Author: Mike Hearn 2013-04-05 09:48:51
Published on: 2013-04-05T09:48:51+00:00
There is a discussion about the possibility of a 51% attack on a mining pool that has reached 46% on IRC. It is possible to do double spends against confirmed transactions before reaching 51%. However, it is a self-defeating attack because it would leave a permanent record and many miners would leave the pool. There are other mining protocols that allow people to pool together without the pool operator being able to pick which transactions go into the block. P2pool has problems dealing with FPGA/ASIC hardware and has not been growing for a while. The discussion includes the possibility of the pool owner being able to choose what goes into the block. It is suggested that with random non-colliding nonces, it would be almost impossible to coordinate a 51% even by the owner. However, someone pointed out that creating random numbers on a GPU is hard, but it would be possible to create one random number and increment from there. The threat of a 51% attack remains a topic of concern.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T11:35:33.845717+00:00