Hacker News Reader

Though that's also assuming people don't do anything about the blatant attack.

True, but if such a attack only costs 400$/hr there's going to quite a lot of them to do things about.

It's almost like if it were true that if it only cost $400/hr to 51% attack the BTC chain, we would actually see it happening much more often.

Exactly, that's (very roughly) why it not only is, but must be, that you cannot, in fact, reduce the hash rate significantly without compromising the integrity of the ledger.

That depends on how you define integrity.

If we cut the hash rate tenfold, which is definitely significant, you'd still need to find someone who has hundreds of thousands of dollars of motivation to perform an attack. Having that motivation is hard when it takes a huge amount of double spending all at once, the attack will damage the integrity of the coin, and clients can be modified to be highly resistant to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com