Published
4 years ago on
January 13, 2020
- Bitcoin is somewhat safe from an attack from hackers however, a popular worry from many is in regards to the centralisation nature of proof-of-work mining.
- This has the possibility to turn into a 51 per cent attack which, if you couldn’t tell, would not be a good thing.
Bitcoin is somewhat safe from an attack from hackers however, a popular worry from many is in regards to the centralisation nature of proof-of-work mining. This has the possibility to turn into a 51 per cent attack which, if you couldn’t tell, would not be a good thing.
Whereas 51 per cent attacks are a futile attempt from hackers, they are an expensive one. This is especially true when it comes to a bigger chain like Bitcoin.
One of the biggest names in the space (literally) Andreas Antonopoulos has recently talked on ‘why can the proof-of-work algorithm prevents one party from dominating the record-keeping?’ This was throughout a new Q&A session posted up on YouTube.
Antonopoulos highlighted that even though a 51 per cent attack is possible for Bitcoin, isn’t true that such an attacker could alter the whole chain.
He said:
“The attacker can, using a 51 percent attack, change the next block, and, in fact, be the only one in the long term that is producing blocks because once you have 51 percent of the hashing power, you can generate blocks faster than the rest of the network, which means that you can have the dominant chain.”
Rules
Antonopoulos further went onto talk about 51 per cent attacks in that they can’t ‘change the rules.’ In this light, other nodes would just reject them.
“A 51 per cent attack cannot change the rules in the long term, they cannot change the rules in the short term, they cannot produce fraudulent transactions and they cannot produce fraudulent blocks, including blocks that lack the necessary proof of work.”
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!
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