Questions tagged [majority-attack]
A majority attack, or 51% attack, is an attempt at solo-mining a longer chain to outpace the main chain.
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Bitcoin Mining Pools Centralization
I read a couple of articles and watched some YouTube videos, but couldn't find a super convincing argument for why centralized mining pools are not a huge issue. I get that from a Game Theory ...
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Couldn't Microsoft execute 51% attack?
There are billions of computers out there running Windows O.S., putting aside the reputation risks, technically, Microsoft could add a backdoor to force users hardware to mine BTC.
Is the combined ...
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Why does an attacker need 51% mining power to overtake the blockchain?
I am really struggling to understand this thing about the 51% attack.
Usually whoever mines a block first wins.
My understanding is that mining is like a race. In a race, an athlete does not need to ...
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Could a government or company run thousands of unique nodes?
Let’s say you’re a tech giant or control a tech giant.
So you have access to money, computers & thousands of unique ip addresses.
Could these giants spin up so many unique nodes that they could ...
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Can someone with majority hashing power decide what transactions are included in my block?
I read this paragraph about if a mining pool controls the majority of the hashrate on the network:
Blocking Transactions:
Anyone who controls the majority of the hashing power can decide which
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Is it practical to prevent a 51%-attack by having a second mining algorithm?
While miners use special hardware designed to perform only one job (e.g. calculating sha256) changing that job would make all that hardware useless. So, can the bitcoin community use this ...
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Can miners single handedly perform 51 attack toward the network?
Is this true that miners alone cannot do 51 attack even one or a group of miners posses >51% of hashrate of the network?
As far as I know, every block should be accepted by nodes to be added to the ...
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If the longest chain is considered the valid blockchain by nodes, what happens if a future supercomputer alters the entire blockchain?
Let's say that the computational power from the genesis block to the current block becomes a trivial computation in the future by some supercomputer using a new technology exclusive to it. Perhaps ...
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51% attack on a small network of nodes?
Not all the nodes in the bitcoin network are connected. So that means the computational power required to attack a smaller network would be comparatively easier.
So, say we start a 51% attack on a ...
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Why wouldn't a state level actor be able to centralize Bitcoin?
I was reading this question:
What can an attacker with 51% of hash power do?
According to that, the 3 "powers" obtained through controlling 51% or more would be:
Reverse transactions that ...
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Do nodes receive information from which they can discern how long a miner has withheld publishing a block from the time it found it?
In a recently Medium article, Joe Kelly described an attack that he calls "Monopoly Mining" in which a state actor or some other very well resourced party that obtains majority hashpower ...
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Can a 'China' or similar actor with more than half of the hash power really destroy Bitcoin?
More of a general question as I've recently gotten into investing in cryptocurrencies. I really love the vision for the future this technology provides, the freedom, ease of use, lack of middlemen, ...
JDS
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51% attack inevitable [closed]
I think the assumption of a 51% attack is not worth the effort is wrong. Eventually the price of Bitcoin will stabilize. Let’s say at 1 million USD then a diminishing block reward and the transaction ...
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Noob question: Why is there not a limit of the number of blocks in a chain revision?
I have a noob idea and I want to understand where I'm going wrong :)
Say nodes agreed on a block revision limit, say, 6. This would mean that if they see an incoming chain that is longer than the ...
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Can a 51% attacker earn mining rewards on the blocks they tampered with?
This article gives an example of a 51% attack in theory as:
In a 51% attack the hacker will typically mine in private to attain a
longer chain than the publicly seen chain in hopes of double-spending
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