Architect Ethereum Merge Justin Drake told Cointelegraph that it would be cheaper to carry out a 51% attack on Bitcoin than on Ethereum.
Drake said “much cheaper up to 51% of Bitcoin attack” and that it would cost “ordering $ 10 billion”.
Drake conducted work on the implementation of Ethereum (POS) and was the main architect in Scale (full transition event POS). His comments reflect on May 14 x post Grant Hummer, co -founder of the company dealing in marketing and products oriented at Ethereum.
Hummer said in the post that Bitcoin “is completely fucked up because of the security budget.”
Hummer said that a successful 51% attack would cost $ 8 billion, and said that a successful attack is “practically sure” when the cost drops to $ 2 billion. The 51% attack occurs when a single unit or group controls over 50% of the upper or articular power of the blockchain network, gaining power through the network. Hummer added:
“It will become blindly obvious over the next decade. ETH is the only really decentralized capricious one that can become the internet [store of value]. “
Related: Coin indicators research shows that BTC and ETH are resistant to 51% of attacks
Ethereum’s attack would cost much more
Drake said that “to have 100% chain control, you need 50% + 1 rate.” He said it would be extremely complex and steep, but far from impossible:
“A rich nation state can probably do this.”
At the time of writing this text, there were 34 168.987 Staced Ether (ETH) worth almost $ 89.6 billion. Therefore, half of ETH has a current value of almost $ 44.8 billion.
Despite this, a much higher investment would probably be needed. Ether has the current market capitalization of $ 316 billion and a 24-hour rotary volume of $ 25 billion (just over 8% of market capitalization).
ETH needed to attack is worth almost 14.2% of market capitalization and 180% of the 24-hour trading volume. The presentation of this size would probably cause significant recognition of ETH prices, additionally increasing the costs of the attack.
Related: Great miners pose a growing existential threat to bitcoins
Last Ethereum defense line
Matan Sitbon, founder and general director of the Lightblocks blockchain interoperability programmers, told Cointelegraph that Ethereum has an additional function to defend against such attacks.
“The final security of Ethereum is not only in the cryptography or the principles of the protocol, but in the powerful mechanisms of social and economic coordination of the community,” he said.
Drake also emphasized another advantage that he claims that Ethereum has over Bitcoin. He explained that “if there is a 51%attack, the social layer can identify the attacker and reduce it socially.”
“This is a superpower POS that are not available in POW,” he added.
Drake’s statement refers to the social layer, which means the human supervision of the network that decides which software to run. The simpler Bitcoin (POW) consensus mechanism has a smaller attack area and longer reliability, but it lacks this function.
Pavel Yashin, a researcher from P2P.org, said Cointelegraph that “if centralization is detected”, the community can solve it with a recent fork. The ancient token would ultimately be removed and the threatened chain would fall into irrelevant.
Hassan Khan, general director of Bitcoin Protocol Protocol Ordeza, told Cointelegraph that “the debate around the feasibility of 51% of the attack remains open-mainly because although theoretically possible, in practice the barriers are extremely high.”
He said that for Bitcoin the necessary amount of computing force and energy “makes the lasting attack very unbelievable”, while for Ethereum “POS introduces additional economic and management agents.”
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