4 ms·

Of course, doing this only makes sense if what you gain outweighs the costs of performing such an attack. If the hardware to accomplish the attack is available

Of course, doing this only makes sense if what you gain outweighs the costs of performing such an attack. If the hardware to accomplish the attack is available for your use, the cost of the mining should net out at zero-ish, because you're also getting the rewards for doing the mining. So the net cost of the attack is just the overhead for the mining hardware. Coincidentally, economist Alex Tabarrok just wrote about this today: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/01/bitcoin-much-less-secure-people-think.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/01/bi...

pietjepuk88 8y ago
Yes, I would guess that coins sharing an algorithm with a much bigger brother (in hash rate) are particularly susceptible. Of course, the perceived security and valuation of many coins is somewhat tied together, and I can imagine many miners would avoid attacks on other (smaller brother) chains because they might end up hurting themselves as well. But it only takes one (big enough) actor to do serious damage to a smaller brother coin, possibly looking to gain financially, or maybe just to undermine its credibility/valuation. To do the latter, I would say continuously forcing many large reorgs is the way to go.