On: Show HN: Cost of a 51% Attack on Popular Cryptocur...

[tfha]

Better to have one person who can attack you than to have 25.

[jacobush → tfha]

Kind of like trusting the central bank. :-)

[loser777 → tfha]

This point doesn't seem to make sense. If you have 25 potential attackers, then for there to be an actual 51% attack, more than half of them (13/25) would have to band together to actually reach 51%. Unless the assumption is that the 25 parties buy chips and sit on them indefinitely without contributing to the network hash rate.

[tripletao → loser777]

I'd guess they mean "better to have one potential attacker because of the centralization that mining with a unique ASIC would tend to cause, than to have 25 potential attackers because you're vulnerable to an attack by 1/25 of worldwide GPU power (which is normally used for other coins but could be briefly repurposed)".

[stale2002 → loser777]

> Unless the assumption is that the 25 parties buy chips and sit on them indefinitely without contributing to the network hash rate.

This is exactly what they are doing.

Lots of people are buying GPUs, but any SINGLE gpu coin has a very small percentage of total GPU hashpower.

For the extreme case, image that I have GPU coin, but I am only supporting it with MY GPU.

That means that any other person in the world, can now attack my coin, if they have more GPUs than me (1).

The fact that lots of people own GPUs doesn't protect me, because those GPUs aren't contributing to the network!