitome of a failed project in terms of decentralization. When you can't achieve it technologically you attack legally. It's almost as bad as Ethereum.

Yes but with 2 or 3 generation old gear, your power NEEDS go up.
In terms of doing something like this, unless you are a major company, a government, or really rich, it's already going to be somewhat difficult to get a facility that has the power & cooling. Adding the need for more power & cooling is just going to make it more difficult.

With that being said, any of the big farms that were in transit, that have found new homes, doing this as a test before going live would be no big deal at all. BTC would not notice if 1/2 of 1% of it's hasrate came back online a few days later.


If you are doing something like this you probably don't want any money trail looping back to you or your operation.
Just make that chain / coin useless until it goes away. If you have the money to do this and if my $450,000 number was accurate getting $135,000 back which although a non insignificant amount of money might not be worth it based on the risk / reward. Faketoshi loves his lawsuits. If the coins go nowhere, you can't trace who to sue. Although, it would be funny as hell if they just kept moving, splitting and combining them to make them waste time chasing them.

-Dave

I was pointing out the outdated numbers, not the amount in terms of $ in reward.

A 51% attacker will not care about the 24 income anyhow and somebody who plans to do this for gains enough to offset the cost will still hurt the coin more than it is worth it.
And for certain if he plans on buying gear not renting hash power, he will not buy brand new gear for that, it doesn't make sense at  all, you simply want as much hashrate as cheaply as possible, why spend 100$/th when you can get it for 10$ with old gear that is sold at scrap metal price. The difference in electricity consumption will not matter since you're only running this for a day, not to ROI. Besides, 5c/kWh, that's closer to consumer prices in some countries than industrial averages.

Again, there will be no attack with a financial motivation, it makes no sense, it will either be one to kill the coin or there won't be any!


Just let it die a slow painful and forgotten death.
The attack on that useless coin will do more harm than benefits right now, it's already isolated and not newsworthy, an attack on it will only lead to speculation about the security of PoW, we would have nothing to gain from this.

That's the signs of centralization when there is a single entity controlling the majority of the hashrate it will obviously resist having its own blocks be reversed. So they still stick to their chain to keep their block rewards valid.
In any case, it's about time someone started having fun with this shitcoin.

I don't know. Coindesk reported that the attack begun on Tuesday morning and it was still ongoing on Wednesday. Not sure which category that should fall into in terms of the length of the attack. As dkbit98 mentioned, separate chains were created (I think 3 in total) and they can't agree which one is the 'honest' chain now.     

This is why it is not a good idea to create an altcoin that uses the same mining algorithm as a coin that has a much larger hashrate. An adversary who wants to execute a 51% attack against bitcoin will end up seeing his equipment being worthless if his attack is successful, however an attacker who wants to use equipment to 51% attack BSV can use his equipment to mine bitcoin after his attack is over, and his only losses would be his lost revenue from when he was carrying out his attack.

In other words, BSV using the same mining algorithm as bitcoin means carrying out a 51% attack against BSV is much cheaper than it would be if BSV had its own mining algorithm.

The real money to be made from 51% attacks comes from the potential for double-spends, and from the financial markets. Someone who is preparing to execute a 51% attack could sell the ability to double-spend specific transactions ahead of time. They could also place bearish bets against a coin they are about to 51% attack before they start the attack with the advance knowledge the price will likely fall.


You have to factor in the block rewards you would receive if you were 51%'ing BSV, which is around $135k/day.

If all you are doing is preventing other miners from mining blocks, are confirming all transactions, and not allowing any double-spend transactions, the market may not notice, or care about your attack, and most other miners will simply stop mining BSV. This means you can, over time decrease the amount of hashrate dedicated to your attack.

I would imagine that mining all the blocks for a period of weeks, and suddenly stop mining on BSV would probably do a lot of damage as all of a sudden, the coin would have literally zero hashrate. You could even stop mining on BSV for a period of time, and when other miners start mining on BSV again, you could resume your attack, and prevent any of those miners from ever receiving a block reward.

Well if we use those numbers or close to those numbers or close to them the BSV hardware = $19,0000,000 x .05 (percentage of the BTC network vs BSV) = $950,000 power = $13,000,000 x  .05 = $650,000 a day

---

On the other hand, if you look at what is available at nicehash and mining rig rentals you can do it without even buying a thing.

The most expensive bid I can find at the moment is 0.0133 BTC/PH/day lets use 0.015 because it's an easy number.
BSV hashrate is .44 EH/s lets use .5 to make a nice buffer and better math. so 0.015 * 500 = 7.5 BTC a day or about $300,000 a day.

So for someone with money, not much at all.

Yes these are all theoretical numbers, since once you grab that much mining from nicehash / mrr the price will go up. But I figured 10%+ over on hashrate and 10%+ over on price. Even if you wanted to go 50% over you are still only at $450,000 a day.

Anybody want to chip in for a test?

-Dave  

Oh trust me it had great effect, exchanges stopped accepting deposits and disabled withdrawals, there was multiple chains, 570k transactions got wiped from the blockchain, pools are
mining at different block heights, there is one chain bsvers now call fraudulent chain, nodes still don't agree that will cause more chain splits, Faketoshi got pissed. etc...

Someone said that numbers from that website are outdated and that may be true so I would like to see correct numbers, but I was really just looking to find how much attackers paid to take over Faketoshi's coin.
I not worried so much about someone doing Bitcoin 51% attack when there are much cheaper way to attack it with fud, regulations and mainstream media.

I'm guessing it hasn't had too much of an effect as most users are aware that such an attack is likely to only be temporary.

51% attack is only something to be concerned about, at least realistically when the cryptocurrency is new, and hasn't got a massive hashrate. Bitcoin has well passed that point. Although, I'm not prepared to look the numbers that your source has provided, I'll just go as far as to say; it isn't happening anytime soon.

There we go, just keep doing this and blocking transactions spending from known CSW addresses and then you cut most of his funding for BS lawsuits.


Does anyone happen to know which pools the 51% hashpower came from? I heard Coingeek had enough BSV mining operations to theoretically carry out one, it would be ironic if the attack came from miners using their pool.

$2400 an S9? When was the last time they've updated that, 2017? You could get them right now between 300-400 in China.
Besides, even if you go for new gear like the S19, you get them at 10k, 4x time the price but 8times the hashrate.

Also, if you would go for S19, you would need 78m kWh, not 260!

Oh,:

That website hasn't been updated from the last halving, a 51% attack will only get you 440 BTC (last 24 reward+fee/2).

It's interesting to see that it hasn't significantly affected the price (a slight drop of 4-5%), although it's being reported that BSV has lost around 50% of its hashrate the day before the reorg. Although that can't be confirmed.

The reorg began on Tuesday according to a few sources. It seems like the attack was 100 blocks deep and affected hundred thousands of transactions. There are conflicting info and another source claims the reorg was only 14 blocks deep.

Obviously there are lots of factors that I'm not sure these sites have counted. That's probably why the first one has calculated $1,5M for one hour while the other $541k, both just for the electricity I guess. But, these numbers correspond to a person, mad enough to allocate the required hardware & electricity and spend those millions for an attack.

They do not correspond to an attack from a pool that already owns a great amount of the hashrate. For example, assuming that BTC.com has gathered 23% of the hashrate, it'll “only” need 28% more to accomplish it.

51% attack is not happening any time soon for Bitcoin but I see that Faketoshi is having big headache after his fork suffered one more 51% attack, after four happened in month of July.
Listen to this now, cost of performing this attack for one hour was only $5,001
Looking at bitinfocharts bsv hashrate chart looks like a slow and painful death to me...



I am not sure if this data is up to date and correct but it would take $1,509,919 to perform just one hour of 51% attack on Bitcoin network with 109,616 PH/s!
https://www.crypto51.app/

Another website claims that cheapest hardware cost for performing 51% attack on Bitcoin would be $19,158,042,714, and the attack would consume 263,423,087 kWh or $13,171,154 per day!
https://gobitcoin.io/tools/cost-51-attack/

Don't be bothered by trolls. The Bitcoin blockchain is made up of people. Faced with an immediate threat, everyone WILL come to consensus, fork all bad-actors away, and make honest-actors out of them.

https://twitter.com/bitcoin/status/1225544194946555904

Even if they bankrupt the large farms with this type of thing there would always be a collective out there who could mine and keep the chain going also if the large players were to be forced out it would just hand the network back to the small miners that in turn would boost adoption further as more smaller miners jumped back on the chain.  It would take some time for the DIFF to re-adjust back down but the attack would not stop miners from coming online if they thought they could get a slice of the pie again.

More people than ever are starting to understand how to store there crypto in paper wallets or hardware wallets I think over time we will see more security coming to the way we store our crypto so hackers would have a hard time hacking cold or hardware wallets.

Exchanges too are stepping up there security what we would like to see is more DEX markets that actually have some liquidity in them the reason people don't trade in them now is they have very little price action or traders there but the more regulation pushes on these places maybe in time we will see a solid DEX start that has some liquidity and can attract traders and investors to it.

Such an attack can lead to nothing significant, but an attackers wallet transaction reversal, and also such an attack may result in chain split, where most of the honest nodes will not follow the attackers version of blockchain.

I would seriously want to see a government attempting that, so that we can make a a$$ out of them. Just imagine spending Billions of taxpayers money on attempting a stunt like this and then having it failed due to a fork maneuver to counter it.  

Even better yet, messing them around by jumping from one coin to the next to waste even more of their money wasted on this. Bitcoiners will quickly shift to the next Alt coin or the "new" Bitcoin with the same features, if it was known that a government funded mining operation was trying to sabotage the experiment.

The public will crucify those government employees, when they find out that they are wasting tax money on stupid projects like that and possibly risk being voted out in the next election.  

Both GDP and GDP PPP have a per capital value, and in both cases is it divided by population.
I showed you that example because although in PPP terms they make 26k$ a year, in real life where it matters they only do 12k$!
And at the end of the year, they can't afford 2,6 BTC because BTC doesn't give a damn about PPP but about real $, with PPP $ you might buy bitcoin cash or bitcoin gold but not BTC.  

But yeah, we're going off-topic, let's continue this (if) in the economics section.
Back to the mining


There is always the risk, that doesn't mean it will happen, and with almost nothing, we can really do, so, what's the point of not sleeping the nights?
And if someone is bent on spending billions or tens of billions attacking it continuously, even if we find a bulletproof solution to a 51% attack, there is still the possibility of a Sybil attack then....

If we talk about somebody with unlimited money, unlimited political power, nothing is safe!


Hihi, I remembered we had a discussion like that, and on this, we agree!

How? with 2,000 deaths of coronavirus? more than that die from car accidents every month in the U.S alone, but even with that "$34 billion were wiped out of apple alone", oil prices feel from $68 to $52 as china imports the most crude oil in the world, everything has been affected by the small and silent half cough of china, china is a "global supply chain", look around your house and you will see china in every corner, if the virus is not contained and cured soon enough, things will get pretty ugly all over the globe.


GDP per capita is not the same as GDP (PPP), you seem to have gotten things mixed up a bit, the example you used is PPP per capita which is pretty dependant on the population size, that's why you see Qatar is placed first but 51th in GDP (PPP). you should probably browse this website http://statisticstimes.com/index.php to get a better understanding of the differences, although this is really going off-topic.


Money!


The king can have 10 countries and 1000 companies work for him to collect all the miners he needs, money buys everything, he can even buy mining farms in China or any other place.




There is no need to keep this a secret, the King's country can simply say they are going to support bitcoin mining by holding a large mining farm if people find out, a dozen of mining gears get moved around, does anyone know where did the last million S9s go to and who bought them?? anyone who has both power and money can potentially and easily accumulate all the hashrate they need, in fact, the Chinese president now does "technically" have control over all the mining farms in China and can perform the attack if he wants, but you are suggesting that he probably wouldn't, therefore there is no risk?


There must be, it's to be or not to be, in 2041 BTC has to be worth nearly half a million dollars  for the chain to be as secured against 51% as is today, if it's worth only 100k then it will be 80% less secure than it is now.

I do believe in the role of economy, more people and businesses owning bitcoin gives it more value and more security as whoever uses it should at some point "invest" a portion of what they have to secure the network, I don't discard that role, but there is nothing wrong with planning for a technical-based solution rather than completely counting on the assumption that "nobody will perform a 51% because it's expensive or difficult".

First:

China is really coughing to death and I don't see anything going to hell!


Because PPP is a lie to make poor people feel better, telling them that eating a rotten piece of meat in N'Djamena is the same as having breakfast at La Coupole.

Let me break this down for you:

GDP PPP per capita:
 United States   62,606
 Romania   26,447 (picked the poorest country in EU without Cyrillic letters)

So in theory, for every 6 BTC an American can buy a Romanian would be able to pick up 2.6 BTC...a 2.3 ratio!
BUT that's a lie!!!!

The average wage in the US is 63k while in Romania ~ 7200. the ratio just went to 8!
But after all that people buy for living the average American is left with 8000 while Romanian pay 93% of their income for basic food and healthcare and stuff and are left with 500$.

So, while an American the end of the year would be able to buy 0.8 BTC the Romanian would be able to buy less 0.05BTC
This although the PPP told us that the difference is  2.3 NOT 16!


On paper, it's all possible but in reality...

First, how do you get that 4,285,714 s9?

And this is when economic strat to play their role, bitmain doesn't have that many chips and they need to also put an order on TSMC for that and if TSMC is busy, could it still be done? If its this huge order and must be done quickly just how much not are only prices going to spike, not even mentioning bribing a lot of guys to keep quiet? Not even mentioning the fact that for 2000MW of power you would need something well over a billion, two billion would be simply the gas powerplant the cheapest option.

Could this be done in secrecy? No way!
So until you manage to manufacture that many miners build the infrastructure, ship and install them there is a lot of time to take some measures, and code is pretty faster than a cargo ship.

So it is possible, on paper at least! Should we be worried about this scenario? I don't think so!
And anyway, there is nothing we could really do if someone is bent on spending billions or tens of billions attacking it!

I find it amusing how you take a measurement scale that is well known and considered and say it means nothing, GDP PPP is not less important than nominal GDP,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)



Using GDP PPP china surpasses the U.S using the Nominal GDP China is not far from the U.S, taking share in world exports china has a much larger share, I don't understand why are you underestimating the economic strength of China. If China coughs twice it will also send the entire global economy to hell.


We are kind of going off-topic here ( a lot of economics) but I have a better argument to put us back on track, the U.S does not ban Bitcoin, they don't have a problem with it, China performs a 51%:

or both China and the U.S have no problem with Bitcoin but UAE, Saudi, Iran does, or even any other prince/king decides to play with 2-5 Billion Dollars (because he can)

Current hashrate is about 120 million TH , half that is 60  million TH that is 4,285,714 Antminer S9 or 4285714*80$ = $342,857,120 , or 1,090,909 T17+ (55th) *1000$ = $1,090,909,090 (slightly higher than 1 billion) and just about 2,000 megawatts worth of power, I am pretty sure a king or prince can spare 1 billion + maybe half a billion for infrastructure and 2,000 megawatt worth of electricity.

Attacking bitcoin for economic profit does not make sense, but attacking it for fun, experimental purposes or protecting one's economy makes a lot of sense, the above calculation is just an estimate, of course, if someone decides to buy that many gears they will cause gears prices to rise, but to what extent? another billion dollars? two? that much money is still pretty affordable to many countries and individuals around the globe, after the halving a huge chunk of that hash rate will leave the network for good and if the price does not moon, the attack will be a lot cheaper.

I find it really naive to think that X person won't do something in one way because Z person can do it in another way, ignoring the possibility of something happening is a terrible idea, IMO anything that has the slightest chance of happening must be discussed seriously and not ignored.

No, it doesn't. We don't actually "hold cryptocurrencies". What kind of law could the politicians propose/make to outlaw this new kind of ledger? Should developing such a ledger be illegal? Why?

Gdp means nothing...sspecially when it is :

I wasn't talking about the US banning only mining, but banning usage. Who would care about mining where there is nothing left to do with them?

The constitution isn't preventing the government to ban anything aside from things that go against human rights.
Just how they've banned drugs, pesticides, cars, and Huawei equipment they can ban everything they want.


As others have said also, I stand by my opinion, why would be something that technical?
Raid coinbase with a SWAT team and from 3 billion in equipment you can do it with 10 million worth of it.  

I am not sure if I am underestimating their power or you are overestimating it, the U.S has been slapping sanctions on Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, Syria, well you name it, and the results are not as bad, the earth has not stopped spinning.



The projected results are even worse



But what do I know? I might be really "underestimating the power of the US"


BTC could be more like a threat to the U.S dollar, this does not mean it has to be at the same level of threat to any other economy.


So you really think if the U.S bans bitcoin mining for an example, the rest of the world will do the same? Also, I would like to hear your comment about how would the U.S government go about banning bitcoin anyway, does their constitution give the government enough rights to do that?


First of all by admitting that a 51% attack on BTC is very possible, and is IMO the most powerful way to fight bitcoin, way more effective than simply trying to ban it.

As far as being technically prepared for such an attack, well I might be the worst person to be asked  , but some interesting idea's like "the delayed block submission penalty." or "Komodo’s Delayed Proof of Work".

Other methods like increasing confirmations required by merchants and individuals, perhaps someone might make an automated system that sensors the migration of a large enough portion of hashrate (assuming the hash power that is used to perform the 51% has already been on the main blockchain),  community consensus to change the mining algothroim to a GPU-Only algthorim so if the attack happens it won't last long.

I don't know, those are off the top of my head, I am sure more intelligent people like yourself have better ways to prepare for such an attack rather than thinking that it simply won't happen:

And one for you too...
You're underestimating the power of the US and its influence, and this comes from an EU citizen, not some 2nd amendment freak.

Let's cut China out of the picture because you know that if the US sees BTC as a threat the Chinese would have gone with the ban already.
Who is left, Russia and Iran, with an economy the size of texas? North Korea? And even those won't encourage usage, all of them are far more control orientated to allow the spread of cryptocurrencies, they won't take a bit of the poison apple just to piss off the US.
As for Europe, we're still too heavily interlinked with the US, even if some might try to counter this some will ally with the Us view.

And since we're at 51% scenario, imagine how this "ban" or whatever it is called would affect the chain security...
We would be lucky if we would drop only to 1k in the first phase.


How can you be prepared for this?

That makes sense, however, there is an essential factor you seem to be missing, a single government can only enforce rules upon its citizens, if the U.S bans crypto altogether, the Russians, Chinese, Iranians and perhaps some European countries would want to buy it more than anything, banning crypto is a risky move to any government if done individually because jumping out of the train does not make it stop, it could simply keep moving and you will be left behind, you need to actually STOP the train, and that would be by "destroying" bitcoin and not just ban it.
 
I pretty much like Saifedean Ammous's (the author of The Bitcoin Standard) statement where he talks about killing bitcoin


Whenever there are incentives to using bitcoin, people will use it, some countries have up to the death penalty for smoking weed and a mandatory 10 years for owning 1 gram of weed, I have personally lived in a country with such rules, and almost half of them smoke weed on the daily.

Another problem in banning bitcoin is that in most countries law amendment can only be adopted by the national legislature and not the government. In a democracy-based country, the legislature represents the people, if the people want bitcoin you can't ban it that easily, it won't work.

I could go on and on forever explaining how banning bitcoin is not easy, in fact, a 51% attack would be easier in terms of the government's limitations, but even that might end up ugly for them.

With that said, a 51% attack by government/s is doable and we as a community should be prepared for such attacks rather than completely ignoring them, just my thought!.

I think the government does that thing because they do not believe the essence of the bitcoin or any cryptocurrency. Some so many people dont believe in bitcoin because they consider the cryptocurrency as a threat to many government agencies and establishments that process the transaction between money. Still, bitcoin is so helpful in many ways. It would be hard for the government to remove or to delete the bitcoins because if they are successful in doing so, there are still many currencies that can be valuable as bitcoin, there are so many currencies here in this forum, the government will find it so hard to delete it all, they will need a billion of money to do that. Some countries accept the cryptocurrency and this so good for them, some article that I have read is that some students use bitcoin to pay their tuition in the universities. Why can other countries not do that thing? Where it is so beneficial to many of us.

I said outlaw. To make illegal under a country's constitution. You too didn't get the context. You believe Satoshi is liable for a crime because he invented Bitcoin? You believe all coders can be imprisoned for building/coding decentralized networks? You believe it's constitutional for the government to convict users for using, and running software for a new kind of database? 1s and 0s.

true, but the cat is already out of the bag. if a crazy government some day pulled something like that then it will only raise a lot of alarms among regular people who were not using any kind of encryption for anything they were doing so far and they will start thinking about using it.
it's like the Snowden effect, although US Gov has been snooping but nobody was thinking about protecting themselves, when they found out about it everyone was thinking about protecting their privacy.

I told you in my previous post
Just how they can allow C12H22O11  which is sugar and ban C21H23NO5 which is heroin.
Just how pinging a poe server is not a crime but a dos attack is, it's basically the same thing, right?
Are viruses and malware attacks legal? They are just a bunch of 0s and 1s.
I a crime having a database with the SSN of a thousand people?


I sometimes think people are really underestimating what an insane government or political party can do!
If one of them would want to that they will!

Fortunately for most of us living in democracies, no matter how much you criticize the "authoritarian" governments, nothing on this scale will be done against cryptos. But good luck if you're living in Turkmenistan or other centra Asia former URSS republics.
You won't be wondering what they can do  anymore!

The U.K. already proposed to forbid publishing open source, non custodial wallet software in one of their AMLD5 proposals. Luckily they decided not to include that rule in their final draft, but they are definitely eyeballing it.

You didn't get the context. The question actually was, what can any government do to outlaw the writing of code/development of software for a "new kind of database"?

Let's start
- ban all atms
- banks must stop servicing any cryptocurrency exchanges
- merchants are not allowed to offer bitcoin payments

We're back at SR levels in a second. What are you going to use is for? Look how shiny your 1s and 0s are?

Besides, we're talking about an extreme scenario here, some of you might be too young or have lived in a democracy all your life to even grasp what a dictatorship regime can do. They wouldn't even need a law, just grab 20 people who are known for dealing with cryptos make a lot of noise about it and throw them in prison for 40 years. On the forum, everybody is tough, in real life, 99% of those that aren't afraid of anything will piss their pants the moment the police knocks at the door at 2 am.

Let me quote :



People are thinking this wrong.

It is like a government would suddenly buy 2 million s17 and immediately launch an attack. Why?

Even a 9 yo would come with a better plan. Why not build gradually your hashrate?
Since it's the actual state doing so they get a zero cents electric bill, they even earn some coins which they can dump immediately on the market, pushing the price down, making it harder for other miners to keep mining and thus pushing down the actual hash rate that is done by independent miners.

If they add 30 PH of hash rate now and manage to get the price back at 8k 1/3 of the old true hashpower will be gone as almost any s9 will be losing money unless free energy. Do I have to add also the fact that if they manage to get ahold of 20-25% of that rate they would simply mine empty blocks and we all know where that would lead to?

Yeah overnight, the attack is not possible but if they would want and put all resources on table 3 billion is nothing.

But again, WHY would they want to do such a thing?

Kjoas76 presented a valid debate about confiscating ASICs to try to stop Bitcoin, but using them to successfully 51% attack the network? Very debatable, https://twitter.com/bitcoin/status/1225544194946555904


No. What kind of law could the any government make to outlaw software/code for a ledger?

Yes that always seems to happen. Newbies usually are those are most vulnerable to falling for anything trolls and FUD spreading users might post. It is hard to blame them for being ignorant, maybe they are just beginning to understand what crypto is how it works so fall prey to anything anybody writes here. The onus really is on the user posting to ensure they are responsible but that is not always the case - hence the words trolls and fudsters come to mind as you put it.

Just like you imprison somebody for carrying carbon, hydrogen nitrogen, and oxygen.
It's the same stuff that your body is made of, how can somebody go to prison for that?
Nobody will go to prison for 1 and 0 but you will go for prison if what those 1s and 0s make together is something deemed illegal just how you're going to prison for C21H23NO5.

If a government would want that much to get bitcoin eliminated from the economy they will not target the chain or nodes or the hash rate, they will go after users.
As I said before and others did, if they would make holding cryptocurrencies a felony with mandatory 25 years, would you still use it?

No 51% or Sybil or any kind of attacks orchestrated by the government will happen.

Plus trolls/fudsters are taking advantage of the newbies' ignorance. But truly, if they understood what makes the network/protocol secure, and "who truly follows who", then they wouldn't be worried.

That explanation makes sense

I did ask him for any links but he never got back. There is so much confusion and FUD surrounding nearly all aspects of crypto that people hear one thing and repeat it to others. In many cases people make it up as they go along. You are right, confusing mining pools with mining farms (and the hash rate) is probably one of the biggest reasons people believe China is in a position to control various aspects of Bitcoin. The reality is far more diverse.

I believe you should watch the video in this tweet, https://twitter.com/bitcoin/status/1225544194946555904

The incentive-structure works, it's better to mine honestly.


We're off-topic, this will be my last reply. Ross Ulbricht wasn't convicted for sending 1s and 0s. Maybe YOU should ask him.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht

people usually either fall for the FUD that has been around for years convincing them of powers of China when it comes to bitcoin whether it is in mining scene or in the market. or they confuse mining pools with mining farms and since there are mining pools with Chinese names (that have different servers around the world not just in China) they think China "owns" a lot of hashrate.

Do you have links about this? Where did you get that information from?

Good points, some of them, but very very far from practical in a realistic scenario. The cat is out of the bag, and how would you imprison people who pass around mere 1s and 0s?

You also seem to like to see Bitcoiners to be imprisoned. Hahaha.

If someone were to hypothetically successfully pull off a 51% attach on bitcoin, there would be a loss of confidence in all crypto coins, even if bitcoin changed its algorithm.

Assuming a government could control the means of production (China), the cost to produce new miners sufficient to execute a 51% attack is somewhere in the $2-3 billion range. For the case of China, this figure could be lower if the government confiscated large scale mining operations that are easier to detect.

I can only think of two reasons why a government would do this 1) they are unable to enforce the collection of taxes on a very large scale, or 2) dissidents are using bitcoin to pay for expenses related to doing harm to the government.

In addition to the cost of producing the miners, a country that pulled off a 51% attack on bitcoin would be known to the rest of the world that investing in that country, and housing IP in that country is not safe. Providing an estimate of these costs is above my pay grade, but I suspect it would be significant and a factor of the country's GDP, and international trade. I don't think a government would try this unless it was in a desperate situation.

Overall, I would consider the risk of a 51% attack to be low. If the bitcoin experiment were to fail, I would say it probably will not fail because of something that can be traced back to a 51% attack.

Just because most mining power comes from China doesn't mean their government can take over Bitcoin through a 51% attack. I've never studied who owns the most Bitcoin power in China but I highly doubt (and I think it's pretty logic) that it's their government. Otherwise, Bitcoin would be right now placed under a serious threat of centralization and power.

Considering Danny's calculus, how will the governments gain any benefit from attacking Bitcoin? A successful attack would only determine devs to focus on Bitcoin's security against these attacks, hence making Bitcoin even stronger. A failure would be a big embarrassment for the governments and would make Bitcoin even stronger than the scenario of a success.

Why would a government spend so much money just to try an attack..

China can already do that. It has more than 51% of all Bitcoin mining power in pools. They can easily take over the pools.

There will be no consensus for a hardfork. Because until this really happen and is only something estimated, Bitcoin is as flexible as 20 m of railroad track

You're underestimating the amount of resources and the benefits governments would gain from attacking Bitcoin. Cryptos will still thrive regardless of if the attack suceeds or not. Its not difficult for Bitcoin to fork to a different algroithm and the government would be left with a huge pile of useless ASICs.

If they have enough resources, there's no fight at all.

If a government decides to buy a big stack of miners to perform the 51% attack i think other countries and bitcoin miners will not allow that and it would be a huge hash rate fight. But if the government wins then they can do some nasty moves on the blockchain.

Do three pools.  have it look like it is a pps+. pool battle.

a price war.

if three pps+ pools  were all paying 125% they would get a lot of the network.

people would think cool not fear this as it is three pools having a price war.

that is also a good point. i believe BTG's algorithm is based on ZCash mining algorithm called Equihash so maybe a better comparison would be with ZCash hashrate which is like this:

5,636,579,094
    2,745,036

BTG is still too small making such attacks very easy.

Bitcoin's hashing power is so overwhelming that even after killing off half its network you'd still have plenty of protection left. Obsolete mining farms would take their place as mining becomes profitable for older hardware again.



There's not enough hashing power available for rent to mount a reasonable attack. Simply seizing private property of highly profitable companies to then run these companies into the ground on the off-chance that one could get enough hashing power for a successful attack is a losing proposition.




Which means less hardware being produced meaning less hardware being available for a potential attack.




Making PoW mining illegal would simply push mining operations to countries where mining is still legal -- assuming you could even successfully persecute miners.

A price drop caused by unfavorable regulation would lessen Bitcoin's hashrate but still not make an attack much easier (ie. see my answere to (3) above)

both of these  depend on how big a hashrate mining farms have. for example if there were a mining farm with 60% or even 30% of the hashrate then it could cause a lot of problems in short term until difficulty adjusts but when mining farms have 1-5% it won't matter.
i don't believe there is any single farm that has a big enough hashrate that its shutdown could cause any trouble for bitcoin.

that would be pure speculation about price. but apart from that if hashrate doesn't grow that means bitcoin price isn't going up and that means it stopped growing in which case there is no incentive for government to attack something that is not even growing!

I have to agree with this. The easiest way for governmental agencies to put any crypto out in the cold would legislation because it would be easier/convenient to pass laws rather than to try to force a 51% attack.

In argue always the current hashrate is shown how hard it would be. But you have to think of:

1) they can destroy or simply cut off the network some of these huge mining farms so hashrate would drop

2) they can use these mining farms in any way (rent them, command them)

3) the hash rate maybe not constantly grow after 2 more halvings



For me much simpler is forbid POW with the climate argument. Lets say the European union does forbid the trading, import and mining of proof of work currencys. Of course they can be used in shadow but the price will significant drop. Maybe this new regulation organisation some kind of foundet in Davos does that nearly wourld wide.

I'm the last person defending shitcoins but you can't compare the hash rate of two different algorithms.
Ethereum's hash rate is ~160 Th, while an S17+ is doing 67Th but I doubt you can launch an attack with 3000$ worth of equipment. 

you can't really post that in a topic that is discussing about bitcoin! and if you compare the two hashrates you will understand how ridiculous that comparison is. in chart form it is this: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc-btg.html#3m the red line at the bottom which can't even be seen belongs to BTG.
in numbers the values are like this (first one is bitcoin hashrate and second is BTG both in h/s):

102,205,774,869,465,923,584
                  2,745,036

Being in line with your scenario, what the government would be doing is illegal. The 51% attack would mean fraud when it comes to transactions happening in Bitcoin's blockchain even the disruption of the system alone will make the government commit a crime what more if they try to double spend in some transactions? This alone would simply make them liable in several criminal things and the worst thing that could happen to them is that the international body would intervene with the sick thing they are doing. Also if they want to destroy Bitcoin and the entire industry wouldn't it be much easier for them to do it by creating unfavorable laws and regulations under their country which will be much cheaper for them to do.

That's the downside of running on an "ASIC-proof" PoW algorithm -- more easily available hashing power that can just as easily be reused for another coin so you don't even have to shoot your own foot when running an attack.

BTG having relatively small hashing power to begin with didn't make things much better.

That is overt. People will see and know what happened. Some of what was posed could be done covertly. No public bad actors, no acknowledgement, just oh look BTC was around for this many years then that happened and it and other cryptos went away. People would point fingers and everything else but w/o proof it would all be speculation.

I seriously do not think it could really happen in just about any of the ways listed, but that does not mean that it can't happen some way.

-Dave

Sometimes this happens ... the last 51% attacks  have succeeded in stealing of   $19K +  $53K = $72K  worth of BTG.

Indeed, assuming a very powerful attacker then limiting them to weird technical attacks is unimaginative.

'just have to catch some miners, gather them up on stage and shoot them in the head. (Or more realistically put them in prison). Don't hypothesize weird technical attacks when boring things will do.'

https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2012-05-17.html#l-642

Even outlaws don't have that much use for an outlaw currency. Actually destroying bitcoin would be very hard but depriving it of almost all of its value would be much easier for a major nation state attacker.  But why would people want to do such a thing? -- in general, they wouldn't.

Have to take my hat off to you, there are some serious calculations there 

The reality is the only winner in any such scenario would the Antminer manufacturing company

If a pool did turn rogue, then a lot of hashrate contributors would switch to a different pool to combat it. The 51% attack isn't a genuine threat from my eyes. I think a 51% attack could potentially be made in a short period of time, but once everyone else is aware, and the expenses start to rack up the attack will subside. The government don't really need to attack the Bitcoin network as much as everyone likes to pretend that Bitcoin is a threat to the governments of the world or the banking systems it just isn't currently.

Bitcoin was never meant to be a direct attack on the government, and I can't see them getting involved especially when they can control it from less expensive, and invasive ways via media coverage.

That pool will have a too big hash rate. People will notice and start crying. Smarter miners may understand that something is fishy and go out.

Keep in mind that other SHA coins have only a small fraction of Bitcoin hash rate.

I think that the trick will not work.

That is very true DaveF,  I think also the fact that there are very few pools out there people plump for the ones that have the largest hash rate leaving out the likes of ck pool and kano now both are struggling now kano's last bock being mid December and ck's some time before that we also lost johnny bravo's pool and have seen may other fold under the conditions now.

It will be a true shame if we lose these pools the more I look at this the more it's looking like a whitewash by the large players to keep the small guys out the market but thing is if this happens and say something happens to the large players if there are no fallback pools and miners left out there your right the chain come's to a horrific stalemate.

It's concerning that the small pools are being forced out now this will only continue we really need more pools and better distribution of hashrate to resolve this or we will end up with 3 of 4 very very large pool basically the mining mafia.

Kinda sorta quoting myself here, but I changed the numbers a bit.
You can screw with bitcoin with a lot of money and a fake PPS pool(s).

6 blocks an hour  * 24 hours in a day  * 12.5 coins per block (for now) = 1800 BTC generated per day

1800 * 8750 (USD value of BTC at the moment) = 15,750,000 USD Lets round that up to 17,500,000 a day

Let’s give everyone a 20% bonus so $21 Million USD a day in our PPS pool in outgoing BTC

Let’s do this for a quarter so 90 days. That is just shy of 2 Billion USD out of pocket if this killer pool mines 0 blocks and has to buy all the BTC that they are giving out.

Since it’s a PPS pool that they control, they can point the hash to ANY SHA coin. Kiss every SHA coin that is not BTC goodbye. Then they point it back to BTC for 2 or 3 difficulty increases. And then in the end they point the hash rate nowhere. And the block chain comes to a crashing halt. Are you seriously going to mine at CKpool or Slush or P2Pool when it’s going to take forever to find a block because difficulty spiked because with an extra 20% marginal hardware gets turned back on, or are you going to mine here and get your extra 20% all day every day.

And then they shut off and go away. How long will it take us to recover?

Who would do this? I don’t know. Do you think if I went to Chase / Bank Of America / HSBC / CitiBank / Western Union / Wells Fargo and said “Hey, each of you cough up $350 million and I’ll set Bitcoin / crypto back 5+
years.” They would ask how or just write me a check? It's also petty cash for just about any government. Even after the divorce settlement Bezos probably still has it in cash in his safe at home

-Dave

I actually think there is another way they could take it over. We all know those three letter agency's love a zero-day to get what they want. 
Now what if a exploit in nodes and miners was being tucked away by them they could easy launch an attack to take over the miners already on the network in conjunction with an attack on the nodes this would be the most plausible way for them to take control over the network.

I for one believe that such an attack is highly possible people thinking they would need to buy miners is absurd when they could just exploit the ones that are on the network already.  Second to this is the fact they could also attack pool's to get the desired hash-rate to perform an attack.

Right now I think the focus should be on the centralization of the mining power with less and less home miners and small farms shutting down and being pushed out dew to power hungry 3kw units that are no use for home miners. 

This should be on the minds more than a state coming in and shutting it down lose the home and small farms and it's basically china and  the east than own bitcoin that should be more of a concern that anything also the number of pools that are about on the brink of shutting down will give the large players more of a the hashrate so the above becomes very relevant,  and quickly..

"A significant number"?

They would need to purchase more hashpower than the entire rest of the Bitcoin mining world combined.

The current global hash rate is approximately 120,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second (120 eH/s).

That means that the attacker would need to purchase enough equipment to generate more than 120,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second, and they'd have to do that quickly, since the global hash rate that they are trying to overcome is currently still increasing.  If it took them too long to purchase all their hash power, the global hash rate may have increased, and they'd still need to purchase even more.

The Antminer S17 calculates approximately 67 TH/s and costs $1600 to purchase.

The attacker is going to need to purchase:
120,000,000,000,000,000,000 / 67,000,000,000,000 = 1,791,045 Antminer S17

I'm not sure how long it would take Antminer to manufacture 1.8 million S17 units, but let's pretend they just happen to have them sitting in a warehouse waiting to be sold...

That's going to cost the attacker $2,865,672,000

So, they are going to spend nearly 3 Billion dollars just to acquire the equipment. Then they are going to need to have somewhere to store/operate all this equipment. They'll need to pay some people to set up and maintain everything. They'll also need about 5.8 gigawatts to power the mining equipment (plus the electricity need to cool it all and light the buildings that house it all.

This is almost certainly going to create a noticeable shortage of Antminer S17 units, which will drive up the costs of whatever mining equipment anyone can get their hands on.

After all that money, and all that effort, it's still questionable whether they'd actually "destroy" Bitcoin.  First of all, they won't be able to chnage any of the consensus rules.  The best they'd be able to do is block transactions from being confirmed, keep any other miners from earning any revenue, and/or perform a double-spend (assuming they can find anyone that is willing to engage in a transaction with them).  There is a small chance that an overwhelming majority of users of Bitcoin might decide to fork the code such that all the mining power the attacker purchased could become instantly worthlesss.

Perhaps it would be better/cheaper to just create a law (with penalty of death) that makes it illegal to mine, purchase, sell, hold, or transact with Bitcoin?  Then send a few missles at large mining operations in other countries?  That should significantly reduce participation.  Then once the hash rate drops down below 67 TH/s, they can perform their 51% attack with a single Antminer S17!

Long before they collect the ASICs for the attack, the government will realize that they can make money mining Bitcoin.
So if they could spend so much money, I thing they would continue the mining and not attacking.
So I believe it is not a possible scenario...

I also dont see any reason why government will do such thing cause they already have enough on their plate rather than focusing on carry out 51% attack on bitcoin and from my experience 51% is usually carry out by miners and i dont see any reason why a miner will want the reason why we are all into crypto today to quench.




If you don't have an insider at the company selling, you won't know it till the hash rate grows and since the hash rate is normally on an upward trend right now because of better gear and the price increase you will need really good clairvoyance skills to realize it's an evil player adding hash power to the network.
[/quote]
In addition, the work of miners are to maintain/manage the blockchain network and also to get transaction confirm. Which mean they also does the examining job either.

First thing, why would a government do that?
And if they are afraid of bitcoin, it means they should be afraid of ethereum once bitcoin is gone, and next about litecoin and them some PoS coins and so on and on. From a government point totally wanting to get rid of cryptos, it makes zero sense to start spending billions in order to pluck only one at a time.

And why kill bitcoin entirely, they could deal with the problem in their country only.
If they are that stupid to plan such an attack first they would put lifetime sentences as punishment people using bitcoin, how many do you think would risk it?


In order to get 51%, you would need roughly 2 million s17, taking into account that while you set them up some miners will drop because of the reward getting smaller, maybe you can do it with 1,2 - 1,5 million, but I doubt Bitmain or Cannan or all the manufacturer together would be able to produce that in a short period of time.


If you don't have an insider at the company selling, you won't know it till the hash rate grows and since the hash rate is normally on an upward trend right now because of better gear and the price increase you will need really good clairvoyance skills to realize it's an evil player adding hash power to the network.

Buying ASICs is easy, but a government wanting to destroy Bitcoin means turning against its citizens. The "Bitcoin is used for illicit activity" excuse card means accusing every citizen of sustaining illicit activity. Not a good idea.

But let's hypothetically say they did really want to destroy it. A 51% attack is possible, damage could be done but it could also be reversed by reversing blocks. 51% attack means they have to own 51% of the mining power, so they either do it by slowly adding more and more ASICs into their system to slowly rise the hashrate during a longer term or they would plug all of them in at once and there will be a 110% hashrate spike.

About being noticed, I'm sure there will be lots of people and articles everywhere on the Internet posting screenshots of the hashrate spike. Twitter would be full of them.

Am I missing something? I've never been deep in Bitcoin mining before so this post might contain stupid statements and any correction is appreciated.

EDIT:


It won't? Where would it be allocated then? I thought the hashrate charts represented the total Bitcoin mining hashrate.

Hi,

Absolutely, that's usually the first argument I make when discussing 51%. Is there enough hashrate available so that it surpasses all the hashrate allocated to Bitcoin ? If so, why not mine Bitcoin ?
Even if it's for trying to hurt, a one (or two?) block(s) reorg won't affect the network that much (if not at all, for one block). Trying to reorg >2 block becomes really difficult..

If the aim is to 51%, then the hashrate won't be allocated to the Bitcoin network. So, no, not by monitoring the hashrate.

Following scenario: A government would like to destroy Bitcoin. It buys a significant number of ASICs to build up a huge mining farm and carries out a 51% attack.
From my point of view it will not be so easy to buy so many ASICs as once - what do you think?
Another question: Will it be noticed (how?) that somebody buys a big stack of ASICs and/or are we able to identify such a behavior monitoring the network's hashrate?