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Comment by zooq_ai | Hacker News Reader

Governments, Big Corps can easily co-ordinate a 51% attack on any proof-of-work networks.

If BTC's marketcap is $1T and it'll only take $5B for a 51% attack, there can be some arbitrage opportunity for a large hedge fund determined enough.

The only thing preventing this is the attacker must execute this flawlessly including attacking all the forks that may happen.

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The problem is the government has to acquire the hardware. There isn’t 51% of the hash power in spare mining equipment lying around. It’s all decentralized.

Ummm really?, is that your counter-argument for governments that have Trillions in their budget?

The US government could spend trillions to surreptitiously manufacture extremely specialized equipment without anyone knowing, turn it on to do a 51% attack, and when it’s over the network will just fork and reverse the transactions. It’s illogical

I think it's fair to say that western cryptologic agencies could likely repurpose hardware, perhaps to a degree unknown in the public space.

delusional to think, the western governments can't attack the forked version too.

Also, who decides which transactions to reverse? and why would an entity with 51% power agree to that?

No one in crypto has thought through this

Yep you’re the first person to ever consider this - tell the world!

You're assuming you dont have state sponsors heavily invested in it already - and have been for years. Which is actually kind of hilarious, as it also assumes the blockchain is safe from other threat models. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant chunk of bitcoin movements were state sponsored; its the next logical move - first you build a brivate internet, then you build a private currency.

There's also a legal risk for private entities, as the conviction of Avraham Eisenberg showed recently, and I think a strong possibility that a successful attack would crash the valuation of BTC and make it impossible to recoup costs.

That’s not what a 51% attack can do. It doesn’t allow you to “steal” money

It allows you to double spend, which is pretty much stealing from the first recipient...

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