News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on You Probably Don't Need a Blockchain. Parent comment

Re:You Probably Don't Need a Blockchain by dlubarov on Thursday February 22, 2018 @12:55PM (#16439604)
It's possible that they acquired a majority of hash power when doing so was cheaper, but in order to maintain their majority, they would have had to invest several billion since then. See [1] which shows the growth of the overall network hash rate.

I'm not saying it's unrealistic, just that it would be more expensive today than what the article says.

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=2years

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You Probably Don't Need a Blockchain by nosuchthing on Thursday February 22, 2018 @04:00PM (#16441342)
51% is not necessary.

A case study in censorship though the pools has proven this:

https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-manipulates-u...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You Probably Don't Need a Blockchain by dlubarov on Thursday February 22, 2018 @04:42PM (#16441678)
51% is necessary to create viable forks with arbitrary lengths. What that mining pool did was much less harmful: they just censored other parties' transactions during an ICO.

Unless a coordinated majority is censoring your transactions, you can't really be censored, your transactions will just be slightly delayed sometimes. Which is normally very harmless.

The only problem here was a poorly run ICO, where prices were dependent on the order of transactions. That wouldn't be the case with e.g. a reverse Dutch auction similar to the process for Treasury bills.

[ Parent | on HN ]