Topic: Why are big Bitcoin miners not destroying Alt coins with a 51% attack? - page 3. (Read 556 times)

I think it's largely profit driven. 51% attacking a minor altcoin would be less profitable than just continuing to honestly mine BTC. Sure, they could fill their bags, dump them for BTC, reverse their transactions, and get their bags back, but to do so with a large enough volume to even approach how much they would make just honestly mining BTC would wreck the order books for that coin and dump the price significantly.

I don't there is any need to "destroy the reputation" of coins like BCH or BSV. Their delusions leaders and insecure chains are quite capable of doing that for themselves.

It's sad, but it's true. BCH was successfully 51% attacked by a couple of their big miners a few months ago, who decided they didn't like some transaction that had taken place and they were going to reverse them. What did all the BCH shills do at the sudden realization that their coin was no longer decentralized, immutable, or censorship resistant? Literally nothing. Continued worshiping Ver and bleating on about being "the real bitcoin".

They don't care enough?

And as we've seen repeatedly the zombies that populate this market don't care either. As soon as whatever coin recovers from its 51% attack it's back to business as usual. And in plenty of cases it appears prices didn't dip whatsoever.

They'd also be losing money by diverting power. If something was shortable then you might do OK but as above there may be zero difference in price. It seems like a lot of work for no likely gain.

I'm not sure what a Bitcoin farm could attack other than BCH or BSV and they may prefer to keep those alive as an option for future short term profit. What other SHA 256 coins are there worth paying attention to? TheresaMayCoin doesn't have a bright future.

They may also have plenty of investors who'd frown on that. That's what blew my mind about Bitmain. Presumably they had no oversight because if I had put large amounts of money into them their Bcash adventure would've had me suing their arses off.

So, we all know some massive Bitcoin mining operations are currently mining Bitcoin and they have loads of hashing power to mine these coins. The hashing power needed to mine Alt coins are considerably less, so if these large mining operations wanted to, they could easily switch to some of the smaller Alt coins and just execute a double spend to destroy their reputation.

I was thinking if some of these bad actors wanted to eliminate the competition, they could easily do this, but why are they not doing it?

Possible reasons :

1. Reputation - Well, here we are talking about their own reputation. People would stop selling hardware to these bad actors, if they were identified or they might lose hashing power if other people in that same Pool, move to another Pool.

2. Money - Could they ultimately lose more income, if they stop mining Bitcoin and then get less gain by doing a double spend? <51% attack>  

3. Nothing to gain? - Destroy one Alt coin and 2 will spring up in it's place?

4. Everyone lose - When the media find out that a 51% attack were succesfully executed on a Alt coin, it might give all Crypto currencies a bad reputation. < Possible investors will turn against Crypto currencies, because of the security risk? >

5. Asic proof mining - Some Alt coins have different mining algorithms that are Asic proof.

6. It is a crime - It is a criminal action to execute a double spend and to get illegal fianancial gain.

I am curios to know why large mining operations are currently playing fair, when they have the hashing power to destroy most smaller Alt coins. Let's discuss the possible reason why they are not doing this.