Topic: Ways to prevent 51% attacks from bad actors/states (Read 228 times)

There is basically zero worry about a 51% attack. It would be near impossible, and entirely impractical.

According to the poster above's calculations, we're talking about $5 billion spent on brand top of the line miners. How many of those miners do you think they even make? If some govt wanted to buy them all up, just like at other times during mining booms, the company will start selling those miners for way more because of the immense demand of trying to buy $5 billion of miners quickly...not to mention that the rest of the mining industry will still be buying miners as well. So it'd end up costing MUCH more than $5 billion just to buy the mining machines. It would also likely take many months if not years to procure all that mining equipment. By which time the hash rate will almost certainly have grown some, so the attacker would need to buy up a good amount more than that.

Then you've got to set up the infrastructure to house 700k+ mining machines, cool them, and get the energy for all that.

And oops, the person who posted these calculations above made a mistake. He only took half the network as the hash rate needed. But if some new actor is trying to attack the network and they only buy up enough miners to do half the hash power that means they will only control a third of the network. Because the attacker's hash power is being added to the network, you don't just need over half of the existing hash power to do a 51% attack, you need more than the entire network. So the attacker actually has to buy double the number of miners that the person calculated, so we're talking about 1,426,000 miners, not 713,000. So double the costs of everything, and then some because this means more demand which means prices of miners go up even more. Plus add in the cost of personnel to set all this up.

So we're probably talking about an attack with upfront costs of dozens of billions of dollars. And then of course you have to pay for the ongoing cost of the electricity for the miners, air conditioning to keep them operating, and general building electricity wherever they are housed.

Show me any govt or organization or even group of govts that would be willing to spend dozens of billions of dollars in upfront costs on a massive project taking many months to set up with ongoing daily costs to continue the attack, just to 51% attack Bitcoin in which the only thing you get is the ability to double spend their own Bitcoin.


Anyway, to the OP, Bitcoin mining is already decentralized. It's not like the network is in some desperate situation in which it needs a million more miners. There are already millions of mining machines running all over the world owned by thousands of individuals, companies, etc. So I'm not sure why the question was even posed, unless you have been reading misinformation somewhere that Bitcoin isn't decentralized.

The only way anyone could threaten a 51% attack on Bitcoin is if mining pools colluded to do so. And you often see people bring this concept up. But they always fail to realize that mining pools are exactly that...pools! They aren't miners controlled by a single organization, the are miners controlled by many many different individuals and groups. If ever pools colluded to try to implement a 51% attack the miners in those pools would very quickly leave those pools, thus immediately ending the attack.

At this point (and this has already been the case for a good number of years), there is no realistic way to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin. Bitcoin has global level security at this point and has had it for years. 51% attacks are a non-issue.

I capitalised on bitcoin is not a threat to fiat, many countries seems bitcoin as a threat to fiat currency but I believe and that should be of the reasons while government doesn't like to legalise bitcoin as a legal tender,  because from the day one bitcoin was established many countries can purchase bitcoin directly through bank with options given by banks through credit card or debit card in Africa,  but it got to an instinct that governments restricted some of the banks not to be a in a collaboration or been a supporting hand to purchase bitcoin because of the terms and conditions given by government, so the objective of government to give all this order or restricted buying of bitcoin except peer to peer transaction aspect is that they felt that bitcoin wants to take over fiat currency and the negative instinct having about bitcoin.

I would be more worried about great economic powers banning Bitcoin mining. Or if the countries where electricity is cheaper, all ban Bitcoin mining. Despite the fact that probably banning it wouldn't completely stop mining in those countries, but would significantly low the hash power in those countries. And if companies try to move to countries where it was not banned, electricity price could not compensate. I don't know if this could make the price of electricity drop in those countries. But yes, this worries me more than 51% attacks. Actually, Antonoupolus has a video where he kinda jokes about those types of actions and he says that there is not much to be afraid of!

As has been noted by others here, it's possible to launch a 51% attack, but it's unlikely to happen. It costs a lot of money and doesn't bring benefit. There's a calculation here about $5 billion, but that's just based on the required number of Antminers. I don't think the supply is nearly high enough to realistically purchase 713k miners, and then I can't imagine the sort of facility that would be needed (or, more likely, many facilities) to actually put the machines there, to not overpower the local electricity grids, to rent the places, hire the maintenance people, keep the operation steady for at least some time but also succeed fast enough for the difficulty rate to not adjust to a sudden huge surge of miners. If someone tries buying out existing mining operations, the prices will go up, more people will feel the need to join mining out of FOMO, etc. So there's much more to it, I think, and it might be impossible to account for all of it to say whether it's practically possible (rather than hypothetically possible) to perform a 51% attack on Bitcoin.

Is not about the number of people running miners, is about the hashing poker they have... If we have 1 million people running 1 USB miner that will not be even the 1% of the hashing power and they will not be able to do anything about the 51% attack, but if each miner is running one of the last miner's machines from antminer, then they will have a big contribution in the network and that would be some help to avoid the attack.

The point here is while more spilt is the hashing power between miners then would be harder to see the 51% attack.

To answer your post simply OP, yes, this would theoretically decentralize the Bitcoin network further and would be an appropriate effort into preventing a 51% attack. The only issue is that a lot of these solo miners would probably join pools, which centralizes their hash rate to one place. However, it's still better than one party controlling all of the hashpower.


A group interested in hurting Bitcoin's integrity or security could severely hurt the price of Bitcoin in the short term if they successfully carried out a 51% attack and/or modified the Bitcoin blockchain by doing so. These groups definitely exist. In fact, these groups are still more powerful than the Bitcoin community to this day and would have the resources to make an attempt at doing so. I'd say it's highly unlikely that it will happen or could be coordinated though. It's expensive to try.

Honestly we are not even talking about the real threat, which is the quantum computing and that's getting closer and closer, which would be fast enough to crack any of this encryptions. 51% attack is not a worry because not only miners do not have that much power right now, but also the fact that people can get together to prevent that against it as well is a big reason why it can't. We have seen ETC get that before, and look how they recovered.

Because people could just handle that when they get together, and that would be what BTC would do and in a big situation as well, multiple times bigger than ETC. So this is not an issue, there are plenty of ways proven to be working as a defensive mechanism towards anything like this ever happening.

If big bad government felt threatened by Bitcoin like bitcoiners tend to say, that would be a good incentive to attack it and make 99.9% of users abandon it. But they know well that Bitcoin is not a threat to fiat, because people don't use it for payments, the biggest use case is speculative investment, which can be taxed.

It's not impossible.
Seattle's city budget is $7.4 billion.
Palo Verde nuclear power plant has an output of 3,942 MW.
Since the OP mentioned actors and (states) look how tiny that number is compared to a country the size of the United States or China, just for fun, the value of the first 24 penthouses in NY listed here for sale is 1 billion.


And they might simply not need 51%.
Since they can run on subsidized cost with no tax no profit they could install just 25%, force other miners out of business and then just add 15% or so to gain a full 51%. Also, they don't have to pay for the best of the best gear, and not at Bitmain prices, they could simply pick up old miners that go on cheaper prices per TH/s and just install those as the energy is simply no problem at these levels, they could simply fire up some old powerplant and just cover it up.

But, why would anyone do it, and what it would solve?

There was a discussion a few years about how the government / bank / whoever would not even have to buy all the miners.
All they would have to do is setup a phony PPS pool that paid some stupid amount of PPS say 120%.
All the miners would flock to that pool, and all they would have to do then is slowly wait till a few of the larger pools went bankrupt since everyone else is mining there.

You would have the pools like foundry that are using their own miners, but how long till the investors start to bail since they are not showing the numbers that other places are.

Yes, there are several flaws with this. But you bet it would cause enough disruption of mining to allow them to do other things.

All it all, a 51% attack from the government / big business is not a big worry for most people.

-Dave

5+ billion is not a big sum for a government, especially those with the top economies. Plus they can just seize miners instead of buying them, and only pay for electricity to attack Bitcoin. If governments and banks hated Bitcoin as much as bitcoiners describe, they would have already attacked it on all fronts, including a 51% attack, that would have been much easier after a hash rate drop that would happen after most major countries ban mining.

It's quite impossible in the current year of 2023 to do an attack of 51%.

Current Bitcoin Network Hash Rate: 357.13 EH/s (https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart)
You would need 182 EH/s hash rate owned by bad actors to do this attack. Now let's do some math about the cost it would take to do this attack.

182 ExaHash is 182000000 TeraHash.
We will take the best ASIC Miner: Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hydro with a hash rate of 255.00 TeraHash.

We would need 713,725 Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hydro ASIC Miners to do the 51% attack.
Each costing 5304W power usage, 713,725 will be using 3,785,597,400W power which will cost millions.

1 Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hydro costs $7k. 713k will cost $4,996,075,000 excluding shipping fees and running the grid, providing cooling, and maintenance.

I am sure you got an idea of how hard is to get this attack done against the whole network which is currently decentralized. Let me know if you want to know much more about it in terms of numbers.

It would cost you a couple thousand dollars to set up a single miner, like an Antminer S19 Pro, to set up a profitable one that can be competitive in finding a valid block would cost a couple more that that.
Setting up a miner for the sake of securing the network is expensive and as such is not feasible, the above suggestion of joining a pool that has lower hashrate to make them more competitive is a good idea.

With newer generations of miners which pull higher hashrates, the older models become far less competitive.

- Jay -

Obviously if the network has a high distribution of nodes it has greater protection against attacks but it is highly unlikely to perform a 51% already now.  We would need quantum computers with great computational capabilities and this is currently expected in about twenty years.

I agree with your take. I think it’s something that should be promoted more. What exactly are the costs of running a miner? Other than electricity and internet access? Do those things use that much power if it’s just a single miner running?

Or are you more-so referring to the actual up front cost of buying the miner? I wonder if a single miner would need to be upgraded everytime a newer model is released for it to still benefit the network? Or would a million miners that are a few generation old still have the same effect on decentralization as a million brand new, current generation of miners?

Consider the capital of 1,000,000 people to run one miner because the question remains will everybody have the capital? Though it will decentralized the network system. In this contemporary world where people have different opinion I guess even if one million persons run a miner, attacks will be difficult but is still inevitable.

Here's my take: if we can get a million folks to each run a miner, it would go a long way in shoring up the network, even if there's no profit to be had. This would make it significantly more difficult for anyone to carry out a 51% attack and ensure the network remains decentralized. However, let's face it, convincing that many people to run a miner without a financial incentive would be an uphill battle. Furthermore, running a miner can be quite pricey, so it's not a viable option for everyone. Nevertheless, this is a thought-provoking concept that merits further contemplation.

Having more people running miners or nodes can help to further decentralize and secure the network against a 51% attack, but there are costs involved, and it may not be feasible to compel a large number of people to do so. The community may be more focused on other ways to promote decentralization.

Interesting links. Was not aware of all of this. So it’s essentially impossible for a 51% attack to happen at this point?

The more decentralization of the network hash rate, the better power to prevent 51% attack. However, it does not mean miners should run solo mining rig to do that task. They can join mining pools but avoid super big pools that have too high total hash rates.

You are worrying too much and in the past, some big mining pools had chance to do 51% attack but they did not do this. It's because they won't gain anything good for themselves if they make such attacks.

Bitcoin mining history
Hash rate distribution over time

I’m just curious. Would it help the network if say, 1,000,000 people each ran one miner, even if it wasn’t profitable. But it would further decentralize the network and make a 51% attack more difficult?

If so, why hasn’t there been a bigger push in the community to make this happen?

Thanks