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Comment by algo646464 | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail?

I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So you will need a lot of computational power to rewrite history and also overtake the rest of the network.

Why would some additional reward for mining (by solving a useful problem) break this?

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You don't actually need 51% of the mining power to perform a double-spend attack. Just by pure chance, even with 10% of the mining power, you will find 5 blocks in a row sometimes.

With a "wasteful" PoW, miners would not attempt this as they would hemorrhage money doing that.

Withe a "useful" PoW, miners could have an outside funding source like some institute that pays for protein folding. The would not lose money in their attempt to produce a minority chain (in proportion to the "usefulness" of their PoW)

The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners, good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact it should actually increase the participation in the network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but are interested in the "useful" problem being solved.

The external reward by itself provides no competitive advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount. Rewriting history still remains difficult.

So what am I missing here?

Rewriting history needs to be expensive, not just difficult. If you decrease the cost of writing history, you decrease the penalty of participating in a minority chain.

I always understood the security of block-chains as a race between the good and the bad agents.

Both are extending their respective chains as fast as they can. A bad-agent, who wishes to double-spend has to rewrite history, and therefore has to start a few step behind the good agent. To succeed, the bad agent has to overtake the good agent.

Even if both have the same speed (i.e. 50% computational power each), the good agent will sill be a few steps ahead of the bad agent, and the system is secure. If the bad agent is faster(51%), then eventually it will overtake the good agent breaking security.

This is true even if the cost of computation is zero (e.g. the Govt. pays for all your computation cost). As long as the bad agent doesn't have 51% or more of the computational power, the system is secure.

An attacker does not have to wait in order to produce a parallel chain. He can mine his separate chain immediately after submitting the transaction.

Even with less than 50% hashrate, he is bound to find a few blocks in a row from time to time. Keep in mind that he can run the attack as often as he wants. This is why the recommendation is to wait for 6 blocks - it is very unlikely (not impossible) that somebody with a 20% hashrate ever finds 6 blocks in a row.

When an attack is successful, everybody will mine on the attackers chain - including the honest miners. The attackers chain is valid after all, it just has a different valid transaction set.

The significance of the 51% hashpower is that the attacker is guaranteed to succeed over a long-enough time horizon.

Reducing or removing the costs of mining a parallel chain (even for miners with 20% hashpower) reduces their cost to mine a parallel chain and weakens the security guarantee. If a miner can work on a side chain and get paid for protein folding at the same time, he can keep doing it without losing money on electricity. When he finally succeeds, he will also cash in the mining reward.

Ok that makes sense.

But I wonder why doesn't this problem also arise in the current Proof-of-Work system. A sufficiently well-funded group, with about 20% hash-rate can try to extend the current head of the blockchain by 6 fake blocks at every time. If they succeed, i.e. all 6 fake blocks are mined before the real network mines 6 real blocks, then they can publish their parallel chain with the fake transactions and it would be longer than the real chain.

This is equivalent to the expected number of coin tosses to get 6 consecutive heads, where the coin is heads with probability 1/5. Here, heads means that a fake block is mined before the corresponding real block is mined. This number is less than 20000, which corresponds to about 6 months of time. This is expensive, but not infeasible. They just need to remain solvent until they succeed and then easily cover the costs.

Yup, this is indeed a weakness of the current PoW system.

People often misunderstand it to be completely secure if no attacker has more than 50% hashrate.

In reality (and as described in the whitepaper), the 51% limit is described as the state where no number of confirmations is sufficient.

If an attacker has less than 50% hashpower, you can plug in some numbers like hashpower and cost of attack and come up with a number of confirmations that is likely to be secure.

It seems to me that even in the PoW is useful, then both the honest and the dishonest miners will be able to get outside funding (from the perspective of the research institute after all, they are doing the same task). So the opportunity cost for dishonest mining is exactly the same - you miss out on the block reward more often.

If you had 10% of the network the odds of that would be only 1/100K right? Or is that not how this works?

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