As long as they have 51 of the hashing power , they can control which transactions to accept. Even blocking a small amount of transactions will destroy credibility of bitcoin.
I've seen a lot of "problems" with bitcoin brought up by people in the forum that are non issues. This does appear to be something of concern.
Topic: 51% attack - page 3. (Read 5157 times)
legendary
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how would it be revived afterward?
Many alt coins suffered from 51% attacks and survived. Go do your research. legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
how would it be revived afterward?
its irrelevant what pools people join if a big bank or government decides to invest a few hundred million (or less)
to develop their own 60 Ph/s of mining power.
This was discussed before. Why would anyone with any amount of brain waste so much power just to 51% attack it, when the coin can be revived afterwards? The more miners we have, the less chance the government has of overtaking us with the mining power. The improvement in ASICs will stagnate one day. to develop their own 60 Ph/s of mining power.
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
its irrelevant what pools people join if a big bank or government decides to invest a few hundred million (or less)
to develop their own 60 Ph/s of mining power.
to develop their own 60 Ph/s of mining power.
The real danger is not in someone taking over 50% of the existing network, but rather someone getting a hold of enough hashing power to double the existing network to create the 51% attack. That is a dire threat , but I'm not sure what is being done.
This isn't going to happen if the few right people care enough. Miners should spread out to more pools because of this. It is solely in their hands. legendary
Activity: 1302
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To destroy bitcoin.
This will not happen.
Why would anyone do this? They would only lose money.
Why would anyone do this? They would only lose money.
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
The real danger is not in someone taking over 50% of the existing network, but rather someone getting a hold of enough hashing power to double the existing network to create the 51% attack. That is a dire threat , but I'm not sure what is being done.
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
Pools are way more concentrated than actual mining farms. I think shutting down some big farms won't have a huge impact on the network. Even if the network were cut in HALF, it would be readjusted in less than a month.
i agree might be good to proactively think about it. probably people have.
im just saying, trying to shutdown bitcoin by attacking mining pools
won't work because it is easy for any miner to switch pools quickly.
im just saying, trying to shutdown bitcoin by attacking mining pools
won't work because it is easy for any miner to switch pools quickly.
The problem is, if the big mining farms were shut down (not the pools), then the hashrate would drop several fold, which means new blocks would be solved who knows how often, perhaps one block per day. So it's not that easy to switch, I mean yeah, the remaining small fish miners can switch to other pools, but the network would still be paralyzed.
If bitcoin developers actually changed the code so that the difficulty is recalculated after each block, the way they do in Dogecoin now, this wouldn't be an issue. If hashrate drops a lot, the difficulty quickly drops too, and the blocks keep being solved as if nothing happened, but when you have difficulty readjustment every 2000 blocks like it's set up in bitcoin now, this would be hell of a nightmare to wait, what, months perhaps, for next difficulty readjustment, it can get crazy.
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
i agree might be good to proactively think about it. probably people have.
im just saying, trying to shutdown bitcoin by attacking mining pools
won't work because it is easy for any miner to switch pools quickly.
im just saying, trying to shutdown bitcoin by attacking mining pools
won't work because it is easy for any miner to switch pools quickly.
Yes but it could only get control for a short time before everyone realized what is happening and changes pools. It would be a huge disruption but not the end of bitcoin.
Hm, do you think that other pools they run to would continue to work just fine? I mean it won't take a long time to identify other pools' operators and if there is a decision to shut the network down, it will be shut down. The chances of this need to be eliminated by design, which is what Bitcoin simply doesn't have. If we put our collective heads in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist, well, some day it might kick us in the butt.
pools are distributed across different countries, there would have to be a global agreement in all the countries involved to shut all the pool's down.
even if for some reason all the world governments agree to shut pools down its always possible to start a pool as a TOR hidden service and let it operate like silkroad.
Yes but it could only get control for a short time before everyone realized what is happening and changes pools. It would be a huge disruption but not the end of bitcoin.
Hm, do you think that other pools they run to would continue to work just fine? I mean it won't take a long time to identify other pools' operators and if there is a decision to shut the network down, it will be shut down. The chances of this need to be eliminated by design, which is what Bitcoin simply doesn't have. If we put our collective heads in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist, well, some day it might kick us in the butt.
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
A 51% attack would NOT necessarily mean everyone would switch to litecoin.
Instead, miners would just leave those corrupted pools and
join new ones not under the control of the dark lord of the sith.
And bitcoin lives on.
Instead, miners would just leave those corrupted pools and
join new ones not under the control of the dark lord of the sith.
And bitcoin lives on.
How hard would it be for a powerful entity to take control of the 3-4 largest pools to completely paralyze the network? Not very hard I would say if that entity has enough political will to do that.
Now, this would be much harder to do, if at all possible, with such a coin as Myriadcoin or NXT, as they have enough protection by design not to fall victim to such an event.
Yes but it could only get control for a short time before everyone realized what is happening and changes pools. It would be a huge disruption but not the end of bitcoin.
Part 2 is more interesting. I hadn't realised that if a 51% miner secret mines empty blocks for 6 hours and then releases them, that would reset all transactions in those 6 hours back to zero confirmations. That would allow double-spends on all those transactions to be attempted, not by the miner (who doesn't know the private keys) but by whoever initiated the original transactions. The miner could then continue mining in public, accepting transactions, but given preference to the double-spends. Basically it would be a lot worse than Bitcoin being offline for 6 hours.
The idea that this could be countered by looking for long chains of empty blocks is surely wrong. The attacker could fill them with their own, dummy transactions.
I'm not so sure about his claim that the miner could be mostly honest, and accept 99% of transactions but exclude ones for Overstock. That kind of targeted attack would require knowing which transactions were Overstock's.
The idea that this could be countered by looking for long chains of empty blocks is surely wrong. The attacker could fill them with their own, dummy transactions.
I'm not so sure about his claim that the miner could be mostly honest, and accept 99% of transactions but exclude ones for Overstock. That kind of targeted attack would require knowing which transactions were Overstock's.
Ah, been waiting for this one, thank you!
can you say in a short way what is in this video about?
It's a long-winded estimation of how much it would cost to acquire 51% of Bitcoin's hash power. With some explanation of why it matters and where the numbers come from. A 51% attack would NOT necessarily mean everyone would switch to litecoin.
Instead, miners would just leave those corrupted pools and
join new ones not under the control of the dark lord of the sith.
And bitcoin lives on.
Instead, miners would just leave those corrupted pools and
join new ones not under the control of the dark lord of the sith.
And bitcoin lives on.
How hard would it be for a powerful entity to take control of the 3-4 largest pools to completely paralyze the network? Not very hard I would say if that entity has enough political will to do that.
Now, this would be much harder to do, if at all possible, with such a coin as Myriadcoin or NXT, as they have enough protection by design not to fall victim to such an event.
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