Topic: 51% Attack - page 2. (Read 333 times)

A 51% attack would be wasting tremendous amounts of energy,just to get control over a blockchain that won't have any value after the attack.What's the point?
The Bitcoin price will drop catastrophically after a successful 51% attack and the attacker will get a bunch of worthless BTC.What's the point?Can somebody of you FUDsters answer me?
Damn,all the FUDsters simply can't create new narratives to shit over Bitcoin.They just keep repeating the old stuff.Over and over,again and again.

Perhaps as you said, it is not difficult to control 51% of the computing power in the future. But if he can control the 51% of the computing power, he can use the computing power to mine instead of attack. Because once he attacks the coins, it will cause the price of these coins to fall, which is not good for him, and may even make him lose money. Once someone has 51% of the computing power, he will not do it.

If you want to attack the Bitcoin system, you must first control 51% of the miners. This sounds difficult to achieve, but it is not actually the case. Miners want to join larger mining pools to protect their own profits, which leads to the continuous expansion of the capacity of each mining pool. In fact, the three mining pools of Ethereum can already reach 51% of the computing power. That is to say, in the future, it is completely possible for a mining farm to control more than 51% of the computing power. This also means that you want to attack. A person in the Bitcoin system only needs to control a mine to achieve his goal.

Let's say cap is $1trillion, so you would have to have north of $500B just to play the game, ... and for what? WHat purpose? These kinds of losses are stuff that start wars between nations.

I think the problem is that minions have no feeble understanding for these enormous amounts of wealth, that exceed almost all USA corporations.

Recently Musk played BTc, he bought $1.5B with borrowed money, and tried to keep his baby TSLA afloat, but to what end could have Musk done a 51%, he would need 350 x $1.5B  of financial influence to play +51%

On the other hand, unlike USA where its herding cats form of GOV by stick&treat, in CHINA its one collective 'jump' and if the CCP ordered, even a simple SW upgrade to bitmain ant-miners, they could alter the course of BTC forever.

But so what, the CCP loves wealth as much as anybody else in CHINA, so why not just keep playing the game, and accumulating more wealth?

51% attack, is like the old game of 'battle ship' kids used to play, one kid would knock another kid out, and say 'where did you get that destroyer?", to which the other replied same place you got your fleet of nuclear submarines, sure its a childs mind game to talk about 51% because, especially with no understanding of the infrastructure, anything can be pulled out of ones arse, when talking this game

BTC well 90% is mined in CHINA, 99% of the HW is made in CHINA, and +90% of the mining pools for btc are in CHINA, but nobody sees the 500LB gorilla cuz morons are blind

The reality is its not in China's interest to kill the golden-goose, so play on garth, and talk poop

One example of a chinese pool getting 51% was bitcoin-gold, not long after launch it was 51% attacked, and some $72M USD was stolen by having fraudulent transactions approved. So it does happen, with bitcoin even the Chinese would not accept the huge losses. Then of course one man Jack-Ma owns 99% of all the crypto-mining on earth as he owns all the ant-miners, ant-pools, and ant-hw, and ant-pay systems; but now under CCP arrest, thus if the CCP wanted to pull the plug, they could, but why would they? BTC was just over $1Trillion USD cap a few months ago, bigger than most USA corporations. Hell that's 1/2 the Chinese holdings in USD, and BTc is certainly more valuable that US-toilet paper.

In summary china is more likely to pull the plug on USD, rather than btc, they'r just studying it, and waiting for the correct time to re-deploy the infrastructure towards CBDC ( its realy field tested between HK&Thailand since 2019 ).

The defense is the attack itself, it is energy expensive and resource expensive so anyone who tries to do it better have a lot of money and resources because they're gonna be needing a lot. Plus, I don't think that any country will even try to do it anyways because what's it gonna isn't really going to affect long term.

Sure ,
it starts with coercion of the top 4 mining pool operators to 51% attack the network and doublespend.

The defense would be spreading out the # of mining pools that together have a collected 51%,
preferable to a minimum of 51 pool operators, however community is clueless and won't do anything.

So the security risk will be there until a successful attack.   

Of which the ASICs are out of stock in various manufacturing and official reseller stores  

If it was easy to perform. I bet it would have already been done over the past decade Bitcoin has existed and seems to get more and more valuable each passing day.

But you can check out other Bitcoin forks that have ever been attacked in the same manner. Mostly the first thing that happens is a price drop as the market reacts to what happened.

Who knows if anyone ever tried, but to date there has never been a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin. There have been successful attacks on other coin though, but by now it is practically impossible to see any such attack on Bitcoin for the foreseeable future.

You don't have to hold the attack for very long. You can at most execute only one attack, if you are out for the profit. The network will react accordingly to the attack to minimize the impact after the attack happen.

Rather than electrical consumption, the main factor limiting something like this is actually the costs of executing such an attack. Purchasing the ASICs for something like this is ridiculously expensive, keeping in mind that it's only good for one attack and they are rendered useless afterwards. Even if you were able to double spend and get your Bitcoins back, what is the use when the price crashes right after? You're still left to deal with ASICs that probably won't be used after as the community explores another algorithm.

When we are talking about a 51% attack, bitcoin first line of defense is something a lot of people ads discussing recently: mining energy consumption.

To be able to hold a 51% attack for long, the attacker would spend more energy than many countries combined. This kind of attack is almost impossible to have any success with the current bitcoin network hashrate.

Has anyone wargamed a 51% attack on Bitcoin? How would it go down. What defensive measures could be taken.

*edit* Ive been trying to guestimate the block rewards in the future and what ive arrived at is difficulty will go down alot. This is not good if there is a relatively large faction in the world vying to supply the reserve asset because for the cost of less than building a power plant you could 51% attack bitcoin at that point. So if a proof of stake coin tracks BTC market cap they can just wait for a few more halvings and then attack. Or if a legacy government like China wants to assert their own CBDCs they can spend a fraction of their military budget to attack bitcoin. Not cool.