4 ms·
I don't see how more confirmations makes it exponenrially harder to mount a 51% attack: you just need to be mining faster privately than the remaining community
by yuliyp 5y ago
I don't see how more confirmations makes it exponenrially harder to mount a 51% attack: you just need to be mining faster privately than the remaining community until you (a) have a lead, and (b) have maintained that lead for the confirmation window.
- yanmaani 5y agoThere's luck involved too. In the limiting case, imagine you have 0.001% of the network hash rate and need a 1 block lead. This can happen every now and then, but getting a 2 block lead is basically impossible. The exact formula is given in the Bitcoin whitepaper <https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>, see page 6 and on.
- yuliyp 5y agoAccording to that formula, in a 51% attack, probability of success = 1 (since 51% attack means you are more likely to find a hash than all others combined), right?
- bellajbadr 5y agoThat's called Selfish mminign but the prob is to be faster than the network!