What is a 51% attack?
introduction
The 51% Service attack is a problem that the Bitcoin – mining can occur. Of course, the system is not perfect, which is why miners should know this phenomenon.
What is a 51% attack?
The Bitcoin infrastructure consists of different elements. A rough distinction would look like this:
- Users with their wallets
- Miner
- different user interfaces
- nodes
The nodes run the Bitcoin network, they manage the transaction traffic and guarantee that all transactions are executed according to the rules. The miners group transactions into blocks and then attach them to the blockchain . The scenario of the notorious 51% attack looks like an Attacker is responsible for more than 50% of all miners.
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Therefore the question comes: What is a 51% attack? This scenario can not be ruled out, because a look at blockchain.info is sufficient for the realization that the large mining pools F2Pool, Antpool and Btcc Pool generate over 50% of the hashrates. If these three mining pools team up, they could always get their blockchain through. Satoshi Nakamoto has examined this scenario in Section 11 in his paper.
The attacker could inject wrong blocks, that was Nakamoto’s concern in 2008. 2017 is about the competition in attaching blocks to the Blockchain. Nakamoto calculated, however, because of his worries, the probability that an attacker with a large dominance “gets through” his blockchain. It can be seen from the calculations that in 51% of the hashrates in the hands of an attacker or miner, it has the absolute power to always attach its block. But even with less dominance, a miner can dominate.
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The probability drops only below the mark of 50%. Therefore, the question, what is a 51% attack, is a reference to the general possibility that mining pools dominate what is happening in the blockchain, rendering obsolete the idea of decentralized mining.
Possibilities with this attack
The possibilities of a dominant attacker are manifold, they could disturb the mining of bitcoins very much. Specifically, the dominant miner would have the following options:
If the attacker had control of the blockchain, he would be able to perform double-spending transactions. He would reverse transactions and then transfer them to other locations.
The consequence would be a sensitive disruption of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The attacker could prevent transactions or deny them the confirmations. One possibility in this context would be for the attacker to selectively block certain payments and thus disable individual subscribers. The attacker could steal the rewards for the blocks of other miners.
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These options are frightening, which is why miners should arm themselves against such an attack.
Possible countermeasures
The Blockchain is fortunately transparent, because its inventors wanted to prevent precisely the dominating power of individuals. It can be seen on Blockchain.info which blocks were currently found by which mining pools. Already in this way, the dominance of a single miner (very unlikely) or a mining pool can be seen.
This would contribute blocks of blockchain significantly more frequently. However, a single miner can hardly fight back. There have been proposals to paralyze hostile pools by DDoS attacks, but this proposal seemed unacceptable and unworkable. However, individual minors with average resources can increase the acknowledgments of their transaction numbers. That would make duplicate transactions more difficult. Of course an attacker with over half of the hashrates would still have the power, but achieving that position would be more and more costly and so expensive that it may not be worth it anymore.
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Gavin Andersen has described the scenario of such attacks very well, but also showed which defense is possible. Among other things, attackers would probably not only have a lot of Hashrate, but also had possessed many Bitcoins before their attack – otherwise they bleed quickly. In summary, it can be said that such attacks are serious, but also verifiable and defensive measures can be quite successful.
Users should just keep watching the network and use the transparency of the blockchain for what it is meant for: a truly decentralized monetary system without creating the market power of individuals.
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