Bitcoin Forum

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. <edited - added this - credit to hatshepsut93 >

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.  ???

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.

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".

Agreed, but the BTC vs BCH thing was a bit different, because these die hard shills just continued doing their masters work like slaves and they kept on dumping fiat into a failed experiment to safe face.  ::)  The BCH reputation did not take a massive hit, because they under played the seriousness of the situation by spreading more FUD. <A lot of speculators does not understand the repercussions of a 51% attack, because they are too focussed on profits.>

It might be something totally different, when smaller Alt coins are targeted with a lot less support. You systematically take down one by one, until the public realize how vulnerable and insecure they are.  ::)  < I am not telling people to do this, but it might be a perfect attack vector >

Why would they do that. ?
Why would you destroy something that is actually beneficial for your main coin , actually the more coins that are in the market , the more choices people have and better will the coins become individually , therefore I think that this is something that is good for us.
Libra only increased the value of bitcoins , people started recognising it more .
It's called healthy competition.

Well, why do people destroy their competition? Big retailers buy out their competition to get a bigger market share and these large Bitcoin miners might try to eliminate the competition to have less investment into shitty Alt coins and more investment into Bitcoin <BTC>

Just imagine what the Bitcoin price would be, if all money invested into 1000s of Alt coins was rather invested into Bitcoin. <BTC>  ::)

I am not saying that it would work and that most of those investors would re-invest in BTC, once Bitcoin miners destroyed their investment in Alt coins, but some miners might have that logic and they might just be tempted to do that.  ::)

Waste of time, resources and money. There is little to no practicality into a 51% attack involving coins that you don't mess around with, or you don't have substantial control to anyway so why would anyone do that? Instead of using that time and resources to mine things which they would get nothing from, why not use those instead to mine something they'd take profit on? The logic is simply there, and even if some nitwit really does this, 51% attack in the long run is costly and is certain to destroy the value of the coin so there's really nothing to gain from it apart from notoriety and bragging rights (?).

Because 51% attack is a crime, it is used to steal money from people by reversing transactions, and to be successful and profitable you need to invest a huge amount of hashpower into it, so the crime will be pretty big - we're talking about millions in USD. Obviously authorities will investigate it, and the list of suspects will be very short - they'll just go after the biggest miners until they will find the perpetrators.

There are 51% attacks that are not considered a crime, like mining empty blocks or censoring transactions, but those aren't profitable.

This is the best answer below. I don't put it past any large entity in mining to have a moral compass that would turn away the opportunity to stomp out competition. In this case there isn't any competition really, and who knows how many of these potential bad actors are still holding onto their forked, BCH. That's like burning a wallet full of foreign currency because you hate the country.

As it stands there are enough farms out there to easily screw with the BCH network at last check they sit under 2 EH for the entire network. Asics make it so you can't just bounce around different Algo's. Your topic is exactly why no one will launch a brand new Sha-256 coin, the network would not be secure and you couldn't grow the project. If you look into alt coins it becomes a bit more tricky as there is no shortage of GPU's out there and the market is significantly more cutthroat as people chase profits. It doesn't matter what your project is it's probably forked and renamed within a week if it has legs and that's when competition starts looking at how to harm the competitor.

Aside from all aforementioned reasons, it's also pretty pointless to attack BCash with how Bitmain & Co will temporarily take off a part of their hashpower that's pointed to BTC, and point it to BCash to protect their chain. Bitmain & Co have already shown that they are ready to take off hashpower from BTC and they won't hesitate to do it again.

There is not enough incentive for you as an attacker to keep attacking that chain, while you face miners with billions worth of incentive to keep protecting it.

I like the fact that the majority of the Bitcoin miners are focused on conducting fair business. They don't have to resort to frauds and illegal acts to make money. They are on the side of the goose that lays the Golden eggs already. :)

In most cases you need to buy BTC to get into your shitcoin and everyone, apart from maniacs, is in shitcoins to make more BTC or dollars. They're effectively an extension of the Bitcoin economy and a significant one. A high proportion of miner fees will be related to moving in and out of exchanges to play alts.

pretty simple, they would lose money. But if it was a miner pool/group/really rich FED leader that did not care about profits, they could, they could destroy bitcoin as they have unlimited money to buy unlimited asics.

There are over 2 million machines mining. They don't appear out of thin air. Where would anyone obtain over 1 million machines? By the time you'd gathered enough the difficulty would be that much higher you'd have to go and find a million more.

It's not impossible. It would be very, very, very hard.

Not to sure what is hard about printing a few more trillion out of thin air. They do it daily! literally 1 click of a button to create $12789638712674861786487126478967127890476102876408712789123 money to buy all the fucking asics or create more.

No the Asics are limited. Try and order a new one right now, you can get a few at a very large mark-up or you can wait a few months. Assuming you could buy 1 000 000 of them right now, that's another 2 million they are going to build, 3 months from now.
Sure they could go around and buy up every old piece of hardware someone is willing to part with. That someone may not want to because they can still earn a little or want to mine, who knows. Same argument goes for the farms that they could buy. Unless those farms are losing money why would the owners want out? Most of these large players have positioned themselves with their farms from either early adoption or investing large amounts of capital to begin with.


It would be an interesting feat to print that cash, then get it into the hands of these manufacturers, all before it crashes whatever price it was holding when the idea seemed like a good one.

Economics is everything when it comes to huge mining corporations, there is nothing to gain when they are destroying the alt coins but if they decide to do that the amount of power and energy they are spending just to destroy something without any return is a fool's errand and no one in their right sense will do anything of that capacity until they have an agenda to destroy a particular alt coin.

If someone really decides to attack a certain alt coin, do you really think that they will think about the implications what the media will bring to the coin, it is not a new thing that coins die off and even ETH had a rollback without any consensus, if an alt coin dies no one cares unless it is a top level coin in the market list.

As mentioned above, it is all about financial gains as they have invested heavily into mining and time is of the essence as the mining reward goes down with time and the competition is really high in the mining sector and there is no point in spending their electricity to destroy something is the simple reason large mining operators are not doing anything stupid. ;)

Because it is not the right thing to do. Neither ethical, nor effective. In case you destroy a coin with a 51% attack, then a lot of unwanted sympathy will be generated for that coin and Bitcoin supporters will attract a lot of criticism. It is a free world, let all the coins fight for their share in the market. If some scam coin is there, it will automatically die out.

Another thing is several altcoin have different algorithm than Bitcoin.  That is one of the reason one Bitcoin miners cannot perform 51% attack to several altcoins.  We all know that Bitcoin is sha256d algo while others have scrypt, x11, etc..  Doing a 51% attack to this altcoin means that they have to spend huge fund to attack the network of different algo blockchain. 

I don't think its profitable to destroy/seize their blockchain, similar to bitcoin you need to invest mining equipment to pull that out, and the net gains are probably inferior to the value of that coin. The same mining equipment would have produced more money mining instead.

Of course do know that by the time you pull the attack successfully, the market value of that coin plummets. Some altcoins have suffered it and gone into oblivion. Yes in theory the smaller coins need lesser resources, but its still resources that could be producing wealth elsewhere rather than destroying a coin.

It blew my mind when I saw that BTG didn't even react aside from its own regular fluctuations.

If I held any BTG after finding out about its 51% attack, I directly would have dumped all my coins hard to never look back again, which would make me the fool instead of those who kept holding on to their coins.

I'm really glad to not own any shitcoin. My holdings currently consist of 95% BTC and 5% ETH and that's more than enough. Both coins are the most secure POW networks within their own segment. Nothing else is needed.

Is ETH really that different? The original Ethereum chain is what we known now as Ethereum Classic or ETC. There was a number of transaction made which a bunch of miners didn't like, so they forked the entire chain to reverse said transactions, and that fork is what we today know as Ethereum. The original unforked chain is ETC. That's not really that dissimilar to 51% attacking a coin to reverse some transaction you don't like; the outcome is the same, namely a group of miners decided which transaction were and were not to be "allowed".

The point of PoW is that even a successful 51% attack doesn't mean that the coin is now dead, because attackers have to spend resources on them, and if they can't make profit, then they can't sustain their attacks. Even if we imagine Bitcoin getting 51% attacked successfully, it too would only cause temporary price drop. On the other hand, 51% attacks in PoS and some other algorithms is a serious problem, because attackers don't risk anything, they can keep attacking as much as they like.

There definitely are those who are doing it.
There was this guy who was live broadcasting how he is doing it ah how easy it is to do, he struggled with the live streams , the platforms were banning him.

It's been done in the past but why would they care about inconsequential shitcoins? Legal liability aside, monetizing 51% attacks might not prove to be as profitable as mining, as successfull & profitable 51% attacks could also cause the value of the attacked coins to plummet, vulnerable ones too once it would become apparent what a bigger miner is doing.

i don't know of any "laws" that would enforce such a thing. this is a free market and what we call "51% attack" is a feature of proof of work algorithm. so in the end they wouldn't exactly be doing anything illegal if they roll back a bunch of blocks.
the only illegal thing could be if they had some legal contract to make a payment through that altcoin and they reversed THAT transaction. otherwise the rest of the transactions aren't "reversed" they are just now in another block and the block reward that went to the other miner is now invalid.
BCH did a 51% attack on their own chain recently and nothing happened! they literary rolled back a block that was mined by an unknown miner that wasn't in their centralized team and stole their rewards.

they aren't ASIC proof because there is no such thing as "ASIC proof", it is an illusion created by a bunch of delusional developers who were trying to sell their altcoin. what we have is "resistant to bitcoin ASICs" or in simple terms coins that can not be mined with SHA256 but are mined with something else like scrypt, sha3,... and ASICs can be created for those too.
to 51% attack these coins, specially since many of them have little hashrate, all you need is a bunch of GPU rigs. like what happened to BTG.

It's a good collection of data you have here but I wonder if where did you get all these information's and for us also to at least verify most of it and if these information's came only from your hypothesis then there is nothing wrong with it.

I can agree to the major reasons why big miners are not destroying alt coins even if they have the power to do it. Though it's a crime is somewhat unreasonable for me because if it is a crime, who will be the one to sentence them and put them to jail?

Two reasons:

1. Not financially worthwhile to commit resources to destroy something when that resource can be better spent mining BTC.
2. You can't "destroy" things in crypto.  A 51% attack will just result in a hardfork/rollback.  Your resources are wasted and their legacy crypto continues as previously intended.

They dont need to do it. Much better to just mine it with 10% for example, pump the price and sold everything

Hardly anyone is mining altcoins now, as their value have crashed by as much as 50% during the past two months. Most of the altcoin miners have shifted to coins such as Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. If you check the mining difficulty and hash rates for the established altcoins (such as ETH, ADA and LTC), many of them are showing sharp declines.

When people talk about 51% attack, they most often mean double spending attack against exchanges or some other entities that accept big transactions. We already saw it with alts when attackers deposited and sold hundreds of thousands worth of USD and then reversed their transaction via a 51% attack. It's clearly a crime because the money were stolen from an exchange, and just because the law doesn't say anywhere "cryptocurrency" or "51% attack" it doesn't mean that such cases won't be prosecuted. You don't need any crypto regulations for that, it's a plain theft.

"ASIC Proof" …. " ASIC resistant" … same thing.  ::)  The crux of the matter is, SHA256 miners will not find it easy to mine these coins. I know some of these miners might still have some GPU's that they use to mine Alt coins, so it might be easier for them to launch such an attack, if they concentrate their efforts on an small Alt coin with Scrypt algorithm.

The main thing is that a larger Pool can easily destroy Alt coins if they wanted to do that, but they are not doing it for some reason. The obvious answer is that the gain is not worth the effort to do this.  ???   

All good reasons, nice list you got going there, but even IF they could somehow do all those things without all the reasons affecting them -- for example, anonymity so no reputation damage -- it still wouldn't work.

If a 51% attack happens maliciously, you can bet the community and good actors would simply just choose to remain on the original chain and ignore the fork. IT would cause chaos and a lot of losses for sure, maybe even a split in the community, but eventually it would all correct itself. The attacker wouldn't be able to alert people, just need to rely on people not to realise, but everyone else, the good actors, they'd be rallying for people to quickly update wallets, etc.

Then, those Bitcoin miners diverting all their resources would lose Bitcoin income, and they would suddenly find themselves isolated in the altcoin.

It's a loss for them no matter what.

Number 1 and 6 are probably the best reasons.
 It makes me wonder if the 51% attackers can be identified or does the identification depends on coin that is attacked?
Are the locations of all miners known? I guess mining pools are known by their locations, ip addresses and even names, right?

Aside from the good reasons mentioned by the OP, I also think that the reason why mining power houses don't attack altcoins because they are wise enough not to "underestijmate the power of the crypto community". Initially they could be successful in taking over a particular network but would end up disappointed knowing that they've allocated huge resources without significance and would only further rally the community in taking a stand against it or implement certain actions to rectify its effects.

The main reason they don't do that is because they don't want to waste their time and hash power. Because they continue to compete with many Bitcoin miners around the world to break the Bitcoin block. Because Bitcoin is the most difficult coin to mine until now. So why waste time harming Altcoin if you can make a big profit with Bitcoin.

ok, that makes more sense.


we already have scrypt-ASICs :D litecoin made sure of that in early years.
we also have X11-ASICs (used by Dash, supposedly ASIC resistant), SHA3-ASICs (used by ETH, yet another supposedly ASIC resistant), i also read somewhere there is CryptoNight-ASICs (used by Monero) but not sure if that is true.

but yeah, i think the reward is not yet large enough to create the incentive for these miners to stop mining what they are currently mining with their equipment (whether it is different ASICs or just GPU rigs) to attack another smaller altcoin with the same algorithm.

Well, is there a need to spend our time and effort in destroying these coins? Check the charts for the last 2-3 months. They are destroying themselves. Established alts are down by anywhere between 30% and 40%, while the smaller shitcoins are down by 50% or more. Why we should waste our resources in destroying them, when they themselves are doing a very good job with that?

If we use a 51% attack, these shitcoins will just claim that Bitcoiners were afraid of the competition from altcoins and that's why they commenced the attack. Is there a need to give them this false victimhood? I would rather leave them alone to their own fate. Ultimately they are going to die out, irrespective of whether the Bitcoiners are going to act against them or not.

Bottlecaps the only coin destroyed in crypto-history by 51% attack, recovered from the attack only to die later a natural dead.
Anyone with a modern desktop could attack hundreds of coin as some just have a old computer run in a basement for whatever reason to maintain the chain. There is nothing to gain to waste time and money to destroy for example izerocoin.

Although that might mean the coin survives, it's irrelevant to the attacker. Rallying a community and potentially hard-forking would take days to weeks. The attacker only needs a few hours to sell their bags.

Let's say an attacker buys $10,000 of a coin. They transfer all that coin to Exchange X, and immediately dump it for BTC. As soon as it is sold, they withdrawal the BTC and 51% attack the altcoin to reverse their deposit. They then transfer all of their returned coin to Exchange Y (or even to a new account on Exchange X if the order books are big enough), and immediately dump it for BTC and withdraw. They could potentially repeat this process several times depending on how quickly the exchanges act to freeze the coin being attacked. They could potentially make more of a profit by staying off of exchanges altogether and setting up several private trades, and executing them one by one in succession with the same coins.

Sure, after this is all done, the community can hard fork and try to mitigate the damage, but the attacker is already long gone with their BTC. Having said all that, given we produce 75 new BTC an hour (on average) from honest mining, I don't think it is worth it.

Yes and No. If your intention is to discredit the whole Alt coin market, then you only need to bring down a bunch of these smaller coins with little or no hashing power and you would tarnish the reputation of the whole Crypto currency community.  >:(

The general public has shown that they do not understand the difference between 3rd party services getting hacked and the actual Bitcoin protocol being hacked, so with every exchange hack... people read in the media that Bitcoin was hacked and they just accept that as the truth. <The same thing will happen when small Alt coins goes through an 51% attack like that>  >:(

Crypto currencys to a damn good job a tarnish the reputation themselves.
There was nothing legal about the Ethereum split. A dev is no court or judge to decide what is right or wrong.

Ripple "selling" XRP which is technically is a lease as you can never own XRP, it it always belongs to Ripple same as a casino chip, jeton belongs to the cassino, taking it home or giving it to your brother changes nothing on it. I dont know of any country such deceitful tactic is legal. Actual ownership and lease is worlds apart especially without informing the consumer.

Litecoin is literately a walking zombi coin where no development has happens this year, the creator exit scammed last year and by his words does not care what happens to the coin. Its traded, thats about it. https://youtu.be/UpeWcRR0kcs

The endless ICO's scams barely finished the next wave of devs cash cow is on the way and people start to "invest" in stablecoin aka digital gift cards. Who in his right mind walks into a shop to buy a gift card as investment.

Should we include the never ending exchange hacks. To hasten some crap coins exit is no reputation damage.