Rodolfo Díaz
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2021–2024
2:16 · 72K views · Apr 25, 2015
A two-minute clip of Andreas Antonopoulos explaining why a 51% attack on Bitcoin would not destroy it and what such an attack would cost. It is a succinct take on mining security.
HN commenters link it as a short, favorite explanation of Bitcoin's security and the sustainability of a 51% attack.
6 comments from Hacker News
It should be noted that the bitcoin network does not need to consume more energy to scale up: - Using more energy does not translate to more transactions committed to the ledger. Second and third layer solutions can handle the world's transactional need with minimal energy usage, still using the security provided by the bitcoin network. - The security of the bitcoin network is not dependent on the amount of users, and mostly driven by financial incentives. However, the more energy it uses, the more secure it is against attacks. As it is, the bitcoin network does not need to use more energy, and here's [0] a succinct explanation as to why. [0]: this video
it’s basically impossible to sustainably 51% Bitcoin or ETH at this point. You could 51% for an hour (maybe, if you can get that hash rate from nicehash for that long, but I doubt you actually can), but what happens at the end of that hour? Would everyone simply throw their hands up, allow your double spend, and keep mining your chain? Likely not. Andreas Antonopoulos has a good take on this for Bitcoin: this video
> They don’t provide an analysis of the true cost of launching a 51% attack. Andreas Antonopoulos has done this many times already. this video (one of my favorites and only a couple minutes long) [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]
I don't think it's FUD. Of course you don't; you're here promoting Nano. If the Chinese government wanted to destroy BTC (because it violated their currency control laws), they could do it by coercing the owners of the mining pools located in China and those pools do do currently have over 51% of hash power. Again, this is FUD. It's not a good look to market Nano by trying to scare people into believing something like a 51% attack could happen tomorrow, when it's extremely unlikely to happen. Nano should be able to stand on its own without these scare tactics. You're assuming a double-spend attack on a block mined by Chinese miners would destroy Bitcoin when everyone knows such an attach is a theoretical possibility. As mentioned in the article I posted and you conveniently didn't respond to, there are many safeguards that would alert other miners. Bitcoin is about to pass $700 billion market cap—that's a lot of incentive to stop bitcoin from being destroyed. Even China knows it's better for them to have a non-sovereign store of value that's not the dollar. It would be pretty easy for the rest of bitcoin to see that the block is not legitimate and ignore it. Don't believe me? Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopoulos said the same thing: this video . It would take a lot of coercing to convince these miners to destroy their lucrative businesses for what would essentially be a one-time stunt that only effected a block these particular miners cared about. I suspect many of them would cho
> I suppose if your worry is a government trying to destroy Bitcoin, then that’s exactly how to do it… Andreas Antonopoulos - 51% Bitcoin Attack this video