A Sybil attack is about having many identities in systems which make such identities count for something, blockchains are designed to avoid that attack by saying "identities don't matter for consensus, only raw 'work' does". a 51% attack is therefore analogous to a Sybil attack but not the same thing.
Unless I'm missing something, this doesn't pass the sniff test. If a 51% attack was successful, every other miner could easily spot this and would stop mining. The fact that this has not happened is more trustworthy than a random guy on Twitter.
* One actor in the space appears to have done a proof of concept takeover of 51%.
* It’s not clear there was any malicious action nor intent in doing so.
* Performing something like this is definitely expensive.
* The potential impact of doing so is disputed.
* Whether or not it was achieved is also disputed
However, what has been known you some time is that the largest BitCoin miners have more power than the entire community of many alt-coins. Whether this is an issue is a matter for debate. Certainly, until now, no-one has chosen to flex like this.
You don't mean to suggest that a scammy cryptocurrency entity that is currently bragging about attacking a competing system might ... lie to people???? Is that possible?
Maybe Black Owl is finishing off APT29's remaining part of the former Mirai botnet?
I'm just saying that this might be a state sponsored actor fighting another one, given that Mirai was primarily hosting XMR miners, and given that they lost 3.5 Mio bots overnight in 2023.
A 6 re-org does not mean a '51% attack' was successful. In that case, we'd see unbounded-depth re-orgs/no blocks mined by any other mining pool (assuming the adversary censors other mining pools, as this one does).
It does mean an adversary with a high amount of hash got lucky. I noted there's a discrepancy between their claimed network hashrate and pools' claimed network hash rate.
They may not be including their own hash rate in the network's, in which case they'd need to exceed it. Having 51% would only be 34% of total.
They're an unreliable narrator and I wouldn't trust any data from them. There's insufficient evidence to claim they have 51% of the network's hash power.
The thing about 51% attacks is they're hard to pull off in secret. And once they happen, who's going to accept the coin anymore? Plenty of potential for sheer destruction, but it seems pretty counter-productive to value.
A couple researchers have told me that it's not necessary to even reach 51%. It's probably something closer to 35% to maintain the ability to perform censorship etc
One of the major things that has always bothered me about crypto: if an economically "irrational" large player wanted to 51% something like Bitcoin, they could.
I am thinking of, for example, a nation-state. Let's say the US, EU, or China decided for some reason that it was in their national interest to blow up Bitcoin. This could happen if an adversary like Russia or its allies were using Bitcoin for funding and there was a war or a major Cold War style struggle. Such players could afford to purchase and build, in secret, a huge mining farm, and then suddenly turn it on, not caring about the cost because the goals are strategic. It would be massively expensive but it doesn't matter for this case.
I'm also curious about an attack vector whereby if a coin has a single reasonably well-installed mining software stack, this effectively gives the developers of that stack control over any miner, which could easily add up to 51% if there's only a few mining software options. Sneaking in a backdoor is well within the capabilities of any developer; do the mining companies compile from source?
The ridiculousness of cryptocurrency reminds me of the ridiculousness of the stock market. Both are absolutely batshit insane ways to maintain a global monetary system, yet people keep investing their fortunes in both.
Sidenote: IDK how is Ledger, a French company, still in business after compromising ~300k users' physical addresses[1] amongst other PII, ~5 years ago.
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[ 10.6 ms ] story [ 1279 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
Btw, here's the alternative link https://xcancel.com/p3b7_/status/1955173413992984988
Anyone have any context about who Qubic are, and what their deal is?
https://x.com/c___f___b/status/1955158154213220492
See e.g. https://x.com/kayabaNerve/status/1955173552363016434
https://x.com/kayabaNerve/status/1955228805598966258
* One actor in the space appears to have done a proof of concept takeover of 51%.
* It’s not clear there was any malicious action nor intent in doing so.
* Performing something like this is definitely expensive.
* The potential impact of doing so is disputed.
* Whether or not it was achieved is also disputed
However, what has been known you some time is that the largest BitCoin miners have more power than the entire community of many alt-coins. Whether this is an issue is a matter for debate. Certainly, until now, no-one has chosen to flex like this.
Appears to be legit, but not really a nefarious attack.
https://miningpoolstats.stream/monero
This Qubic group claims to concentrate 3 GH/s of hashing power, yet there has been no increase in the global hash rate either:
https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/hashrate-chart
Could this be just a bait?
I'm just saying that this might be a state sponsored actor fighting another one, given that Mirai was primarily hosting XMR miners, and given that they lost 3.5 Mio bots overnight in 2023.
This is how proof of work systems operate.
They are very expensive to attack but very cheap to recover from.
$75m per day is clearly unstainable.
Soon they will give up and the network will recover cheaply.
The attack is more of a nuisance than the end of Monero.
It does mean an adversary with a high amount of hash got lucky. I noted there's a discrepancy between their claimed network hashrate and pools' claimed network hash rate.
They may not be including their own hash rate in the network's, in which case they'd need to exceed it. Having 51% would only be 34% of total.
They're an unreliable narrator and I wouldn't trust any data from them. There's insufficient evidence to claim they have 51% of the network's hash power.
(https://nitter.net/kayabaNerve/with_replies)
*gestures wildly*
I am thinking of, for example, a nation-state. Let's say the US, EU, or China decided for some reason that it was in their national interest to blow up Bitcoin. This could happen if an adversary like Russia or its allies were using Bitcoin for funding and there was a war or a major Cold War style struggle. Such players could afford to purchase and build, in secret, a huge mining farm, and then suddenly turn it on, not caring about the cost because the goals are strategic. It would be massively expensive but it doesn't matter for this case.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwalletleak/