Doing a 51% attack may not in itself be illega, but double spending is fraud and that is illegal.

Exactly. There are no laws that limit an individual's (or a collaboration of individuals) hashpower relative to everyone else's. A single company could take control of 90% of Bitcoin's hashpower and there would be nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It only becomes illegal once the people in power use that power, well, illegally. Double spending is fraud, so that's definitely illegal. Other things though, like rejecting transactions may not be, depending on how they're construed.

I don't even think there will be any laws ever that would prevent anyone from grabbing 51% control of any crypto, because the way they work already kind of discourages it. If anyone started to hold like 45% of Bitcoin's hashpower, for example, people are going to drop it and it's going to lose its value, making an attack counterproductive (and that in itself is the consequence you're asking about). These only usually happen to small coins which can be 51% attacked with minimal resources.

In most cases,activities that are considered as illegal are immoral as well,but some activities might legal,yet immoral.I think that a 51% attack is the same as corporate piracy.Corporate piracy is the action of buying 51% of stocks from some company that doesn`t want to be bought by you.Such activity is legal(it doesn`t break the law),but it`s immoral,because it might damage other people,who hold stocks in that company,if you decide to bankrupt the company.

Let us not focus on the technical aspect or how 51% attack is done. The attack is like double-spending and what have other have called this attack it is equivalent to a digital counterfeit. And we all know a counterfeit currency is illegal in any country for some it is even considered as a national threat. Double-spending itself is fraudalent by nature meaning it is punishable by penal laws. They are basically taking advantage of someone just for their gain.

I don't think even double spending is fraud. I mean it is obviously fraudulent activity, but im not sure if any government at all has made laws regarding the double spend case since crypto is such a new phenomena.

I think there is nothing illegal per se, the only law is the protocol itself. It wouldn't hurt if governments made it clear for miners that if they attempted a %51 attack they would go to jail tho, but the protection against %51 attack should come from incentives not to do so within the crypto system itself and not depending on the protection of a government. So far Bitcoin is the only coin that has that, the rest of coins are fucked.

I think that's a really fascinating area, legally. Miners are expected to act honestly because they are incentivized to -- attacks have costs and honest mining is profitable. But does a tort actually occur if, say, they use chain reorgs to allow double spending? After all, I don't think there's any law that would require miners to accept any and all transactions. Ethics aside, why can't they legally publish a new branch that drops certain confirmed transactions from the best chain (and therefore allows double spending by those they are colluding with)?

Governments most likely don't care as long as you aren't dealing with fiat.

For instance, was the "DAO hack" legal? It was just the code itself, exploited, but if "code is law" applies then it was not a crime from a strict crypto perspective. What if the government made a law saying exploiting smart contracts was a crime while "code is law" is supposed to be the case?

What's clear is these funds were bailed out and for me when that happened the whole dream of "smart contracts" collapsed, it's really nonsense. You either get hardforks to recover money (so code is not law) or you get in legal trouble because of governments making laws about outcome of smart contracts.

Only the protocol itself can ultimately protect your tokens and Bitcoin seems to be the only safe place to hold said tokens, adding complex smart contracts will only increase risk.

It's a really interesting question and I think that's the only likely answer.

There's no one to adjudicate or guarantee anything. You're not offered anything to agree to when you sign up. You're one of millions of hands on the tiller and a bigger one can come along and send it off in another direction.

Presumably somewhere some legal minds have been tasked with creating some sort of report on this for deep pockets. I also presume their conclusion was 'tough shit'.

Ethereum has a big single point of failure called Vitalik Buterin. It's also not even decentralized. The mining is even worse than Bitcoin, and the nodes is definitely WORSE than Bitcoin at such insane level of growth rate.





There was never an alignment to fork. The fact that Ethereum Classic was created and still exists shows that it was a failed hardfork. A successful fork doesn't generate an altcoin, if there is consensus the legacy chain dies.

Vitalik and friends lost a lot of money and they recovered it via hardfork. Ethereum is a joke. No "code is law", not a safe store of value, doesn't even scale to be an usable token for common payments. I still don't see why ETH is worth what it is other than it's ability to generate ICO's and Vitalik having big connections like Putin, certain banking groups etc, to keep it in the news.