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April 17, 2023, 06:08:15 PM |
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There is basically zero worry about a 51% attack. It would be near impossible, and entirely impractical.
According to the poster above's calculations, we're talking about $5 billion spent on brand top of the line miners. How many of those miners do you think they even make? If some govt wanted to buy them all up, just like at other times during mining booms, the company will start selling those miners for way more because of the immense demand of trying to buy $5 billion of miners quickly...not to mention that the rest of the mining industry will still be buying miners as well. So it'd end up costing MUCH more than $5 billion just to buy the mining machines. It would also likely take many months if not years to procure all that mining equipment. By which time the hash rate will almost certainly have grown some, so the attacker would need to buy up a good amount more than that.
Then you've got to set up the infrastructure to house 700k+ mining machines, cool them, and get the energy for all that.
And oops, the person who posted these calculations above made a mistake. He only took half the network as the hash rate needed. But if some new actor is trying to attack the network and they only buy up enough miners to do half the hash power that means they will only control a third of the network. Because the attacker's hash power is being added to the network, you don't just need over half of the existing hash power to do a 51% attack, you need more than the entire network. So the attacker actually has to buy double the number of miners that the person calculated, so we're talking about 1,426,000 miners, not 713,000. So double the costs of everything, and then some because this means more demand which means prices of miners go up even more. Plus add in the cost of personnel to set all this up.
So we're probably talking about an attack with upfront costs of dozens of billions of dollars. And then of course you have to pay for the ongoing cost of the electricity for the miners, air conditioning to keep them operating, and general building electricity wherever they are housed.
Show me any govt or organization or even group of govts that would be willing to spend dozens of billions of dollars in upfront costs on a massive project taking many months to set up with ongoing daily costs to continue the attack, just to 51% attack Bitcoin in which the only thing you get is the ability to double spend their own Bitcoin.
Anyway, to the OP, Bitcoin mining is already decentralized. It's not like the network is in some desperate situation in which it needs a million more miners. There are already millions of mining machines running all over the world owned by thousands of individuals, companies, etc. So I'm not sure why the question was even posed, unless you have been reading misinformation somewhere that Bitcoin isn't decentralized.
The only way anyone could threaten a 51% attack on Bitcoin is if mining pools colluded to do so. And you often see people bring this concept up. But they always fail to realize that mining pools are exactly that...pools! They aren't miners controlled by a single organization, the are miners controlled by many many different individuals and groups. If ever pools colluded to try to implement a 51% attack the miners in those pools would very quickly leave those pools, thus immediately ending the attack.
At this point (and this has already been the case for a good number of years), there is no realistic way to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin. Bitcoin has global level security at this point and has had it for years. 51% attacks are a non-issue.
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