What is a 51% Attack? What can’t a 51% Attack do?

What is a 51% Attack? Bitcoin has experienced some significant events in the past year.

For example, a hacker attack in 2018 resulted in losses of over $500 million in encrypted assets (including BTC, BCH, and BSV) and caused its price to soar to nearly $20,000. However, in the following months, with more and more developers joining, the total transaction volume in the industry reached an all-time high.

One of the recent events is the discovery of a vulnerability in the Lightning Network, which prevents users from accessing private keys or sensitive digital information on the blockchain. This situation indicates that most blockchain platforms rely on third-party nodes to validate blocks. Since these nodes often require multiple wallets to obtain enough data, they can leverage existing service providers without having to trust others.

Since then, the term “lightning” has been widely used, allowing people to control their own accounts and passwords. However, they are still very expensive given current prices. While many blockchain platforms have implemented plans to prevent potential network failures and block malicious activities.

However, due to technical reasons, this concept has always been a mystery. When it comes to scalability, we must understand how to conduct security audits. To address this issue, we have discussed before studying consensus protocols: a way to store off-chain data between separate wallets – and everyone can create a separate wallet in it without worrying about their funds being lost. If two different exchanges choose to run a complete system, there will be a new wallet entering this wallet every now and then. This means you don’t need to know the details of ownership or worry about your funds being compromised. Additionally, there is a way to improve network efficiency by charging high fees to miners. What is a 51% Attack? Why does a situation of 51% computing power concentration occur? In fact, attackers are trying to counter any potential attack behavior by increasing the distribution of computing power. For example, if you want to let a node control most of the computing power, you can take action or delete some unnamed messages from your server.

However, compared to ordinary PoW mining, this seems to be easier to happen. On the contrary, when someone wants to send their Bitcoin to someone else, they will try to transfer it out of their wallet by reducing the concentration of computing power, making the entire system more decentralized. The purpose of doing this is to protect user privacy and ensure that no one takes huge risks to participate, as this may cause greater market fluctuations.

What can’t a 51% Attack do?

Editor’s note: This article is from BlockBeats (ID: blockbeats), author: 0x13, authorized reprint of Odaily Star Daily.

There was a recent tweet that said, “If someone can use a 51% attack to switch the computing power of Bitcoin, then I suggest not doing it.” This statement is actually very straightforward, “we should know how to get the mined without miners” itself explains this. “But isn’t it said that 51% is no longer feasible now? Or do we think this is not worth it.” In fact, this is a real problem: “Either mine the ‘currency’ yourself and sell it to others. But when you see others making money by mining a token, they will tell others that your token has been taken away. And if you want to grab a small portion of the token from your own hand, they wouldn’t want to do it because they just want to get more tokens.” While many people agree with this view, I still think it’s not a good idea.

First, let’s take a look at why it is necessary to restrict 51% attacks, which is a common type of attack. Due to the use of Antminer S9 series chips produced by Bitmain and Canaan Creative, it is difficult to avoid the impact of the 51%, and the cost and security issues need to be considered. Therefore, attackers will choose to distribute all ASIC chips in their hands to different desktop computers to ensure security. Secondly, we must remember: if the attacker’s computing power exceeds 51%, they must pay a fine of up to 15% and return the cryptocurrency they hold as a reward. Finally, it is crucial to control the probability of 51% – as long as enough nodes can participate, this hacking event can be completed.