51% Attack

[blacksmithtm]

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.

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[bitmover]

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

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.

[ranochigo]

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.

[drwoo]

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

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.

[logfiles]

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,

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

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

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.

[TangentC]

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

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.   

[Obito]

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-room101]

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.

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 ).

[btc-room101]

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.

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

[Velazqe]

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.

[Tina H]

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.

[davis196]

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.

[rhomelmabini]

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.

[Darker45]

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.

[Kemarit]

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.

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.

[kaggie]

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

[GeorgeJohn]

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,

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.

[btc-room101]

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.

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.

[btc-room101]

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,

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.

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.

[FinallyRegistered]

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

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.