Topic: Bitmain taking over bitcoin with >51% attack (Read 118 times)

Entirely possible knowing that BITMAIN is notoriously known for causing some trouble in the blockchain by refusing to accept lower fee-transaction and deliberately pulling off some things that benefit Jihan Wu's interests even if it hurts the whole protocol. But the people operating at BITMAIN know that if they did such a foolish thing, everyone and their mother would likely pull out their assets off bitcoin and move to investments that are safe from being manipulated by only a single organization/company.

It's a very common misunderstanding to think that majority attack (also known as 51% attack) gives attackers full control over Bitcoin. In reality, miners power is very limited, all they can do is decide which transactions are included in blocks and create forks by mining on top of previous blocks instead of the highest block. This leads to two malicious attacks - double spending, which is executed by forking blockchain to erase their own transactions, effectively rolling them back; and the second attack - black listing, when attackers decide to ban certain addresses and refuse to mine on top of blocks that included them in their blocks, which make those addresses frozen. Alternatively, attackers can mine empty blocks to freeze the entire network. However, attackers can not do things that violate network rules enforced by full nodes like creating more coins out of thin air or spending someone's coins without proper signatures. However, Bitcoin's protocol allows defense against those attacks, because every full node can change the network rules for themselves, so in case of majority attack nodes will be able to change mining algorithm to fire all existing miners. This is why it's important to keep the blocksize small, so regular users can run full nodes and keep miners in check, instead of trusting them like people trust banks.

What if the Chinese government is behind Bitmain and they let all hardware burn externally? These what if theories don't hold much value at all. Bitmain at the end of the day is dependent on Bitcoin's success, so if they do anything to harm Bitcoin, they are harming themselves. The entire Jihan squad is talking big that Bitcoin Core isn't the real Bitcoin and bla bla, but at the end of the day they aren't willing to cash out their entire Bitcoin holdings for their trashy BCASH. If you so badly believe that you own shitcoin is the real Bitcoin, then what's the point of holding any Bitcoin Core coins? They are just playing a game with everyone to make BCASH look more valuable than it in reality is, and make most of the noobs here major BCASH bagholders.

70% of bitcoin network hashing power is from bitmain's asics. What if bitmain built backdoor access into the asics that can be triggered over the internet. They would effectively take over bitcoin and break it (assuming they had nefarious intention). What do you think?