Bitcoin Forum

Has anyone wargamed a 51% attack on Bitcoin? How would it go down. What defensive measures could be taken.

*edit* Ive been trying to guestimate the block rewards in the future and what ive arrived at is difficulty will go down alot. This is not good if there is a relatively large faction in the world vying to supply the reserve asset because for the cost of less than building a power plant you could 51% attack bitcoin at that point. So if a proof of stake coin tracks BTC market cap they can just wait for a few more halvings and then attack. Or if a legacy government like China wants to assert their own CBDCs they can spend a fraction of their military budget to attack bitcoin. Not cool.

When we are talking about a 51% attack, bitcoin first line of defense is something a lot of people ads discussing recently: mining energy consumption.

To be able to hold a 51% attack for long, the attacker would spend more energy than many countries combined. This kind of attack is almost impossible to have any success with the current bitcoin network hashrate.

You don't have to hold the attack for very long. You can at most execute only one attack, if you are out for the profit. The network will react accordingly to the attack to minimize the impact after the attack happen.

Rather than electrical consumption, the main factor limiting something like this is actually the costs of executing such an attack. Purchasing the ASICs for something like this is ridiculously expensive, keeping in mind that it's only good for one attack and they are rendered useless afterwards. Even if you were able to double spend and get your Bitcoins back, what is the use when the price crashes right after? You're still left to deal with ASICs that probably won't be used after as the community explores another algorithm.

Who knows if anyone ever tried, but to date there has never been a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin. There have been successful attacks on other coin though, but by now it is practically impossible to see any such attack on Bitcoin for the foreseeable future.

Of which the ASICs are out of stock in various manufacturing and official reseller stores  ;D

If it was easy to perform. I bet it would have already been done over the past decade Bitcoin has existed and seems to get more and more valuable each passing day.

But you can check out other Bitcoin forks that have ever been attacked in the same manner. Mostly the first thing that happens is a price drop as the market reacts to what happened.

Sure ,
it starts with coercion of the top 4 mining pool operators to 51% attack the network and doublespend.

The defense would be spreading out the # of mining pools that together have a collected 51%,
preferable to a minimum of 51 pool operators, however community is clueless and won't do anything.

So the security risk will be there until a successful attack.   :)

The defense is the attack itself, it is energy expensive and resource expensive so anyone who tries to do it better have a lot of money and resources because they're gonna be needing a lot. Plus, I don't think that any country will even try to do it anyways because what's it gonna isn't really going to affect long term.

BTC well 90% is mined in CHINA, 99% of the HW is made in CHINA, and +90% of the mining pools for btc are in CHINA, but nobody sees the 500LB gorilla cuz morons are blind

The reality is its not in China's interest to kill the golden-goose, so play on garth, and talk poop

One example of a chinese pool getting 51% was bitcoin-gold, not long after launch it was 51% attacked, and some $72M USD was stolen by having fraudulent transactions approved. So it does happen, with bitcoin even the Chinese would not accept the huge losses. Then of course one man Jack-Ma owns 99% of all the crypto-mining on earth as he owns all the ant-miners, ant-pools, and ant-hw, and ant-pay systems; but now under CCP arrest, thus if the CCP wanted to pull the plug, they could, but why would they? BTC was just over $1Trillion USD cap a few months ago, bigger than most USA corporations. Hell that's 1/2 the Chinese holdings in USD, and BTc is certainly more valuable that US-toilet paper.

In summary china is more likely to pull the plug on USD, rather than btc, they'r just studying it, and waiting for the correct time to re-deploy the infrastructure towards CBDC ( its realy field tested between HK&Thailand since 2019 ).

Let's say cap is $1trillion, so you would have to have north of $500B just to play the game, ... and for what? WHat purpose? These kinds of losses are stuff that start wars between nations.

I think the problem is that minions have no feeble understanding for these enormous amounts of wealth, that exceed almost all USA corporations.

Recently Musk played BTc, he bought $1.5B with borrowed money, and tried to keep his baby TSLA afloat, but to what end could have Musk done a 51%, he would need 350 x $1.5B  of financial influence to play +51%

On the other hand, unlike USA where its herding cats form of GOV by stick&treat, in CHINA its one collective 'jump' and if the CCP ordered, even a simple SW upgrade to bitmain ant-miners, they could alter the course of BTC forever.

But so what, the CCP loves wealth as much as anybody else in CHINA, so why not just keep playing the game, and accumulating more wealth?

51% attack, is like the old game of 'battle ship' kids used to play, one kid would knock another kid out, and say 'where did you get that destroyer?", to which the other replied same place you got your fleet of nuclear submarines, sure its a childs mind game to talk about 51% because, especially with no understanding of the infrastructure, anything can be pulled out of ones arse, when talking this game

If you want to attack the Bitcoin system, you must first control 51% of the miners. This sounds difficult to achieve, but it is not actually the case. Miners want to join larger mining pools to protect their own profits, which leads to the continuous expansion of the capacity of each mining pool. In fact, the three mining pools of Ethereum can already reach 51% of the computing power. That is to say, in the future, it is completely possible for a mining farm to control more than 51% of the computing power. This also means that you want to attack. A person in the Bitcoin system only needs to control a mine to achieve his goal.

Perhaps as you said, it is not difficult to control 51% of the computing power in the future. But if he can control the 51% of the computing power, he can use the computing power to mine instead of attack. Because once he attacks the coins, it will cause the price of these coins to fall, which is not good for him, and may even make him lose money. Once someone has 51% of the computing power, he will not do it.

A 51% attack would be wasting tremendous amounts of energy,just to get control over a blockchain that won't have any value after the attack.What's the point?
The Bitcoin price will drop catastrophically after a successful 51% attack and the attacker will get a bunch of worthless BTC.What's the point?Can somebody of you FUDsters answer me?
Damn,all the FUDsters simply can't create new narratives to shit over Bitcoin.They just keep repeating the old stuff.Over and over,again and again. :'(

It will be too expensive, time consuming (I guess) and total waste of energy unless these attackers are that ruthless and they really want to bring the Bitcoin down. I guess this has been possible in the early days but I guess now it will be too rare to even see it happen, it gets scaled though and miners isn't on the decreasing level.

How would it go down? We'll never know the extent of the damage but I think it won't effectively kill Bitcoin. These are all theoretical talks. The only available actual references of successful 51% attacks are those on certain altcoins which are incomparable to Bitcoin anyway. And they're still around. Bitcoin Gold, Ethereum Classic, Grin, and others were attacked successfully in the past.

How could it be defended? Well, the cost-benefit disparity is defense enough. Bitcoin's hashpower is high enough that gaining 51% is next to impossible. Not to mention that there's probably no solid reason for any entity to do such a costly endeavor. And also, it has to be closely watched that no miner or group of miners or mining pool would control Bitcoin's computing power even close to 50%. The GHash.IO experience shouldn't happen again.

Nah, it's not as simple as that, the cost of a 51% is so huge that the incentives for doing that is so low. You need to have a lot of mining hardware, and then if some pools notice this attack, they can simply stop mining bitcoin. So your chain will not survived, maybe just a couple of minutes after the attack. But after that, you're done. So I don't think any government or nation are willing to spend their budget just to prove a point, doesn't make sense.

How likely is a fork if a 51% attack happened? Could the other 49% of miners quickly fork if a 51% attack happened?

From me you got it right, but i don't really know for any other once, and it's obvious that before something been into attack they most be a competition which @Darker45 stated above, so the competition of numerous coins can bring total reduction to the existing one, so the point is very clear that what might cause the 51% of attack might be the results of alternative coin's.

All miners use the same bitmain hw, all hw calls home, all u have to do is mod the firmware and redeploy, but why kill the golden-goose at this point in time?

The war between USA is coming, either uncle-scam assumes the prostrate position and takes it at both ends, or the Chinese bring the dying empire to its knees who cares?

Don't fool yourself people, you all talk as if you dont' have a clue about ant-miners, bitmain and ant-pools. Hell for the past ten years its been a complete monopoly, everybody else selling mining hw for btc is a minor player.

They could but they don't , compeche?

U don't piss in your own soup, well that's what  the Italian mafia used to teach its kids, and its certainly what the Chinese triads teach their kids.

Probably the main reason that Jack-Ma is under CCP house arrest, is not so much that he was outspoken, but that should he be kidnapped and ransomed, he could bring the entire house of sand down.

See that's a different subject, 51% & double-spending, aka ordinary theft one time, or a complete destruction of bitcoin, sort of clean-bomb on crypto.

The wealth/power required to play 51% of btc, well if you had that kind of wealth/power why would you waste it on a teenage prank. On the other hand say bringing the crypto system to its knees the weak link is USD-T, as nobody plays with real money, and for all the talk about about bitcoin being fungible, if&when USDT implodes so does all crypto including bitcoin.

USDT is centralized, so perhaps a hacker/extortion scam, or just an old fashion high-explosive takedown of their infrastructure. There is always an achilles heal in every fragile system, while bitcoin, can be defended on principal of dispersion, its trade on the back of USDT makes it humpty-dumpty, should the great fall begat.

Like has already been said, if your goal is a quick $200M USD, then best to go after a 51% attack on an alt, can be done on a realistic budget. If your goal is to bring down say GOV financial system, then that requires different kind of thinking.

James Garwin, nuke advisor for six presidents said it best years ago, "The most troubling decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, was that we could no longer deny its existence", see the cat would be out of the bag. Most things people think they know, aren't even true. What's possible is actually easier than they tell you. The real problem, is that that the 'question' isn't defined.

Perhaps the OP doesn't really even know what 51% attack means? It was what made Satoshis 2009 work new, as opposed to the prior imf-bis white papers of 1997 ("how to make a digital bank"), the solution to the double spending problem. But in the context here I doubt that the OP means 'who can double spend btc', I think its more like who can attack bitcoin? Then you need to step back and ask the question, what is the achilles heal of bitcon.

Just like the USA in time BTC is going down, there is no particular rush, its all controlled demolition. Just like the US-Dollar its going down. BTC is dependent upon SHA256&SECP256k1 both NSA algo's with a limited shelf-life ( 10-15 years from release )

Today in CHINA, where everybody wants to be rich, the only game in town is 'crypto' so everybody plays, and nobody wants to kill the golden-goose,  in the USA where everybody is a meth-head living on the streets covered in their own urine, I doubt they give BTC much thought. In summary for now, those that actually control bitcoin (the Chinese), love it much more than the paid influencers found on this site.

You say 90% is mined in China, but that number is closer to 65% (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/).  Plus, aren't the large mining pools made up of members that join the pool from all across the globe?  Thus while the pool may be based out of China, those miners in the pool can be from other countries.

Wars have been fought over who gets to mint the currency. Its a privilidge. The reason the world adopted the USD was because it was secure because the US military is massive. If Bitcoin keeps growing and becomes some kind of reserve asset some government will declare war on it, and get everyone to use its own currency instead.

And like i said, after a few more halvings there is not going to be alot of money for miners anymore which is when it becomes completely feasible for a government to establish enough hashrate to 51% attack. Actually the smart thing would be to just let Bitcoin get adopted, especially by smaller countries, and then you 51% attack it to force all these countries to use your CBDC instead.

I mean China banned skype in 2010 because they said only China Telecom and China Unicom are allowed to operate VoIP services in the country. Its just a matter of time until they ban bitcoin and 51% attack it because only Chinas Central Bank will be allowed to mint money. And noone can do anything about it.

Stat's always lie,

Recall that 99% of bitcoin 'mining hw' made in China, and it all calls home to 'mother' for updates, firmware, and mining stat's;

Like I said morons will ignore the 500LB gorilla, for seeing defy the entire narrative of bitcoin in the west, in asia of course its a known-known

The funniest part of all this is ASIA owns crypto, but the NSA/BIS/IMF created the bitch, so who is the real mother? Who is the real winner, A trojan horse, or like COVID did a FT-Detrick project simply get fall out of Western Hands?

The USD adoption came from bretton-woods, and the saudi compact, that said 'all who want oil, must trade in USD, in exchange house-of-saud got US-GOV mob protection, from its own muslim citizenry, and the USA got to be 'reserve-currency' a few more years, of course it didn't hurt that the USA was still #1 post WW2 in the region;

Today USA/USD is backed by Murder, MIL power to destroy anybody who exits the USD reserve trade system, and only country's on earth who are tip-toeing into the new direction right now are Russia&China, but its baby steps.

Given that BITCOIN came out of the NSA ( MIL INTEL ), its somehow a creepy joke to suggest that BITCOIN is anti-US-MIL.

Hell my favorite ALT is Horizen ( prev called Zen ), and it came out of US NAVY INTEL.

just like people all said its really expensive and need a lot of resource even they can do successful attack the most people will know the transcation id make hard for selling the bitcoin they have most exchange will freeze the account before make sell any penny

Chinese pools have long since found that spamming the bitcoin transactions are farrrrrrrr more profitable than a few week 51%.

no worries.

Chinese have found that selling crappy used bitmain mining hw to western suckers is most profitable of all

Chinese have found that a two tier pool system, one for the white trash, the other for the asians is also profitable

The fact is NSA/west created bitcoin/shit-coins, but the chinese are making all the money off the white fools.

Dude are you a full blown cuckoo or what?

Pools will never collaborate by themselves for their own economic benefit. That is the whole point of Byzantine fault tolerance.

Coercing the pool operators is something that any Governement authority can do if they were to go full dictatorial. To be honest, if governments decide to do it, of course they can not just 51% attack the network but just destroy all of it.
Though, it still cannot stop dissenters to run anonymous nodes and continue the network even in such dystopian conditions.

Now, the mining hardware concentration is pretty obvious though. There have been attempts elsewhere but none can compete with the supply chain that the Chinese manufacturers have managed (ASIC chips from Taiwanese suppliers). It is nigh impossible to make inroads once these monopolies get established in high end integrated electronics. This does not mean that it is somehow a weakness of the network itself. These are geo-political issues you talk of, those which Bitcoin doesn't care about.

All of your hyperbole-filled arguments with crazy assumptions (90% miners in China) is typical FUD. But this is Bitcointalk and nobody says anything when the likes of you fill pages with FUD. So carry on.

Do we believe and believe that what China is doing with a specific purpose is true and can be ascertained. look at past experiences about 51%. citing some news that circulated among them;

- To exert influence in a foreign country where Bitcoin is in use, China may aim to weaken or even totally destroy Bitcoin. This could be done by targeting specific users or miners for attack or by generally weakening consensus to increase volatility to a breaking point.

Of course there are implications that occur with this and whether there is no protection that can prevent this from happening.
we know that there is ;
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) seems to clearly encompass 51% attacks, and impose significant penalties on the attacker.

whether it will still be done with a clear risk that is easy to know.

We have already said "Only a moron pisses in his own soup", If you don't understand this statement, then you wouldn't understand the question.

This entire OP is BS, because nobody on earth with the power necessary has any desire to 'destroy btc', like I have already said, it doesn't matter because BTC has a limited shelf life, but that doesn't matter either cuz of the 12k shit-coins, 100's of them are rock-solid to stick around the next +20 years long after btc implodes.

China by hard-work has 90% of btc on earth today, they worked for they're smart, they ain't going to pee in their soup.

...

Here's what is going to transpire, CCP already has control of Jack-Ma and his ant-holdings which 90% of the world BTC infrastrucure, when CBDC is ready CCP just slides their code in, and all the infrastructure simply starts running CBDC.

But this is years off ( 2-3 years IMHO ), in the short term there needs to be a slow migration of out BTC and into the btc-3.0 coins where the wealth can be preserved. CCP well knows the NSA created BTC, and they know that it has a limited 'shelf-life' so they'll have their people slide into CBDC and/or GOLD until the transition is complete.

The morons in the west will be the bag-holders and watch btc go slowly to zero.

And they are much cheaper compared to 51% attack since you don't need a lot of resources to spam the transactions and knowing China, they would probably choose those that they can benefit from in the long-term than a big one that wouldn't even last that long.

LOL. There is just one guy who speaks like this and has so much verbal diarrhea with meaningless speculation and completely cuckoo assumptions (Jack-Ma doesn't own the Ant in the Ant-Miner).

What happened to your old accounts? Now I recall from your  earlier posts where you used to talk in this swarm/ Gollum-ish language of addressing yourself in the plural. LOL, Its so much fun. ("We are not going to explain further", "We know everything", "We are the legion").

Welcome back TOAA/ Khaos..Why do you keep making these Alts though? You selling PoS these days??

I wonder if it will make you stop being a bot with generic one-liner replies while wearing a signature. Seriously, who the fuck is your campaign manager at OWNR wallet? Ohh the campaign is stopped and you have taken some sort of oath to only reply with one-liners.

Or you a bot. If this is a bot, please teach us how to make one.

Your reply will also serve as a form of Turing Test for your "bot", i guess.

AND, to answer your question, the only people who should worry about the Digital Yuan are the Chinese citizens who love falling for the communist nationalism propaganda so much. The rest of the world will continue with Bitcoin. Nobody will give a damn for these centralized curiosities.