Topic: 51% attack on Bitcoin - page 2. (Read 304 times)

It would take billions of dollars to accomplish that and in the end the attacker will get nothing because even if somehow succeeds with his attack, everybody will leave bitcoin and the attacker will control an empty network. It is not a good move financially. The attacker has a lot to lose and nothing to gain. That alone makes this potential attack a non-issue. BSV and their billionaire guy tried to attack BTC before and they failed. They quickly realized that they were hemorrhaging money for nothing.

You're calculating the cost of building a farm to attack the network, and you do that also wrong as Phil said
What that calculator does is simply taking the rent cost for 1th/a and multiplying by the needed hashrate, so no initial gear cost, no energy not anything else. Much like buying a car to go on a trip versus taking rental.

After all it's pretty simple, to get that hashrate you just have to rent it by paying the miners more than they are making but you will never be able to bribe mining pools with tens of exahashes to rent you that for one hour or two.

During the early stage, Bitcoin never got 51% attack. Now Bitcoin price is already expensive, has a high market cap and more difficult to mine, but you're still wondering if Bitcoin will get 51% attack.

I don't believe with the mathematical number, if $1 Billion, $10 Billion or $100 Billion can ruin the Bitcoin network, it just need few developed countries to buy a lot mining rigs to perform 51% attack. Mining rigs has a limit and the current miners wouldn't just their rigs.

As others have mentioned, you would need north of $10 billion to at least achieve 51% of the mining hash rate. But I think this isn't the point. There are individuals, families, companies, banks, governments, and so on who have way more than $10 billion. They can afford to achieve that 51%. As a matter of fact, GHash.io once achieved 55% of Bitcoin’s hash rate. But the question is why would somebody invest so much money to attack Bitcoin? The key takeaways are that [1] it's not going to be profitable, so if it's for the money, it would be absurd, and then [2] it would only be temporary, quick; the takeover won't last forever, so if it's to destroy Bitcoin, it would also be absurd. So, what's the point? I think there's none.

you are externally attacking it by buying new gear from asic builders.

that can only happen if a country decides to do it.

Ie china tells bitmain to build the gear. and only sell to china so china can attack the network.


the reality is  2x the 1.9 billion i mentioned won’t cut it and an external attack done by buying the entire network it 400 eh and running that ontop of the 380 eh is not the way to do it.

If it ever gets done it will be by hijacking the top four pools and doing a fork.

the top four pools could simply agree to start doing this at any time.


cost in gear is zero.


list of the pools

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/pools

foundry 34%
antpool 22%
f2pool   13%
binance. 7%
viabtc    7%

they add to 93% plus they could easily agree to do a 51% attack.

No.

If you're attacking from within (using existing miners on the network) you have to buy up 51% of the miners on the network, which miners are not going to sell you. So no go there.

If you attacked from the outside (bringing new miners onto the network) you have to buy up 101% as many miners that are on the network.


Antminer S19 Pro is listed at $3230 from what I can see. Though I think sometimes miners go for much more, I was looking at miner prices a couple years ago and $3000 miners were selling for like $15k or something crazy. But let's just assume you could buy them for the actual list price.

At current hash rate it'd take about 3.3 million S19s to match the entire network hashrate in order to do a 51% attack, since you'd be doubling the hash rate. At list price, just buying the miners would cost about $10.5 billion. Now you have to pay for the infrastructure, both physical and electric, to run all these, and the workers to set them it all up. Also you have to get AC to cool down these facilities so the miners don't all melt down.

And then you gotta pay for the electricity. Looks like this would take about 10.725 million kilowatts just for the miners, not including AC and other electrical uses like lights, security stuff, etc. Assuming you can get $0.09/kw-h cost of electricity that's roughly a million dollars an hour, but more since we're not including all the other things you need electricity for in these buildings. Of likely you're not gonna be consuming over 10 million kilowatts in one location so you have to spread this all out, costing more. Ya gotta set it up somewhere so you gotta lease or buy land, hopefully land with buildings already on it so you don't have to build the buildings from scratch, so that land is gonna cost more.

So basically we're talking tens of billions of dollars in upfront costs, likely years of planning and setup, plus probably in total around $1.5 million every hour in electricity costs to do a 51% attack. Oh and of course you won't be able to get millions of miners at once, you'll have to order them over the course of several years, and you're gonna be competing with orders from all the people/companies already doing bitcoin mining, so you're not gonna be getting that list price on the miners anyway, so add a few more billions of dollars to the years-long setup.

Okay, now you've spent the past few years and tens of billions of dollars setting up all the infrastructure and buying all the miners and turning them on and you're ready for your attack! But wait, the hash rate has doubled in the meantime so you have to do the entire thing again....




Now, some people like to talk about mining pools colluding. But the thing they always fail to mention is that mining pools are, well, pools! They're made up of tons of different people. As soon as anyone got wind of several of the largest mining pools trying to attack bitcoin those mining pools would find themselves with far less than 51% of the network as the miners in those pools flee to other pools. So even in the situation that the largest mining pools wanted to kill their reputation and their business, and do this attack, it probably wouldn't even take an hour for the attack to end and their business to be destroyed.


The incentives of mining make it so nobody in the network would want to attack in, and the Bitcoin economy and security is so large now that it can't be attacked from outside. Bitcoin has for years now had global-level security, meaning that no entity or group of entities on earth could realistically engage in a 51% attack on it. Bitcoin is the most secure network in human history. Ain't nothing taking it down.

190,000 to 195,000 ph in gear

190,000,000 to 195,000,000 th in gear

I used a 100 th s19j pro

so 1,900,000 to 1,950,000 machines at 1000 each

or used your gear.

190,000,000 th /257 = 739299 units at 8500 = 6,284,046,692 which about a factor of 1000x

I just made a few fixes... If it's still too off, please tell me where!

your math is wrong..

network is 350-380eh
or
network is 350,000-380,000 ph
or
network is 350,000,000-380,000,000 th

You would need to grab about 195,000,000 th to clearly have mover than 1/2

195,000,000/100 =

1,950,000 s19j pro units.

say 1,000 each

or 1,950,000 x 1,000 = $1,950,000,000 in gear.

plus power to run it
plus buildings with wires and cooling.

so 2 billion to fuck up about 540billion in coin

BTW if a legit attack ever happens it would be top 4 pools being hijacked -hacked for more than an hours time.

if you could hijack them and point them  elsewhere you could fuck up the chain pretty well

To be honest, I don't understand these values:
Name    Symbol    Market Cap    Algorithm    Hash Rate    1h Attack Cost    NiceHash-able
Bitcoin    BTC    $517.53 B    SHA-256           378,673 PH/s    $1,646,739             0%

Means that to attack Bitcoin network for 1h, it would cost 1 million, 6 hundred, forty six, 7 hundred and thirty nine dollars?


I would think this way:
Total hash power 378673PH/s

51% of Total hash power is ~195PH/s

Each S19xp Hybrid runs at ~257TH/s
Therefore we need  190000TH/s / 257TH/s = 760 miners
Each miner costs $8500, so, we need 8500*760 = $6460000 ~6.5 million dollars
Each miner uses 5350W/h, so, we need 5350 * 760 = 4066kW/h * 24h = 97584kW / day
If electricity costs, let's say 6cents / h, we need $5900000 / day.

I'm not absolutely sure about my numbers but they seem ok to me. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong!
Now, the only question I don't know for sure how to answer is how much time would it take for this setup to take over the main chain of the other 49% of hashpower!

It's a very expensive attempt. Hundred millions of resources could be the budget of it. Who will attempt to do like that if it can be reiterate later by the community devs. It's just a "way" of that a blockchain can be changed/hacked etc. but there's no way it can be done to bitcoin blockchain as it's on it's peak of hashrate.

This website:


says that for someone to operate a 51% attack for an hour to Bitcoin, it will cost them around $1.6M. This is prolly just an estimation and it could even be more. While it's gonna sound like a threat after looking at those projects that have been 51% attacked but it's highly unlikely to happen to Bitcoin. Whoever is gonna fund this much to just attack the network will cost them a lot and it might not be worth it because of how strong the network is and this is the beauty of Bitcoin's network and its security.

51% attack is very much impossible because you’ll need to have a lot in place before it’ll take place. I’ve read about 51% attack before and it’s said that it can not be possible because of how the system works, they’ll easily detect it and prevent it before the attacker succeeds. Owning more than 50% of the mining power is very very impossible. Why waste your efforts and energy on something that is not beneficial?

It's not a realistic threat because Bitcoin network is very big in hash rate and attackers have to spent huge and expensive cost to own 51% of total hashrate or more to do attack.

Because Bitcoin network is decentralized from nodes to hashrate, if something looks suspicious, miners will change their mining pools. Communities like exchanges have bots to detect attacks and will halt their withdrawal and deposit so attackers will waste their money for attacks.

How many Bitcoin confirmations is enough?
https://jlopp.github.io/bitcoin-confirmation-risk-calculator/
https://web.archive.org/web/20181231045818/https://people.xiph.org/~greg/attack_success.html

https://howmanyconfs.com/

PoW 51% attack cost
https://www.crypto51.app/

Hey guys,

As we know, as long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, Bitcoin network remains safe.

I was wondering what it would cost to control 51% of the mining hash rate? Is this ever a realistic threat?

Appreciate your answers in advance!

Kind regards,
Papa