Topic: Bitcoin security risk? How many miners make up 51% of the hashrate? - page 2. (Read 239 times)

mining "control" is just the risk of empty blocks, chain re-orgs to double spend
its not about "controlling bitcoin" in regards to changing the rules

most mining pools are not some building with servers which a swat team can invade.. instead its just some ip address of some cloud service which a mining pool brand has multiple IP addresses and cloud services set up for dotted around the planet (remote location stratums)

if an entity took over a server they cant change the rules as their blocks would get rejected. so all they can mess with is the amount of transactions they include or if enough power over enough time go back and change the transaction list of a recent old block and then catch up to re-org the chain of recent blocks to undo some confirmed transactions

if an entity took over a mining pool server. miners can simply 'pool hop' away to another mining pool or even just a different stratum ip address of same brand if they notice silliness occur to blocks produced by a certain pool

however everyone has become too reliant on cores code releases and follow blindly out of "trust" even when new releases do change the rules of what data it put into blocks, but do not benefit bitcoiners.. and instead benefit the inception of the idea that bitcoiners should stop transacting on bitcoin and use other networks for their daily activity, to allow spammers and metadata bloaters to fill blocks for high fee's to further annoy bitcoiners

the real "control bitcoin" in regards to the rules ends up being more related to majority following cores code. and core being controlled by under a dozen devs with code force-merge privileges all employed by just 3 companies who get funded by certain institutions/organisations

Performing a 51% attack on the network will be a very tough task considering the things that must be involved. A 51% attack will require the performer to have control over at least 51% of the total computing power (hash rate). This attack would cost so much since the computing power will require more powerful hardware and consume more energy. But we should also understand that the more the network grows with more people on board, the more secure Bitcoin becomes, making 51% attack more difficult to perform. which means, as more adoptors, Bitcoin price, mining difficulty,etc continue to increase, then the network security also increase. I think this increment should be in a linear pattern (correct me if am wrong).


 I think most government or entity might have thought of this idea, but ended up dumping it due to the imaginable cost attached to performing such attack.

With the current hashrate percentage, as you asked the government will only get to hold onto just two pools; foundary USA (26.67% hashrate) and Antpool (25.38% hashrate) to make it a 51% hashrate. There is more because the government will need to actually generate large electricity again to be able to continue mining without the other miners getting a block.

Also one thing we have failed to understand about 51% attack or double spending is that the Miner with this hash power wouldn’t still be able to use it get in invalid transactions in, other nodes will need to accept the transactions first. Having an invalid transaction like you think will just nullify the work done by the mining pool and also means they lost energy.

But overall this will be very bad for the network as they could even censor some transactions that they will include in their blocks and you will have to wait till the smaller miners get to mine a block and add your transaction

The 51% rule on the bitcoin network is like a protocol that suggests that if a miner or mining pool is able to attain 51% of the total Bitcoin network's hash rate they will have an edge over the whole network and can dominate blocks more significantly by being able to do certain things like alter more recent blocks and some other stuff.

The fact is that the chances of some miner or mining pool pulling a 51% attack is very thin. This is because aside from the fact that attaining such amount of hash power would not be easy, I believe no pool will be soo foolish to waste such huge amount of hash rate to harm a network that they can benefit heavily from with that same hash rate. Every miner is out for profit and pulling such an attack that might even be neutralized would be uneconomical.

The prevailing notion about Bitcoin is that:

1. It is "impossible" for any government or other large entity to control Bitcoin.

2. Bitcoin is "absolutely safe" since the redundancy and dispersal of the network makes it impossible to compromise.

But as we discussed in another thread here, Satoshi identified, in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, the risk of a "51% attack" on the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin's integrity is safe, Satoshi said in essence, as long as a majority of the network's hashrate is not "evil".

Bitcoin's hashrate is controlled by "miners", and some of these mining companies are large, publicly traded companies.

The question this brings up is this: how hard would it be for some "evil" entity--say a major world government or an extremely sophisticated group of hackers--to gain control of the the companies (or key personnel within those companies, or key servers within those companies) that comprise over 51% of the hashrate, and thus take control of Bitcoin? Or in another scenario, how many companies would a large government e.g. the US or the EU need to compel in order to effectively change the Bitcoin network?

Here is an article that alleges that just 0.1% of Bitcoin miners control half of all mining capacity. It's a little old, and I would wonder if the hashrate is even more concentrated now, since that's what businesses tend to do: consolidate.

Does anybody have any more recent data about this? To me, this seems like a really big deal since it calls the security of the Bitcoin network itself into question. And at minimum, the idea that only a handful of public, not-government-proof, companies actually control Bitcoin sorta... flies in the face of the prevailing Bitcoin mythology .