51% attack and BTC price

[giantdragon]

Just interesting, how much BTC price will fall if 2 largest mining pools will be hacked and double spend performed?

[gweedo]

If double spending is performed, then the price will be $0, cause double spending is the biggest flaw you can have in a currency and all faith in it will be lost.

[BubbleBoy]

The 50%+1 attack is probably the least vulnerable part of Bitcoin. If it's performed as the result of a hack, then nothing will come of it, maybe a shortterm price crash and a quick recovery. Someone who hacks 50% of the network stands to earn something like 300K/day from mining. I have no idea where would you double spend such a large amount of money and get away with it.

I would worry about a catastrophic client bug, like an integer overflow that goes unnoticed and allows millions of "fake BTC" be sold on mtgox  and flood the economy. Government regulation, equating the bitcoin network with running a terrorist or pedo site. Bitdust, massive DDoS on the P2P network. And many more.

[jhansen858]

Don't double spends happen all the time?  I just don't know if they are successful or not.

http://blockchain.info/double-spends

[Le Happy Merchant]

A malicious 51% attack has such a huge oppurtunity cost that no profit-seeking individual would be willing to forgo the chance to simply mine more coins.

Only someone who wanted to see Bitcoin fail would do it. This is an unsettling notion, but since only institutions (corps, governments) would want to do it, I'm not as worried that it will happen.

The recent lawsuit filed by Coinlabs against Mt.Gox shows that Bitcoins are at the verge of being something you can really sue about. Once that case plays out, Bitcoin will have legal precident. If an institution 51%-attacked the network to kill it, they would face legal trouble.

To answer your question though, if a double spend was successfully preformed, the price would either plummet to near zero, or have a major non-zero crash. It really depends on the size of the double-spend.

[Zaih]

Scary s**t. One can only hope eh.

I'm sure everything is sorted though, it seems unlikely in reality.

As for your question, I think it'd be hard to disagree with everyone else above.. 0 seems like a pretty practical value for a situation like this eh