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> But if it would restore public confidence in the protocol and economy It actually scares me. If any private body or group could somehow amass 51% of the mine
by atgm 13y ago
> But if it would restore public confidence in the protocol and economy
It actually scares me. If any private body or group could somehow amass 51% of the miners in some way, they would then control the currency.
- snitko 13y agoIt's not one private body. I think in this case one might say all MtGox customers would be asking miners to do that.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoWell, that always has been and always will be true.
- atgm 13y agoI think there's a difference between something being factually true (you will die) and something being imminently factual (you have cancer). Those are really negatively-biased examples, sorry.
- VMG 13y agoNo, you basically only control the order of transactions: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...
- atgm 13y agoThank you for the clarification!
- patio11 13y agoYou can also rollback history and block transactions which you disapprove of from happening with 100% probability. Other than that, no major problems.
- tlrobinson 13y agoYou are correct, but I feel like it must be physically impossible for you to comment on Bitcoin without being snarky.
- VMG 13y agoTechnically, you need 100% hashing power in order to block a valid transaction forever.
- patio11 13y agoOh, you can certainly use your 49% to publish a block or two, or even twelve in a row -- good for you, probability sometimes works like that -- but eventually I will have more blocks mined privately than the rest of the network does publicly, at which point I publish them (with my choice of confirmed transactions) and all your work, the transactions which you chose to confirm, and your mined coins just go down the memory hole.
- VMG 13y agoThe mined coins, sure, but you can include the transactions that were omitted in the revealed fork in the blocks after that. That's why the document states An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, _for the time that he is in control_ I'm not saying that when this would happen it would be a good day for Bitcoin by the way.
- tlrobinson 13y agoI don't understand. I think "for the time that he is in control" means "as long as he has > 50% hashing power". No need for 100%. As long as he has > 50% he can eventually overtake any fork that includes a new transaction. In theory, given enough time (a very long time), someone able to maintain 50.0000001% of hashing power could eventually rewrite the entire blockchain after the genesis block.
- gus_massa 13y ago