Author: Richard Hein 2018-06-19 18:58:01
Published on: 2018-06-19T18:58:01+00:00
A potential attack called Dilution was brought up by a Bitcoin developer named Артём Литвинович in a message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list on June 18, 2018. The attack involves a malicious actor acquiring a majority of hash power and producing valid but empty blocks. This would effectively reduce the block rate by half or more and since nodes can't differentiate between block relay and block production there would be nothing they can do to adjust difficulty or blacklist the attacker. According to Литвинович's rough estimate, it would cost around $2 billion for equipment and $0.4 billion per month of power costs to maintain the attack. He questioned whether this was a plausible scenario and asked what could be done to mitigate it. It was suggested in response that making ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) available to everyone could help prevent such an attack.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T03:36:11.934906+00:00