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Solution to 51% attack?

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• Hesham_3del

  

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  Location: Cairo, Egypt

  @biggiebitcoin I have listened to many proposed solutions (mostly on LTB!) . One solution that I have not heard of yet:

  I was thinking that it would be in the community's best interest to only allow a mining pool to receive 20% of the block rewards. If the protocol could be changed by the majority of the miners so that after a pool gets 20% (of the block rewards for a day/144 blocks), they can still do the work, but will not get any additional block reward. This would highly incentive miners to not grow bigger then 20%. I know the protocol is fixed, but want to know if this could be implemented using a "soft fork"?

  It doesn't have to be 20%, just wanted to plug a number in.

  Did you take a look here ?

  http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/solution-to-sybil-attacks-and-51-attacks-in-decentralized-networks

  Posted on August 3, 2014 at 9:22 AM
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• wct296

  

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  Hypothetically, what would happen if bitcoin mining for some reason became massively unprofitable? Lets say the price goes down the $30 USD, it would mean that anyone mining on the network would be losing money. The purists/enthusiasts would still mine for the benefit of the network (myself included) but would scale back new investment. The big players (ghash/cex etc) would likely fail or opt out and then it would be MUCH easier to hit 51%..

  I'm not saying that this would ever happen and if BTC is $30 then it really means disaster for bitcoin or just that everyone has moved to a new/better coin, but its an interesting thought experiment.

  If all the big boys pulled out, someone with say 10phs might be able to do a 51% attack.. That said, if they did, they would discrete the coin even further and make its price plummet further making the attack a bit pointless as no-one would want the coin and be buying it. I guess it would even itself out that way.

  Posted on August 30, 2014 at 5:36 PM
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• wct296

  

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  Thanks Kerneloops.. point taken and I agree..

  I wonder if bitcoin annoyed enough central banks/governments that they would do it..

  I guess other coins would just take their place that were resistance to such attack... it could wipe a huge amount of value off btc though and make people lose confidence in it.. Scary thought

  Posted on August 30, 2014 at 5:56 PM
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