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The chart is misleading for most cryptocurrencies. The "1h Attack Cost" is calculated from the rentable hashrate from NiceHash, but you should pay attention to
by lawn 5y ago
The chart is misleading for most cryptocurrencies.
The "1h Attack Cost" is calculated from the rentable hashrate from NiceHash, but you should pay attention to the "NiceHash-able" column that says how much hash you can actually rent.
While you'd think you could attack Ethereum for only 1.5 million dollars, you can only rent 7% of that hashrate, so you can't get the required >50% you'd need to pull of the attack.
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoCouldn't you get additional power from various cloud computing places?
- brunocvcunha 5y agoRequires machines with strong GPUs, which are probably very limited, even for big cloud providers. Also, using cloud hardware for mining is against most terms of services, and I guess they can figure out and stop it fairly quickly.
- osigurdson 5y agoEven if you cannot conveniently rent the required hardware from a provider, it still seems rather concerning that behemoths like Ethereum could be brought down rather easily with an investment of a few million dollars (especially by government actors for example). Perhaps I misunderstand the table in the article or the impact of a 51% attack however.
- Taek 5y agoIt can't, this website is crap. Getting control of enough hardware to successfully attack Ethereum is going to be a multi billion dollar ordeal, and probably take 6+ months.
- bottled_poe 5y agoThose are some big claims without a shred of supporting evidence.
- murtnowski 5y agoGovernment actor says hold my beer
- hutrdvnj 5y agoLet's assume your estimate is correct. Then this is still very possible for government or Elon Musk.
- landemva 5y agoFor chains that have a broad adoption of validating nodes often called full nodes (check validity of produced blocks but not mining), a 51% attack is not enough because the bad blocks would not widely propagate. The bad blocks would be ignored. This is why a reasonable size of the state, to allow many many to have affordable nodes which validate and check the rules, is so important. These are not the so-called miners, yet they are critical for the integrity of these distributed systems for preventing nation-state attacks.
- lostmsu 5y agoThey could not. Rent price on NiceHash is a market price. Even if it is not, when you'd try to buy the remaining 44% you'd have to turn to the market. Do you know what happens to the market price of something when you try to buy half of the worldwide supply?
- yardstick 5y ago> you can only rent 7% of that hashrate, so you can't get the required >50% you'd need to pull of the attack. Is this 7% per customer or aggregate per blockchain? Ie could I set up a dozen or so companies to each have a few percent of NiceHash and obtain the 51% that way?
- lawn 5y agoIt's total availability from NiceHash per POW algorithm (some blockchains share the algorithm). If you want to get 51% you need to find it from somewhere else.