Are you sure?

Guys correct me if I am wrong, somebody ask me a question about what will happen to bitcoin miners after all available bitcoin have been mined and no more halving every four years, will miners go out of business? This is the question I was asked and I believe that miners are the reason why transactions are been processed, right? correct me if I am wrong though,  I believe that even after all the 21 million coins are mined, Bitcoin miners will still be here because they are the reason why transactions are going through or am I wrong?

puzzling, if one trusts the election process.

imo many elections with a near 50/50 result might be rigged. (you cheat just enough to get your candidate in, hence a near 50/50 results)

US '20
Brazil '22
Turkey '23

...are some candidates

Try to do the 51% attack with money is not the right approach, because if the main mining pools organize to do the attack then the cost would be close to zero. Right now the main pool is Foundry USA with 33.8% of the network, the second one is F2Pool with 17.5% and in 3rd place we have AntPool with 16.9% of the network. So, if Fundry USA buys or collaborates with F2Pool or Antpool, they will have more than 51% of the network and they would be able to do the attack. Simple as that.

But if you think that you can spend billions in miners to get the 51% of the network, that is not possible. There are not enough miners in the market for this.

I think I know where I went wrong.
When I evaluated 51% of total ash power, I dropped by a factor of 1000. It should be 195000PH/s and I wrote 195PH/s.
So, it should be 195000000TH/s / 257TH/s = 760000 miners!
760000 miners * 8500 = $6.5billion
Then, 5350W/h * 760000 miners = 4.1GW/h
At 6 cent/Kwh, this would mean $246million per hour.
Per day would be $6billion, which matches your numbers. Well, apparently you're an experienced miner, so, I just wanted to do this as an exercise for mylsef.
Thanks for pointing out my mistakes!

An even thoug, my approach wouldn't work. After reading some other posts here, I think someone said it woul be needed to buy at least twice as much miners as needed to add twice the current total hash power. So, I tink I would need to double my number to match this, which makes sense.

But I had a question that I think it wasn't answered. In this scenario (introducing twice as much as current total hash power plus some more to overcome the current hash power), how much time would one need to run the attack to make it effective?

And, of course that your approach would make more sense. The one that you described as forcing the tow major pools to fork the main chain!



Yes, I found my error and fixed it.
I don't know if there would be enough renting sites (actual hardware) enough to run such attack! I think Phil's approach of hijacking the 2 major pools would make more sense!

Explanation
Chartbuddy thanks talkimg.com

No.

If you're attacking from within (using existing miners on the network) you have to buy up 51% of the miners on the network, which miners are not going to sell you. So no go there.

If you attacked from the outside (bringing new miners onto the network) you have to buy up 101% as many miners that are on the network.


Antminer S19 Pro is listed at $3230 from what I can see. Though I think sometimes miners go for much more, I was looking at miner prices a couple years ago and $3000 miners were selling for like $15k or something crazy. But let's just assume you could buy them for the actual list price.

At current hash rate it'd take about 3.3 million S19s to match the entire network hashrate in order to do a 51% attack, since you'd be doubling the hash rate. At list price, just buying the miners would cost about $10.5 billion. Now you have to pay for the infrastructure, both physical and electric, to run all these, and the workers to set them it all up. Also you have to get AC to cool down these facilities so the miners don't all melt down.

And then you gotta pay for the electricity. Looks like this would take about 10.725 million kilowatts just for the miners, not including AC and other electrical uses like lights, security stuff, etc. Assuming you can get $0.09/kw-h cost of electricity that's roughly a million dollars an hour, but more since we're not including all the other things you need electricity for in these buildings. Of likely you're not gonna be consuming over 10 million kilowatts in one location so you have to spread this all out, costing more. Ya gotta set it up somewhere so you gotta lease or buy land, hopefully land with buildings already on it so you don't have to build the buildings from scratch, so that land is gonna cost more.

So basically we're talking tens of billions of dollars in upfront costs, likely years of planning and setup, plus probably in total around $1.5 million every hour in electricity costs to do a 51% attack. Oh and of course you won't be able to get millions of miners at once, you'll have to order them over the course of several years, and you're gonna be competing with orders from all the people/companies already doing bitcoin mining, so you're not gonna be getting that list price on the miners anyway, so add a few more billions of dollars to the years-long setup.

Okay, now you've spent the past few years and tens of billions of dollars setting up all the infrastructure and buying all the miners and turning them on and you're ready for your attack! But wait, the hash rate has doubled in the meantime so you have to do the entire thing again....




Now, some people like to talk about mining pools colluding. But the thing they always fail to mention is that mining pools are, well, pools! They're made up of tons of different people. As soon as anyone got wind of several of the largest mining pools trying to attack bitcoin those mining pools would find themselves with far less than 51% of the network as the miners in those pools flee to other pools. So even in the situation that the largest mining pools wanted to kill their reputation and their business, and do this attack, it probably wouldn't even take an hour for the attack to end and their business to be destroyed.


The incentives of mining make it so nobody in the network would want to attack in, and the Bitcoin economy and security is so large now that it can't be attacked from outside. Bitcoin has for years now had global-level security, meaning that no entity or group of entities on earth could realistically engage in a 51% attack on it. Bitcoin is the most secure network in human history. Ain't nothing taking it down.

I just made a few fixes... If it's still too off, please tell me where!

To be honest, I don't understand these values:
Name    Symbol    Market Cap    Algorithm    Hash Rate    1h Attack Cost    NiceHash-able
Bitcoin    BTC    $517.53 B    SHA-256           378,673 PH/s    $1,646,739             0%

Means that to attack Bitcoin network for 1h, it would cost 1 million, 6 hundred, forty six, 7 hundred and thirty nine dollars?


I would think this way:
Total hash power 378673PH/s

51% of Total hash power is ~190PH/s your error is to the left it is 190,000 to 195,000 ph a factor of 1000x

Each S19xp Hybrid runs at ~257TH/s
Therefore we need  190000TH/s / 257TH/s = 740 miners error continues here
Each miner costs $8500, so, we need 8500*740 = $6290000 ~6.3 million dollars
Each miner uses 5350W/h, so, we need 5350 * 740 = 396kW/h * 24h = 9504kW / day
If eectricity costs, let's say 6cents / h, we need $1368576 / day.

I'm not absolutely sure about my numbers but they seem ok to me. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong!
Now, the only question I don't know for sure how to answer is how much time would it take for this setup to take over the main chain of the other 49% of hashpower!