The more decentralization of the network hash rate, the better power to prevent 51% attack. However, it does not mean miners should run solo mining rig to do that task. They can join mining pools but avoid super big pools that have too high total hash rates.

You are worrying too much and in the past, some big mining pools had chance to do 51% attack but they did not do this. It's because they won't gain anything good for themselves if they make such attacks.

Bitcoin mining history
Hash rate distribution over time

Having more people running miners or nodes can help to further decentralize and secure the network against a 51% attack, but there are costs involved, and it may not be feasible to compel a large number of people to do so. The community may be more focused on other ways to promote decentralization.

Consider the capital of 1,000,000 people to run one miner because the question remains will everybody have the capital? Though it will decentralized the network system. In this contemporary world where people have different opinion I guess even if one million persons run a miner, attacks will be difficult but is still inevitable.

Obviously if the network has a high distribution of nodes it has greater protection against attacks but it is highly unlikely to perform a 51% already now.  We would need quantum computers with great computational capabilities and this is currently expected in about twenty years.

It's quite impossible in the current year of 2023 to do an attack of 51%.

Current Bitcoin Network Hash Rate: 357.13 EH/s (https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart)
You would need 182 EH/s hash rate owned by bad actors to do this attack. Now let's do some math about the cost it would take to do this attack.

182 ExaHash is 182000000 TeraHash.
We will take the best ASIC Miner: Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hydro with a hash rate of 255.00 TeraHash.

We would need 713,725 Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hydro ASIC Miners to do the 51% attack.
Each costing 5304W power usage, 713,725 will be using 3,785,597,400W power which will cost millions.

1 Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hydro costs $7k. 713k will cost $4,996,075,000 excluding shipping fees and running the grid, providing cooling, and maintenance.

I am sure you got an idea of how hard is to get this attack done against the whole network which is currently decentralized. Let me know if you want to know much more about it in terms of numbers.

There was a discussion a few years about how the government bank whoever would not even have to buy all the miners.
All they would have to do is setup a phony PPS pool that paid some stupid amount of PPS say 120%.
All the miners would flock to that pool, and all they would have to do then is slowly wait till a few of the larger pools went bankrupt since everyone else is mining there.

You would have the pools like foundry that are using their own miners, but how long till the investors start to bail since they are not showing the numbers that other places are.

Yes, there are several flaws with this. But you bet it would cause enough disruption of mining to allow them to do other things.

All it all, a 51% attack from the government big business is not a big worry for most people.

-Dave

If big bad government felt threatened by Bitcoin like bitcoiners tend to say, that would be a good incentive to attack it and make 99.9% of users abandon it. But they know well that Bitcoin is not a threat to fiat, because people don't use it for payments, the biggest use case is speculative investment, which can be taxed.

To answer your post simply OP, yes, this would theoretically decentralize the Bitcoin network further and would be an appropriate effort into preventing a 51% attack. The only issue is that a lot of these solo miners would probably join pools, which centralizes their hash rate to one place. However, it's still better than one party controlling all of the hashpower.


A group interested in hurting Bitcoin's integrity or security could severely hurt the price of Bitcoin in the short term if they successfully carried out a 51% attack and/or modified the Bitcoin blockchain by doing so. These groups definitely exist. In fact, these groups are still more powerful than the Bitcoin community to this day and would have the resources to make an attempt at doing so. I'd say it's highly unlikely that it will happen or could be coordinated though. It's expensive to try.

As has been noted by others here, it's possible to launch a 51% attack, but it's unlikely to happen. It costs a lot of money and doesn't bring benefit. There's a calculation here about $5 billion, but that's just based on the required number of Antminers. I don't think the supply is nearly high enough to realistically purchase 713k miners, and then I can't imagine the sort of facility that would be needed (or, more likely, many facilities) to actually put the machines there, to not overpower the local electricity grids, to rent the places, hire the maintenance people, keep the operation steady for at least some time but also succeed fast enough for the difficulty rate to not adjust to a sudden huge surge of miners. If someone tries buying out existing mining operations, the prices will go up, more people will feel the need to join mining out of FOMO, etc. So there's much more to it, I think, and it might be impossible to account for all of it to say whether it's practically possible (rather than hypothetically possible) to perform a 51% attack on Bitcoin.

I capitalised on bitcoin is not a threat to fiat, many countries seems bitcoin as a threat to fiat currency but I believe and that should be of the reasons while government doesn't like to legalise bitcoin as a legal tender,  because from the day one bitcoin was established many countries can purchase bitcoin directly through bank with options given by banks through credit card or debit card in Africa,  but it got to an instinct that governments restricted some of the banks not to be a in a collaboration or been a supporting hand to purchase bitcoin because of the terms and conditions given by government, so the objective of government to give all this order or restricted buying of bitcoin except peer to peer transaction aspect is that they felt that bitcoin wants to take over fiat currency and the negative instinct having about bitcoin.