Topic: How to end Bitcoin with as little as 15% of hashpower efficiently - page 4. (Read 2526 times)

10% to 15% is what you directly control. It's about controlling hashrate indirectly with priceaction aswell as using natural movements which can easily amount to much more.
The point is: it's actually possible to force a drop of hashrate of 40% or more by pumping it artificially before a natural drop would occure.

The attack consists of many components and needs good timing but would end bitcoin on the spot.

10 to 15% increase of 10 minutes is not 'hours'.  It is in fact 11 minutes.

sure. They don't want to adress it though.

Pumping up the price before and then dumping it would also help.

If you would additionally spam the network with microtransactions it would be defunct immediately.

The tech is much more fragile and totally not as secure as people like to think especially bitcoin with his old design. This wouldn't be possible with most altcoins as they have faster difficulty retarget. Bitcoin is much more vulnerable to these attacks than any of the newer, more advanced alts.

All you need is 10% to 20% of hashpower.

What you do:
Shortly before an anticipated natural (or forced by selling) decline in hashrate you put your extra hash on BTC to make difficulty go up.
Now you sell off massively or use natural dynamics to your advantage. Once the miners drop out (10% to 15% of the network is enough) you withdraw your extra-hash from it.
Result: bitcoin is stuck at high difficulty as it retargets only every 2016 blocks. Blocks could take hours to solve. This will cause a further decline in value and people selling off as soon the news spread (selling can be reinforced at this point by the attacker) which in turn will lower hashrate until solving blocks takes so long the next difficulty adjustement can't be reached. Basically bitcoin remains stuck at high diff and with no network.

So if someone wanted to destroy bitcoin he just needed to find a way to collapse hashrate by 30% to 50% which can be easily done with a combined strategy of:
-providing parts of the hash yourself to cause higher difficulty and to be withdrawn later
-using anticipated natural decline
-selling coins in massive amounts

it's cheaper and more effective than any other attack. Every government or bank can do it.

Every time a decline in hashrate would be anticipated this attack becomes possible. (like right now - this exact attack could actually be on its way as we speak)


reference:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/hypothetical-price-collapse-and-massive-farms-failure-912190