Has the 51% attack threat been solved?

[niveamen1]

My company has asked me to research Bitcoin as a potential back up storage of a slush fund due to the ease of sending money to people around the world on the field even in hard to reach locations.

I'm confused is the 51% solved or is it still an issue?

[squatter]

My company has asked me to research Bitcoin as a potential back up storage of a slush fund due to the ease of sending money to people around the world on the field even in hard to reach locations.

I'm confused is the 51% solved or is it still an issue?

It's not really an issue that can be "solved" per se. Bitcoin's use of proof-of-work is the best solution so far, but it is not immune to 51% attacks. Double-spend attacks have occurred (by miners) in the past and it's prudent to expect that they might happen in the future: never accept zero-confirmation transactions and consider waiting for a multiple confirmations before releasing goods.

And it's probably more prudent to think of it as a 33% attack (selfish mining), and 25% of the hash rate will make the attack work a good deal of the time. Bitcoin incentivizes honest mining, but miners can act fairly anonymously if they choose to and they are motivated by profit, not goodwill. So act accordingly. Having said all that, Bitcoin is the most secure payment network in the world. Just don't accept unconfirmed transactions for payment.

[Decoded]

Nope. You can think of the 51% attack as a general fault for all distributed system that gives the decision/voting power to the users, and bases their stakes on a commodity, for example hashpower.

The only way we could fix this is to take this right away, basically ruining the concept of "power to the people". Hashpower isn't ideal, but it's the most practical. We won't be able to give equal votes to everyone, because impersonators will always come along. So the current system is - The more you invest, the more voting power you have.

I believe the current hashpower should be more distributed. You can't join together to join a pool and expect the owners to run it the way you want them to. One pool doesn't have to even be more than 50% of the network hashpower. 5 11% pools could cause the same problem. I'm not sure if it's possible, but there should be a pool protocol where each miner can signal for whatever they want, instead of what the pool owner wants.

[Fatoshi]

The developer of Xtrabytes has claimed to of solved the 51% attack problem. NEM kind of said they have by patching over the  cracks but javent gone as far as to say they solved it.

https://www.xtrabytes.global

[lighpulsar07]

No 51% attack never solved and this kind of attack will never happened to bitcoin network because it requires a lot of mining power and high end equipment which would cost you thousands or even more to achieve 51% of total hashrate of network. if attacker want to do the 51% attack on the network in today's standard he must be wasting his time and money.