> But I’ll try to explain everything technically and stay objective You failed inside of 3 paragraphs.
The headline used the term "BCash." It'd be tough to have an objective post by someone about "BCore," too.
On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
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Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#22A 51% attack only allows you to (1) censor transactions for a short time, and (2) double-spend. The first part is a mild nuisance. The second one can be retaliated against off-chain, which puts the attacker (who must be a large entity) at great risk in the real world.
> The second one can be retaliated against off-chain. What do you mean?
I believe it means that the recipient of the double-spent transaction can sue you or send goons after you just like they would someone who defrauded them without using cryptocurrency.
Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#23BCash is a scam to convert as much of their scam coin as possible to Bitcoin over time.
BCash is a fork of bitcoin that appears to offer lower fees for transactions.
Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#24I like the math and theory on this. But really why would someone who's making millions on the status quo risk tanking the market for a one time gain? Seems unlikely.
You don't have to risk anything. If the trend continues, at some point one would be able to rent the mining power required.
On top of it, if you are a small miner, and you can't afford capital investments required to keep up with latest mining hardware, while loosing market share, you can use your soon-osolete hardware to make a one last buck. A big buck this time.
Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#25Who is seriously going to try and execute a 51% attack? It would be so incredibly expensive, you would have to keep spending more as people added hash power to shut you out, and most importantly if your attack worked you would instantly undermine the security of the blockchain making all the currency you've stolen worthless!
Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#26I can't take any criticisms against Bitcoin Cash seriously when the authors knowingly refer to it as BCash. It's not just a shortening of the name, it's part of a concerted effort by detractors to distance the chain from the Bitcoin legacy.
Any author that purposefully uses the term BCash is, on the face, incapable of being objective because they're advertising that they're detractors already.
The Bitcoin Core (no on-chain scaling at any cost!) crowd asked the on-chain scaling fans to "fork off and leave". Now that the coin is doing very well in terms of market value and especially in growing merchant adoption, they're desperate to push the narrative that it's a scam or dangerous or can't be taken seriously. They know that if they can't destroy Bitcoin Cash now, it has a reasonable chance of eventually overtaking the legacy Bitcoin network in every important respect.
Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#27A 51% attack only allows you to (1) censor transactions for a short time, and (2) double-spend. The first part is a mild nuisance. The second one can be retaliated against off-chain, which puts the attacker (who must be a large entity) at great risk in the real world.
> The second one can be retaliated against off-chain. What do you mean?
If you do a double spend attack of any significance, the other party will notice. Unless you are doing something completely anonymous, the other party will also know who you are and be able to pursue other remedies (eg. sue you for fraud).
Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#28tl;dr: younger coins have fewer miners, so they are more susceptible to 51% attack. In particular BCash has same hash function as BTC, so those BTC miners could easily switch into mining BCash, and so is even more at risk.
It would incur a huge opportunity cost for them to switch over, especially because they would tank bcash by doing it.
Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#29Not happening. ANT Pool has a huge investment in Bitcoin Cash and would swoop in with mining power to protect their investment.
Please re-read the post, because you don't understand. The 51% attack is carried in secret. Noone has any way to know if it is happening until the longer chain is published. And after that, it's too late already. Someone could try to catch up with (not anymore secret) longest chain, but the damage has been done - the state of the network has already changed. Actually switching it back is only adding salt to the wound…
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Re: On the growing risk of the 51% attack against BCash
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The second one can be retaliated against off-chain. What do you mean?
I believe it means that the recipient of the double-spent transaction can sue you or send goons after you just like they would someone who defrauded them without using cryptocurrency.
How would you determine the culprit? You can't even prove that there was an intent to roll back a particular transaction.