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So you can perform a double spend attack on the largest crypto currency with a market cap of $124 billion dollars for only $600 thousand? For criminals who kn
by mike-cardwell 8y ago
So you can perform a double spend attack on the largest crypto currency with a market cap of $124 billion dollars for only $600 thousand?
For criminals who know what they're doing, this looks like a very juicy target to me.
- jldugger 8y agoIs it? Say you control 51 percent of the mining capacity. How do you profit from it in such a way that you don't tank the value of the good you're stealing?
- GW150914 8y agoOne obvious way would be to heavily invest in the currencies likely to shoot up in value over the corpse of the currency you’re attacking.
- jldugger 8y agoYea, that seems like a bit of a gamble versus the naieve 'just spend it' strategy.
- empath75 8y agoShorting it is the obvious way. You borrow a bunch of that currency, sell it, then use the money to buy hashing power, and steal it back to cover your shorts.
- stale2002 8y agoYou have to short it by billions and billions of dollars. Bitmain, alone, made 3-4 billion dollars in PROFIT last year. And they don't control even close to 51%. Bitmain would have to make enough money off of a single attack so as to cover all it's FUTURE profits. And then it would also have to not be noticed.... Do you really think all these exchanges would just suffer under an attack that loses them many billions of dollars, without retaliating? No, they wouldn't. And then people would end up in jail.
- empath75 8y agoYou short a small currency not bitcoin.
- xur17 8y agoThis comment [0] has a better explanation, but this is the theoretical cost - per the 'nicehash-able' column, NiceHash only has 2% of the necessary hashing power available for rent, so an attack like this is most do-able and problematic for smaller coins. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173402