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To summarise: * One actor in the space appears to have done a proof of concept takeover of 51%. * It’s not clear there was any malicious action nor intent in
by moomin 1y ago
To summarise:
* One actor in the space appears to have done a proof of concept takeover of 51%.
* It’s not clear there was any malicious action nor intent in doing so.
* Performing something like this is definitely expensive.
* The potential impact of doing so is disputed.
* Whether or not it was achieved is also disputed
However, what has been known you some time is that the largest BitCoin miners have more power than the entire community of many alt-coins. Whether this is an issue is a matter for debate. Certainly, until now, no-one has chosen to flex like this.
- lagniappe 1y ago>until now, no-one has chosen to flex like this. The two networks have wildly different proof-of-work algorithms, they're incompatible. A BTC ASIC will never mine Monero, ever.
- rokkamokka 1y agoThat's not true for all altcoins however
- yieldcrv 1y agoIts always hilarious when someone launches an L1 with an algorithm everyone can already dominate and it gets attacked immediately Last time I saw that was on photonics processor blockchains
- scyclow 1y agoPretty much everything other than bitcoin, monero, and dogecoin are running proof of stake these days anyhow, so it kind of doesn't matter.
- OutOfHere 1y agoLitecoin goes in that PoW group too. In fact, Litecoin has an optional privacy feature called MWEB, which is probably why Litecoin too got kicked off of being named on some conventional news sites.
- subsistence234 1y agoKAS is PoW, at ~240 times the hash-rate of LTC, ~120 000 000 times the hash-rate of XMR, and 0.0007 times the hash-rate of BTC. Obviously not really comparable... https://poolbay.io/coins https://poolbay.io/coins
- idiotsecant 1y agoThat's not at all relevant to parent post's point. BTC mining is famously centralized, and continues to get more so. It is inevitable that a manufacturer of BTC asics with access to cheap power will become large enough to control 51% of the hash. It's inevitable. It's bad system design - it makes being able to manufacture your own custom silicon table stakes to run a financial system for some reason. BTC will have to move to a proof of stake design to survive. It's unavoidable.
- ifwinterco 1y agoThat is debatable, but also besides anything else, changing to PoS means changing the tokenomics (some tail emission for staking rewards, no 21m hard cap), which means it's incredibly unlikely to happen
- ChadNauseam 1y agowhy would staking rewards be any more necessary than mining rewards?
- ifwinterco 1y agoIn the end state (after ~2140), mining rewards just come from TX fees. But true, it is possible you could just redistribute TX fees to stakers. Post-merge ethereum is designed so that the gas fees and the staking rewards roughly cancel out on balance (so overall inflation is around zero), but they are decoupled so even if nobody is using the network you still get a staking yield
- eurleif 1y ago>so overall inflation is around zero Pedantic point: monetary inflation is around zero, not necessarily price inflation (which is what people typically mean when they just say "inflation").
- ifwinterco 1y ago
- soganess 1y agoI ask this not as a gotcha (I don't know the first thing about this), but rather because I'm interested: How do you know not "ever"? Like, trivially, it's an ASIC, so I can use it to simulate a von Neumann[*] machine, hence I can use it to run whatever algorithm I want. Would that be more efficient than using a modern OoO superscalar? Almost surely not, but that doesn't mean it can't be done, just that it shouldn't be done that way. *: I realize that the ASICs used in Bitcoin miners don't have dram access, but that isn't a general limitation of ASICs, just those ASIC 'chips' (and maybe not even those chips, just their implementations in bitcoin miners) EDIT: Thanks to everyone who answered! For some reason, I had it in my head that the way we implement fixed function stuff in an ASIC was basically the same as a "burn once" FPGA. Brains gonna brain.
- BoppreH 1y agoYou might be confusing ASICs with FPGAs. You can't reprogram an ASIC, the algorithm is fixed at design time, and the chip built for this single purpose.
- tux3 1y ago>Like, trivially, it's an ASIC, so I can use it to simulate a von Neumann[*] machine No, that doesn't follow at all. An ASIC doesn't mean a general purpose CPU or FPGA. A chip that only knows how to do, say, video decoding is an example of ASIC. The video chip can't do bitcoin, the bitcoin chip can't do monero. They're not general purpose.
- blibble 1y ago> Like, trivially, it's an ASIC, so I can use it to simulate a von Neumann[*] machine asic does not mean turing complete good luck simulating a von neumann machine on a sha256 accelerator
- soared 1y agoWay more context here https://www.cointribune.com/en/qubic-hits-52-72-of-moneros-total-hashrate/ https://www.cointribune.com/en/qubic-hits-52-72-of-moneros-t...
- apercu 1y agoIn all seriousness, can you explain why the "impact of doing so is disputed". In my laypersons understanding, if you control ~51% of the hashrate you can outpace everyone else in producing blocks, which means you can change (reorganize) your blockchain history which means the ledger isn't trustworthy. Right?
- the_sleaze_ 1y agoYes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- corimaith 1y agoThat's the point, you can only change YOUR history. From the perspective of future merchant, that's the trivial to deal with. And for existing transactions, you'd need the value of the goods from the transactions to exceed the cost of controlling to network to be worth it. But what kind of goods that can be transferred so quickly be worth that much?
- xnorswap 1y agoMaybe there's more resilience to prevent chain swaps now, but my understanding of the original blockchain algorithm is that: At block N someone could start to privately mine (empty) blocks. They keep mining in private until block N+x is public, at which time the private (51%) chain is length N+x+1. They then announce their longer chain. By the protocol, this longer chain (technically "most work" chain) is the more trusted one, and undoes any transactions in N+1 through N+x.
- SamPatt 1y agoMore or less, but the private chain doesn't need to contain empty blocks. A more sophisticated attack would include all the legitimate transactions on the network except for their own transaction(s) which they're trying to double spend. That way the network isn't disrupted apart from the parties you're double spending against.
- nomilk 1y agoNewb question, but why's it expensive, aren't they mining the whole time and can therefore make the usual money from that mining?
- treyd 1y agoYou are correct. It's expensive if you want to go rewrite history. 51% is when that becomes economically viable to do on its own.
- subsistence234 1y agoAFAIK Qubic (the company) is paying people extra to mine XMR through Qubic (if you mine $1 worth of XMR, you get $1.50 worth of QUBIC (the coin) which you can then sell). Qubic (indirectly) loses those extra $0.50. If on average the miners sell too much (more than two thirds of the rewards), then Qubic has to buy their own coins back in order to keep the price stable. Qubic bets on their coin pumping from the publicity.
- mattwilsonn888 1y ago"Performing something like this is definitely expensive" That is false. A 51% attack is only expensive to the degree to which the hashpower required to exceed 50% is obtained at negative margins. If an attacker can collect the total 51% or more hashpower at what would be a profitable rate despite the attack, then the attack is not "definitely expensive" - no, the attack is definitely profitable and the expense falls sorely on the minority.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoJust because something is profitable doesn't mean it's not expensive, which only means it costs a lot of money. Or, you need to spend a lot of resources to do the attack even if it's the case that you get that money back when you succeed. And the attack is not available to you if you can't front those resources (because it's expensive rather than cheap).
- blantonl 1y agoOr, you need to spend a lot of resources to do the attack even if it's the case that you get that money back when you succeed. There is a word for this. We call it risk.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zamadatix 1y agoI'm not sure I'd call this risk. Risk would be "you can invest the money, but you might not get it back" however the above is referring to the "a 51% attack absolutely works but you need a shit ton of money to do it" aspect instead. This makes it capital intensive, not (necessarily) risky.
- freehorse 1y agoThe fact that it succeeds does not mean that you get the money back (eg the price of monero could drop if that happens). You may also have miscalculated some parameters in all this or something unexpected happens (where human factor is involved). So there should always be risk involved imo. Otherwise I agree, even in a probability 1 success situation this would still not be called "cheap".
- nickysielicki 1y ago> Whether this is an issue is a matter for debate. Monero uses RandomX, which is intentionally chosen to make it difficult to accelerate using hardware that is common with other coins. It’s almost certainly not what happened here.
- latchkey 1y agoCPU was a terrible choice.
- pas 1y agowhy? what's better?
- JKCalhoun 1y agoIt would be interesting if a "coin" were tied to protein folding prediction or something else useful.
- jayknight 1y agoIsn't that what GridCoin is? https://gridcoin.us/ https://gridcoin.us/
- MadnessASAP 1y agoProof-of-Work fails if the work has value.
- ssd532 1y agowhy?
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoI don't think it's true, look up Proof of Useful Work
- mvdtnz 1y agoNo one is spending $75M a day to do a proof of concept. There's obviously some kind of intent to profit.
- fruitworks 1y agoQubic aims to profit from the publicity