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If you can shut down up to 70% of the mining power, it would make mounting a 51% attack incredibly easy. It would also mean whoever controls the remaining minin

• olegkikin 10y ago
  51% attack would require a collusion of the large group of the miners, and, if successful, will likely cause a massive price drop. Which is the last thing miners want. P.S. And btw, it's >50% attack, not 51% attack. You don't need that whole extra percent.
  • int_19h 10y ago
    > 51% attack would require a collusion of the large group of the miners If you can shut off 70% of all the miners (because they run backdoored hardware), then you only need >50% of the remaining 30%, no? Which should be a lot easier.
• MertsA 10y ago
  Whoever was left mining after that wouldn't get more block rewards unless it was something more extreme like bricking 70% of miners instead of just disabling them for a short amount of time. They would be able to mine 100% of blocks but there would be a lot more time between blocks until the next difficulty change. Unless it's something that would permanently break miners it wouldn't last long enough to earn the attackers anything extra in terms of extra blocks mined but facing congestion all blocks would be filled with extra high fee transactions so there would be some BTC to gain, but not from the normal block reward.