News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Coinbase is exploring the addition of new currencies by seibelj on Sunday December 09, 2018 @05:49PM (#18643822)
“51% attack” is meaningless if you can’t find a way to profit on it. It costs money to run an orphan chain that long. You can’t simply double-spend because you are the biggest miner so long as everyone is running software that prevents it. To profit you must find a way to earn money with transactions on a given chain that are then wiped out when you release the longer chain.

The typical way to profit from this is to deposit to a centralized exchange, trade it for something else, and withdraw before the exchange recognizes what’s happening. However there are simple calculations you can make with the cost of 51% hashing and then the exchange can bump up the minimum confirmations required for deposits and limit the amount you can deposit for weaker currencies.

In general the 51% problem is no longer easy to profit from except with low quality exchanges.

Re:Coinbase is exploring the addition of new currencies by asperous on Sunday December 09, 2018 @06:06PM (#18643894)
I think the attack looks like, two transactions at the same time, one sending to exchange or merchant, one sending elsewhere (back to owner). Keep orphan chain open long enough for merchant to send goods or exchange to payout. Then release orphan chain and have it "snap back" to a world in which you received something but didn't have to pay for it.

https://unhashed.com/cryptocurrency-news/five-successful-51-...

Re:Coinbase is exploring the addition of new currencies by LawnboyMax on Sunday December 09, 2018 @06:23PM (#18643976)
It's quite hard to find a merchant that accepts a cryptocurrency so unpopular, that a 51% attack on it is relatively cheap. And any exchange that really cares about the security of its funds has very long confirmation times for such cryptoassets and/or monitors those chains for any suspicious activity so that the withdrawals can be frozen if anything happens.

Not saying it's impossible to do a successful 51% attack, just that it's a lot less trivial than it might seem after checking out a site like https://www.crypto51.app/

Re:Coinbase is exploring the addition of new currencies by whoisninja on Monday December 10, 2018 @12:19AM (#18645408)
this site only indicates how much it will cost per hour to sustain the attack. it is unknown how long it could really take for attack to be successful, also as others pointed out - there's no incentive But yes, most of these garbage tokens can be attacked. But it is quite evident to me that eventually people will understand that it is just Bitcoin that they need to follow to keep up to date with the field of cryptocurrencies. Others claim to bring cool concepts and technology but in actuality they don't work or are a messed up very large software project like Ethereum (and tons of projects don't are simply forks with no further development)