Bitcoin Forum

If you could use (rent it?) the hashpower dedicated to Bitcoin to attack altcoins for a week, which one would you attack first? If this would happen right now, which altcoins could ipotetically suffer a severe attack to their blockchain

No,  I'll never do so.
I believe in playing honestly and not with crook.

i would not do it....and thankfully Litecoin is big enough to resist  ;)

what would be the point of that? 

Pointless question is pointless.

I would agree attacking a coin.... hurts it.  That in a way hurts crypto so we all should be against it.

The good thing is the good coins have enough network hash where it is highly unlikely for attack.   As far as why someone does it.... who knows....

I would rather use that hash power to support the Bitcoin network and to generate a income, rather than wasting it on a fruitless venture.

All the other Alt Coins fall under the same category, called : Crypto currencies {Why would you want to hurt your own family?}

Every time a Alt coins fails or Scam, it has a negative affect on all Crypto currencies, so should protect each other, not attack to gain a competitive edge. The DoSS attacks and Spam attacks is plain stupidity and

greed.  >:(

old sha256 coins are pretty much dead, instead of wasting time trying to double spend on those coins, is better for you to try to instamine new sha256 coins with high block reward at launch

not really possible, and even if it was, what's the point?

Indeed it is bad press when something like this happens.

The OP is investigating the economics and ethics question of whether there would be miners willing to point their hashing power at a SHA256 altcoin to participate in a 51% attack.  Interesting question but I can't imagine anyone putting their hand up in the forum :)

 

Manipulating the price of that altcoin maybe. I'm not sure how hashpower might do this but it might be possible to move the price. At least you would get a lot of coins of that altcoin. I'm not sure if you can earn from that.

I don't see a point of doing this. We are all the same family, aren't we? I hate when different cryptos are seen as competitors. We are all fighting for better financial tomorrow so this question is useless for me.

Is deadsea33 an alt for LukeJr?

So your solution to competition is kill it with fire?

i don't see it like that, some user can do this not because they hate altcoin, but because they can perform a 51% easily and double spend like no tomorrow, thus earning more bitcoin

I think when it could be done riskless then it would have been done a lot already. Firstly it might be hard to cash out the illegitime cash since exchanges will monitor the blockchains closely i guess.

Second, these altcoins mostly dont have a market depth that makes that worthwhile. So cashing out is hard.

And lastly... you will do something illegal since lawyers, most probably, will have an easy time to explain that you faked data and did some kind of hack. At least in the past all sort of such things in other areas could be claimed as a form of computer sabotage and so on.

Its risky in so many ways so i doubt something like that will happen.

That is why no viable PoW competitor to Bitcoin can ever exist.

It is not a matter of ethics, it is a matter of return on investment. Once an alt coin is put on a trading platform that allows for shorting, if it is PoW then a mining pool can easily decide to short that alt coin and 51% attack it to pretty much destroy it before going back to mining bitcoins.

Same with Litecoin and PoS. The most powerful will win out.

No I'll never do so with those poor coins.
But still if I'm having an asic with more than 51% of altcoin network I can invest some of it in mining altcoin.

There is no point in attacking altcoin because most of them are:
1. pretty much dead and useless anyway.
Additionaly:
2. It would bring no real benefit for bitcoin so why bother?
3. It is no ethical to do something like that.
4. Imagine bad publicity when someone uncover that 'bitcoin' is attacking 'doge' or something like that. Not worth it.

If you're relying on other people's ethics or goodwill for your coin to survive, you might as well put a bullet in it right now.

Cryptocurrency is considered trustless. I don't have to trust that you sent me the money. I can verify it and see that it happened. I don't have to trust people not to do a 51% attack. I can see that it would be extremely difficult to do so.

please take out the words hack an attack unless used to break into someones computer to steal

codes etc these terms are not applicable im not even sure if a physical attack on nodes

is an attack though it would be definately is other malicious terms

Crypto is a stand along brute force strength currency

ya can't touch this :)

I understand that cryptocurrency field is new, by many being considered modern Wild West. We don't have competition based on morals, what is arbitrary better for people or is a better technology.
I still believe that there is karma, and karma is a bitch if you do something wrong, and people will find out you and your project might be done for.
There is no need for bitcoin - which is the biggest crypto to ever do something to harm lesser known coins, because it will only bring hate towards bitcoin.