How the Bitcoin Community Turned to War

Re:How the Bitcoin Community Turned to War by gus_massa on Sunday February 28, 2016 @03:20PM (#11192186)

With 51% of the hashing power you can asymptotically do whatever you want with the recent transactions. Including erasing some of them and so allowing double spending, or blocking all the transactions. It's much easier if you have more than the 51%.

With the 70% you can do more interesting stuff, like using a 35% to mine in the fork/altcoin you like and use the other 35% to block the other fork/altcoin so no one can make transactions in it.

With the 90% you can play games, like mining during the day as usual, and do fancy stuff at night. From 0am to 4am, keep a 10% as protection against attacks, and use the other 80% to mine empty blocks in the other chain, starting from the last block you mined last night. So in 4 hours with a 8x hashing power is enough to catch up with the other chain and then when they get up in the morning they will see all their transactions reverted.

A fork with little hash power is very insecure.

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Re:How the Bitcoin Community Turned to War by vertex-four on Sunday February 28, 2016 @03:31PM (#11192237)

Assuming that the amount of hash power put into a blockchain is something that can more-or-less be derived from the value of that blockchain, the result of a fork with less hash power than it "should" have is that it will attract more miners until it has the same amount as the network pre-fork.

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