Topic: Bitcoin risk management table (Personal opinion) (Read 303 times)

Probability of a 51% is much lower than you think, it nearly is nonexistent. first of all because of the high difficulty and the huge hashrate that bitcoin has, you will need a very large hashrate to be able to attack bitcoin. it won't be 51%, you actually need a lot more. and that only works IF you can build a longer chain and get others to build on top of YOUR chain not the previous that you orphaned.

even if this costly operation is successful it can not damage bitcoin, you just switch to a bigger number of confirmation requirement and simply eliminate the risk of double spend attack. in other words it is impossible to double spend a transaction that is 3 blocks deep and in case of a 51% attack or in case you are accepting a large amount of bitcoin you simply switch to 6.

i would give this 1 * 1 = 1

the result of this is not going to be big. because bitcoin is global and many big countries have already accepted bitcoin and regulated it to some extent (positively) and one country doing some crap won't affect bitcoin at all.

depends on the bug! bugs are fixable!

doesn't make any sense!
the probability of it is nearly zero. and if it happens bitcoin simply dies so the impact is the max because no one wants a centralized bitcoin and that is why the probability is zero.

that is the idiocy of individuals and the probability of it is high but the impact is zero because you are talking about some individual(s) losing their private keys and the effect of that on bitcoin in total!!!

how would the 51% attack happen overnight? (worst case scenario)

Sad to say I think you need to add to your table the probability of being phished. I've seen so many people complaining on Facebook groups on how they got "hacked" by exchanges like Bittrex or wallet sites like MEW even though it wasn't these service's fault since they went into a website url like blttrex.com  or myeetherwallet.com instead. This can probably go together with "losing private keys", but I think there's a big difference in losing private keys and it being stolen.
I'd say P=3, I=5, R=15  in my opinion.

That can happen in the stock market as well with penny stocks.

Any investment is a risk in general.

Although it does not read your table, everyone will get the same opinion that bitcoin is one of the high risk investments. It could be that we see the bitcoin price is at the 4000USD and then tomorrow it drops drastically at the 1000USD rates. This is what causes bitcoin to have a high risk because we can just lose easily.

I'm in Bitcoin since 2013. It didn't stop fascinating me all those years.
During those years my belief in bitcoin success never stopped, but the probability of the risks as i can see them got change a few times.

This the summary of the risks management table as i can see it today, in my eyes as a Bitcoin user (Not a professional opinion)

Values : 1-Very Low, 2-Low, 3-Medium, 4-High, 5-Very high.
Probability X Impact =Result

51% Attack - P=3, I=5, R=15
Anti-Bitcoin Regulation - P=2, I=3, R=6
Protocol Bug - P=1, I=5, R=5
Domination by company - P=4, I=3, R=12
losing private keys - P=1, I=5, R=5


When the impact is high, it means long years of trust recovery = Price is down.

Share your opinion.

I have it also for fiat money but it's a different topic