So 7$ is the nicehash cost? But isn't nicehash an out of the box solution? So if I wanted to actually execute a 51% attack I'd have to deploy my own malicious mining software to the nodes, that then issued an invalid transaction and forced consensus on it ... is that the idea? Can someone who knows a little bit more about this fill me in?
I believe this is the basic idea. Let's say on QKC.
1. Buy a whole bunch of QKC and wait for your receipt of the QKC to clearly be part of the winning chain.
2. Make a copy of the blockchain. Keep it to yourself.
3. Start adding mining blocks* to your copy, in private; do not release your private copy of the chain at all, just keep piling on mining blocks. You must outpace the world's ('public chain') rate at which they are piling blocks on, hence why you need over 50% of total hashing power to do this and guarantee that your private copy ends up with more mining blocks than the public copy.
4. Whilst you are mining your own private copy, spend spend spend. Spend ALLLLL your QKC, getting goods and services in return, or simply other cryptocurrencies.
5. Eventually, when you've spent all your QKC and your private copy clearly has more mining blocks on it than the fork of the public chain everyone currently agrees upon... release it.
6. The protocols and papers all state that now your erstwhile secret, private copy is now the new consensus view; after all, it has the most mining blocks on it.
7. That means that none of your QKC is actually spent. Effectively you get all your spent QKC back. In addition, whatever wallet has been doing all that mining just earned a bunch of QKC as a reward for doing all that mining effort, so you now have more QKC than you started with, AND you have all the goods (or other cryptocurrencies, or services, or whatnot) that you bought with your QKC whilst you were secretly mining.
Exactly how much time you need to spend all your QKC and ensure that your private copy of the chain definitely will win any consensus fight with any other fork is beyond my understanding of cryptocurrencies.
There are out-of-band mitigations possible; if it is abundantly clear what's going on and sufficient amounts of those who control major nodes all agree to just hardcode in their copy of the software that your chain, no matter how many blocks it has, is never selected as the consensus, then all your work is for naught. Etherium has run into a variant of this problem (it wasn't a 51% attack but something else). Everything happened just as I write: the majority of ethereum network movers and shakers chatted on forums and the like and decided to update their software (and their personal 'belief' of which of the many forks is the consensus fork) to disregard the one where a lot of eth was 'stolen'. But not quite everybody; a few decided not to update their software and stick with the rule that the one with the most is the consensus. That is now called 'etherium classic'.
*) Mining blocks are just blocks confirming all is well; they contain a proof of work which involves a random number added to the message. A mining block is valid if, when you hash it, the hash ends in a whole bunch of zeroes. The idea is that the only way to do this is to generate billions of random numbers, keep hashing the results, until you hit the jackpot and your hash ends up by sheer coincidence to end in the desired # of zeroes. At which point you publish this mining block on the chain. As part of doing that, the 'network' itself gives you some coin to pay you for your efforts, and the 'fork' that you put this block on is now more robust, in that the rule is that the consensus block is the one with the most mining blocks on it.
So 7$ is the nicehash cost? But isn't nicehash an out of the box solution? So if I wanted to actually execute a 51% attack I'd have to deploy my own malicious mining software to the nodes, that then issued an invalid transaction and forced consensus on it ... is that the idea? Can someone who knows a little bit more about this fill me in?