Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw1234651234 | Hacker News Reader

You don't double your money - at that point the network is compromised and nobody wants your coins. It's a guaranteed way to destroy Ethereum's value, but the only incentive to do it is to troll. Not too many entities globally looking to spend that much for a laugh, even if they could get the necessary funds in liquid form AND manage not to drive up price with their buy orders.

View on HN

Perhaps state actors who can print free money would be interested in performing these attacks. Say if a coin was owned predominantly by citizens of one country or if the countries' infrastructure was running on ETH technologies.

Like suppose the banking system was running on ETH. Or if Colonial Pipelines used ETH.

The etherium developers and community have made relatively clear that if someone were to attempt such a thing, the non-malicious members of the community would just fork at the direction of the developers to a chain that is identical except that all of the etherium staked by the attacker is redistributed among the non-malicious verifying nodes, as it would be once the consensus process concluded that an attack was being carried out in a <51% attack scenario.

I can elaborate on any point if interested, but this is covered in the parent.

1. They would drive the price up way past market price in an attempt to make such a large purchase. The cost of a large, rapid purchase is far, far from market price. Only a fraction of the market is willing to sell at current price.

2. If a country wanted to run on Ethereum, they could clone it, since they are giving up the benefits of a GLOBAL system when they take it over.

Lmk if you have any questions. Pretty interesting topic given the insane ETH valuation atm, in contrast to, say, Algorand. Network and first move effects, I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com