5 ms·
Well, under the standard assumptions of blockchains like Bitcoin, yes it's incredibly expensive to obtain enough hashing power to do a 51% attack. There's a lot
by Taek 8y ago
Well, under the standard assumptions of blockchains like Bitcoin, yes it's incredibly expensive to obtain enough hashing power to do a 51% attack. There's a lot of nuance to it though.
In this case, Bitcoin Gold chose to have an "ASIC Resistant" algorithm, Equihash, and likely was only protected by GPUs mining the network. Bitmain has recently released an ASIC for Equihash that is substantially cheaper and more energy efficient than using GPUs, meaning that some pool which was able to buy a large number of the ASICs would have had a pretty easy time gaining enough hashrate to launch a 51% attack.
This is one of the big risks of attempting ASIC resistance. In the event that someone produces an ASIC, your coin is a complete sitting duck.
- celticninja 8y agobut hashrate on BTG has been falling consistently since inception, it doesnt look like someone invested in a load of ASIC devices to perform this attack, more like they kept the same operation and watched its % grow as other miners left the chain for a more profitable coin.
- Taek 8y agoThe hashrate charts don't measure orphaned blocks, so the attacker hashrate (manifested in the form of a bunch of orphaned honest blocks) wouldn't be visible in that chart.