Topic: The attack is 51%. The Bitcoin killer. (Read 344 times)

I'm just saying that there's no reason to do it. Spend more than a billion dollars to attack something that works under a general agreement. You may indeed achieve to destroy the Bitcoin network, but you won't get rid of your worries. Proof of stake cryptocurrencies will then arise. What will they then do? Buy half of the units? There will be other permissionless and borderless cryptocurrencies they'll be afraid of; beating Bitcoin doesn't beat this liberated attitude.

Yes, this is how the world works, I know. The majority of the people don't want to be responsible for their wealth. Hence, centralization occurs. 

it's true that 51% of bitcoin killers attack, want to destroy and bring down bitcoin, but all of their attacks to destroy bitcoin, it can be said to be unsuccessful, they failed miserably, haters have always instigated bitcoin, everything they do, but bitcoin has a way separately to overcome all the attacks that come..

People sometimes overestimate the cost for this, they take new gear at resale value, they think in power at residential tariffs and so on..

To launch a 51% you would need roughly 1 million s19pro, that would be 7-8 billion $.
But if I would do that I wouldn't go for that gear, I would grab s9s that sell for around 250$, and instead of paying 8k for 110th/s I would get away with 1500$.  So rather than 8 billion, you're down to 1 and a half. And there is a ton of cheap useless for ROI gear sitting in China with no buyer, you're not going to make a profit with it but you'll definitely get a far better price per TH than with the newest generation. Besides, you don't need it to run for a year, one week and it's enough.

The other thing is energy, the first part is quite amusing, every time when it's about bitcoin, everyone says bitcoin is using only 0.01% of the energy in the world, now when you need to attack it, god that's a lot of energy and nobody can get it!!!! Back to the math, miners can't spend more on energy than the reward, so to match them you will need to spend a max of 45 million a day, but you're the government so no taxes, it will get way cheaper. If we go by 10cents/kwh it will still only cost 20 millions to power 6 million s9 a day.

Now, let's assume that indeed Bitcoin is threatening the US dollar, and the US who spends 13 billion on a Ford-class carrier won't be able to pull that off?
But nobody is interested to do so, why do it?  It means people in your own country losing wealth, it means stopping an activity and dealing with people that once had a job and now are on the unemployment payroll, why? Because it will replace the dollar and it will do that and that? Common...


Once the value is gone so is the hype. The idea for which Bitcoin was created get's more tainted every day, look at the ecosystem now, it's all about centralized exchanges and wallets, prices and trading, and holding till you make x in profit, once that is gone you will never be able to find the same userbase again, the ones that are reticent to the idea will never embrace it after such a failure, and from their point of view is quite understandable.

If by "votes" we are talking about hash power, then that's exactly what it means. If someone consistently controls 51% of the hash power, they become a centralized third party which can censor any and all transactions they do not like. At that point bitcoin is no longer trustless, decentralized, or censorship resistant. That's incredibly unlikely, yes, but never impossible.

The idea of bitcoin might survive such an attack, but bitcoin itself would only survive with a hard fork to brick the attacker's (and everyone else's) ASICs, or something similar.

But, Bitcoin, after all, is an idea. The fact that someone may catch up and gain the majority of the votes doesn't mean that he ruins the system. It's an idea which transforms human's greed to common good, which discourages you from attacking it, but rather helping it so you can earn the most.

There's harmony in this consensus and the only ones who can destroy it are the ones who make this beautiful melody.

You may need no Bitcoins, but you need wealth. You can't plan to spend billions of dollars worth of ASICs and electricity and retain their work until further notice (?), without damaging your own wealth. Besides, what could they do on a PoS crypto? Buy half of its units? They can't attack everything and that makes the 51% attack of Bitcoin meaningless.

There are greater achievements in terms of technology than Bitcoin. Sure thing, it was created in 2009 which has its downsides. Phenomenonically, it'll always be the #1, but in terms of privacy (e.g.), it can't be compared with Monero (e.g. again).

In my opinion, without Bitcoin the whole industry would become chaotic.

As much as I think almost all altcoins are either trash or scams, bitcoin is not the only possible incarnation of a decentralized peer to peer currency. The idea might never die, but that does not mean that bitcoin is invulnerable to attack.

There is no requirement to own bitcoin to attack it. A government which sees it as a threat to their fiat monetary system could be attempting to preserve their wealth by attacking bitcoin.

No idea. I don't really follow altcoins very much. The only altcoin I hold is Monero, for obvious reasons given my feelings regarding privacy.

Ethereum Classic was made because a majority of Ethereum developers decided they wanted to reverse some transactions which had taken place on the Ethereum network, not unlike a 51% attack. Those who decided that developers shouldn't be allowed to reverse transactions they don't like forked the network to create Ethereum Classic.

Suffice it to understand what you're attacking. The revolution set sail; you can't stop it, just like you can't kill an idea.

Seriously, think it. Do you really believe that after this revolutionary creation, people will simply forget it? That this innovative technology will be gone just because the government says so? That we'll let slip the PoW mechanism combined with a chain of blocks containing immutably information?

By attacking Bitcoin, you actually attack your own wealth. Masochism...

Which ones do you have in mind?

Isn't Ethereum fine? I've read that ETC was 51%-ly attacked, but that was long after ETH was hard forked. Ethereum Classic was made due to a hack of a third party project.

That's what I also meant, although indeed a state could do huge damage if it would manage to pull a sustained attack like you mentioned.



Ethereum had quite a blow back then. And the rest of the coins you've mentioned are imho speculation coins, so the comparison with Bitcoin may not be correct/good.



I hope you're right. Or, even better, I hope that we'll never find out.

I agree with OgNasty in that I think bitcoin would probably survive a short and specific 51% attack. By that I mean a 51% attack which double spends a handful of specific transactions, as opposed to a prolonged and sustained attack just mining empty blocks to censor the entire network, or something similar.

There are too many people involved in bitcoin who either don't care or don't understand the importance of a 51% attack, blocks being orphaned, or transactions being reversed or censored. Look at some of the "top" altcoins. Ethereum - not a classic 51% attack but effectively the same result (majority of hash rate reversed some transactions), creating Ethereum Classic in the process, which itself has been 51% attacked several times. XRP, USDT, BNB - completely centralized, can have transactions reversed or censored at any time by their owners. BCash - successfully 51% attacked. And yet all these coins continue to have volumes of billions of dollars and attract new users.

Provided that the 51% attack was short lived, and bitcoin continued to function normally afterwards, then there might be a hit to the price, but I don't think it would be the end of bitcoin.

While - at least on paper - 51% is not impossible, if that would happen it would be a blow for Bitcoin's credibility and the way of handling it could keep it alive ... or not (i.e. indirectly killing it). But it's a way too hypothetical situation and imho OP's question/problem was caused by lack of knowledge (and hopefully that was handled too).

They can succeed but in a short period only. The Bitcoin community will detect their attacks and react quickly to stop governmental attacks.

Geolocations don't mean they are identities of ownership. In same geolocations, you can find different mining companies and their hash rates belong to different owners.

Full nodes can detect IP address as I know. I read some documents that in order to have better privacy for your bitcoin transactions, you should set up your Bitcoin full nodes and broadcast your transactions from your full nodes.

And if a government tried to attack Bitcoin, wouldn't it be extremely likely that they will be exposed? How could you pull off such a massive operation, whether it be hardware orders or electricity going through the roof at a specific geolocation, or anyone else involved in the operation saying a single word, the government/actor trying it would almost certainly be exposed.

Is there any way to roughly identify the geolocation of the hashrate production through means other than whistleblowing or obvious behavior like huge hardware orders?

I don't think a successful 51% attack would kill Bitcoin at this point nor do I think anyone capable would be willing to attempt it.  It would take a great deal of equipment and money to pull off such a thing.  I do like the idea of governments with massive amounts of hashrate closely monitoring chains for any sort of forking while they wait for a massive transaction to receive confirmations.  Makes me think of the new Loki show and divergent timelines being managed by the timekeepers...

Agree with some of what you said, but governments absolutely do care about Bitcoin. When you have major enterprises like VISA, Amazon, Twitter, banks, etc. starting to use it and it poses a threat to the central banks fiat currency control, they are starting to take notice. That's why you hear all this noise about stablecoins, because governments see this as a way to destabilize crypto and a direct threat to CBDC - they're missing out.

A few billion to destabilize Bitcoin would absolutely happen, if governments thought it would work. While you couldn't practically change the algorithm, people would switch to a different crypto before it happened, making the effort pointless. Bitcoin is one serpent head among the medusa's head of snakes. They can try to cut off one head, but PoS or something else would just take over.

If every major country banned/bought out cryptos, they could theoretically discourage it, but I think they see the futility in that and are going to try to tax and regulate it somehow. CBDC is one way to do this. CBDCs maintain the surveillance and allow them to monitor users onramp/offramps into the system. Some say Bitcoin was developed by governments so they could even better track us than the private/public banking system we have now.

Too many elites making money off of it and manipulating the masses into buying/selling through influencers like Musk/Bezos/Dorsey pushing the herd of sheeple in the direction they want them to go, just like they do with stocks.

I suggest you read how mining and pool mining happens, maybe also what it does. (info)
Then I suggest you read a little about 51% attacks and double spending. (more info)

And only afterwards you are good to go with this kind of topics.
It's OK that you don't know everything. Just you "jumped in" and missed the start.


Edit: I've added two links as info. I'm not affiliated with that website but at a first glance it looks pretty informative.

How exactly will the capacity be transferred to other pools? Do they automatically do it or am I misunderstanding something?

The system is completely transparent and decentralized.

Yeah, it would be really pointless to even make an attempt at such a venture. 51% attack topics used to be a thing in the early days of the forum but stopped being one as more and more people got into crypto. I don't see why any organization or country would want to do something like that. Considering how much it would cost to execute such an attack. So much efforts for very little reward.

Exactly, if anyone or group of people had the hashpower/computing power to
attack the network it would be far more rewarding to actually help the network
and mine to earn a Bitcoin reward.

As franky1 mentioned this topic has been discussed many many times on the forum.
The question has been asked since 2011

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52388.20
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/what-would-it-take-to-make-a-51-attack-on-the-whole-bitcoin-network-44078
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-way-how-to-double-protection-bitcoin-network-against-51-attack-55394

Miners need to own 51% of hash power on the network and maintain it for a while in order to do 51% attack. It is very costly if you have to hire hash power from any source and many full nodes will detect suspicious things. They will switch to other pools and the community will have solutions to stop the attack.

You are wrong because hash power is needed to run attack. Not Bitcoin. Miners need of have ASICs, and they don't need to have Bitcoin to confirm Bitcoin transactions. Same, they don't need to have Bitcoin to do 51% attack on Bitcoin network.

51% attack is NOT some error in Bitcoin code and I don't know how you got that idea in the first place 
Taking over mining hashrate for Bitcoin is almost impossible task, some people tried to take over with various forks but they failed, this is most secured computer network in the whole world, and anyone willing to throw away many can try that again and se how it goes.