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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

Even if you cannot conveniently rent the required hardware from a provider, it still seems rather concerning that behemoths like Ethereum could be brought down rather easily with an investment of a few million dollars (especially by government actors for example).

Perhaps I misunderstand the table in the article or the impact of a 51% attack however.

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They could not. Rent price on NiceHash is a market price. Even if it is not, when you'd try to buy the remaining 44% you'd have to turn to the market. Do you know what happens to the market price of something when you try to buy half of the worldwide supply?

For chains that have a broad adoption of validating nodes often called full nodes (check validity of produced blocks but not mining), a 51% attack is not enough because the bad blocks would not widely propagate. The bad blocks would be ignored.

This is why a reasonable size of the state, to allow many many to have affordable nodes which validate and check the rules, is so important. These are not the so-called miners, yet they are critical for the integrity of these distributed systems for preventing nation-state attacks.

It can't, this website is crap. Getting control of enough hardware to successfully attack Ethereum is going to be a multi billion dollar ordeal, and probably take 6+ months.

Those are some big claims without a shred of supporting evidence.

Government actor says hold my beer

Let's assume your estimate is correct. Then this is still very possible for government or Elon Musk.

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