Author: Mike Hearn 2015-06-02 11:26:54
Published on: 2015-06-02T11:26:54+00:00
The article discusses the potential for a majority of mining hash rate to perform double spending attacks on Bitcoin exchanges, which would ultimately result in the failure and abandonment of the Bitcoin experiment. The basic assumption behind Bitcoin is that only a minority of actors are dishonest, and if the majority are, then Satoshi's scheme does not work. This fact has been known since day one and is outlined in the white paper. If the majority of the hashrate can perform double spends on a chain, they can send Bitcoins to exchanges, sell them, extract the money and build a new longer chain to get their Bitcoins back. In essence, this would render the Bitcoin experiment a failure.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T22:11:24.918429+00:00