Why are big Bitcoin miners not destroying Alt coins with a 51% attack?

[o_e_l_e_o]

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

My holdings currently consist of 95% BTC and 5% ETH and that's more than enough.

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".

[hatshepsut93]

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.

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.

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.

[Schirer]

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.

[malevolent]

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.

[pooya87]

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 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.

5. Asic proof mining - Some Alt coins have different mining algorithms that are Asic proof.

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.

[BlackFor3st]

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?

[100action]

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.

[coiningz]

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

[Vishnu.Reang]

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.

[hatshepsut93]

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 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.

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.

[Kakmakr]

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 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.

5. Asic proof mining - Some Alt coins have different mining algorithms that are Asic proof.

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.

"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.     

[buwaytress]

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.

[Ucy]

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?

[bitsurfer2014]

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.

[dimastegar]

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.

[pooya87]

~
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.

ok, that makes more sense.

"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.     

we already have scrypt-ASICs 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.

[bryant.coleman]

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.

[ðºÞæ]

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

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.

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.

[Kakmakr]

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.

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>