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Bitcoin (BTC) is known to have several elements that facilitate securing the cryptocurrency from theft. Bitcoin’s usage of a distributed ledger technology – commonly known as the blockchain, provides owners a record of all the transactions made and this cannot be tampered with in any way because there’s no single point of failure. However, the question remains. What if someone succeeds in hacking the king coin?
The 51% attack on bitcoin
Such thought was tackled during Laura Shin’s “Unchained Podcast” as she invited a couple of experts to debate whether or not an attack on bitcoin would be possible. The host brought in author Vijay Boyapati and Ethereum Foundation Researcher Justin Drake to talk about the possibility of a so-called 51% attack on bitcoin.
Boyapati pitched in the idea that security was a spectrum and not binary. A good example is users and even networks have this requisite of a different number of transaction confirmations before they were met to which Drake seconded.
Nonetheless, the researcher pointed out that if a would-be attacker is in control of more than 50 percent of the hash power, the security turns into a binary. He went on to state that hackers can attain such power over bitcoin as they can have the capability to mine empty blocks.
Also, Drake criticized bitcoin’s proof-of-work principle claiming that an attacker could likely turn the above-mentioned power into reality by purchasing the hash power requisite to manipulate 51 percent of the BTC network.
He commented that one can look at the bitcoin network’s hashrate which according to him is around 150 million terahashes per second and ask as to how much does it cost to produce and deploy one terahash per second and one can put a dollar amount to that.
He explains that if an individual were to assign, let’s say $50 to a single terahash, he/she would be needing at least $7.5 billion to carry on the attack on bitcoin. Further, Drake described such economic shields as peanuts if nations like the U.S. or China were to carry such an attack.
Game theory approach
Boyapati, on the other hand, believes otherwise. He highlighted that bitcoin was devised to incentivize its users with greater hash power to mine BTC rather than attacking its network.
While Drake showed an attack on bitcoin from an economic standpoint, Boyapati took the game theory approach to point out that nation-states that plan to hack bitcoin would be met with resistance from both nation-states that have BTCs as their reserve asset and financial institutions.
The author then brought up this so-called nuclear option where it involves the alteration of the SHA-256 proof-of-work. He said that under an extremely grave situation, there’s a possibility that participants within the network would push the agenda of wanting to tweak their proof-of-work function.
Such a move, according to Boyapati, would render every machine bought including the energy they’ve put into attacking the bitcoin network useless.
Billionaires’ game
Drake countered this thought of Boyapati and described the solution as a flawed one. He highlighted the possibility that these attackers could be resorting to GPUs, CPUs, and ASIC miners and redo the said process. He also stated that attacking bitcoin is nothing more but a game to the likes of Elon Musk and firms like MicroStrategy.
With a background in journalism, Ritika Sharma has worked with many reputed media firms focusing on general news such as politics and crime. She joined The Coin Republic as a reporter for crypto, and found a great passion for cryptocurrency, Web3, NFTs and other digital assets. She spends a lot of time researching and delving deeper into these concepts around the clock, and is a strong advocate for women in STEM.
