Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by latchkey 1465 days ago
> They don’t provide an analysis of the true cost of launching a 51% attack.

Andreas Antonopoulos has done this many times already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM (one of my favorites and only a couple minutes long)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZTGmTjqXEU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-La8gyNVCI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDZVW4hri2g

1 comments

From the first link: "Bitcoin has achieved a level of comput[ational power] that no single nation state can overthrow it through computation alone. The effort to do so would require a massive covert operation of chip fabrication. Then, the coordinated assault would give them over the next block for 10 minutes, until we kick those bastards off the network... they would be revealed, they would have lost billions of dollars doing this, and all they would have got was a double spend"
How are you going to "kick them off the network"? There's no way to tell where the hashpower is coming from.
Yeah it’s a pretty glib answer. Not clear at all how you kick them off the network.

Perhaps he’s conflating some kind of protocol exploit that could be patched against with a 51% attack.