It doesn't really matter: a government entity could order whichever company to do their bidding, or take them over by clandestine means. In the latter scenario, nobody would even know what was happening until they had complete control of the network.

GHash.io is not Russia, China or the USA. GHash.io does not have a CIA, an FBI or nuclear weapons. Etc. etc.

Well yeah but the whole system is flawed and that's because the idea behind it was flawed and it was also implemented with flaws!

Otherwise we have smart contracts in Bitcoin as well and the whole Bitcoin system is designed in a way to prevent users from doing stupid stuff like sending their coins to an OP_TRUE contract so that anyone can spend it.

Also, again, the paper is assuming an attack duration of 1 hour.

That's $6-20 billion thrown out the window for... what? Showing that it could be done? The thing is, the 6 confirmations that the paper is using as a basis for calculating the attack cost are pretty much arbitrary. In case of an imminent or ongoing 51% attack, exchanges and merchants can simply increase the required confirmation count, increasing the attack's cost signficantly, with very little effort.

So basically you'd spend tens of billions to stall the network for a few hours. Basically what Ordinals achieved by accident, but to a much lesser extend.

This is a very interesting point to discuss. I admittedly don't know much about the topic, but I did read this blog post by Conklin et al., https://sites.duke.edu/thefinregblog/2022/12/28/legal-liability-of-a-51-goldfinger-cryptocurrency-attack, as part of my research, which concludes that a 51% attack will be hard to prosecute in reality.

Its argument in particular about why the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would be difficult for a prosecutor to use is quite interesting.

Yes, we certainly agree that it would likely require some change in the public perception of crypto. But who knows, that could happen. And it seems to me that once the Ethreum stakeholders truly realize that there could be up to a trillion dollars on the line, they will have more than enough motivation (and means) to make the public more acutely aware of the competition between the two blockchains.


No, the operational costs that the paper mentions are only in the millions. (And if we consider the daily total mining rewards, we also see that the price is measured in the millions.) So by far the largest part of the price of a 51% attack will be due to acquiring the ASICs (and/or compensating bribed miners for their ASICs).

So the US government was protecting Bitcoin from a 51% attack in 2012 and 2013 when Karpeles was running the biggest exchange in the world... That's an interesting theory
If China could do something about bitcoin and knew it was protected by the US, why didn't they? Why would they instead ban exchanges when Bitcoin was cheap and vulnerable to an attack by a rich and powerful country? As time goes by the cost of an attack will go up. There was a window to do it in the early years, but they ignored bitcoin thinking it wouldn't survive on its own. Now it's too late.
As for Russia forcing other people to do things... They can't even force one much smaller and weaker country to do what they want and give up some land.

you linked stats about blockchain transactions. not market volume
also of the $10b estimated actual market volume of ethereum today, majority of that is not sourced from staked ethereum holders but instead from a small amount of traders whom are bitcoin based and are arbitraging the markets in a loop pattern several times a second

so now put the math to work.. if you had an actual group of actual ethereum holders that want to wealth transfer to then invest in bitcoin hardware. the numbers even over many days would effect the markets

also i know you want to imagine it as many people selling just 0.0x eth every second for weeks on end, but in reality knowing that over 2 million bitcoin asics need to be bought over say 6 months to keep the collusive gang in check/entertained that their plan can succeed. they would need to sell hundreds of thousands of eth periodically to then bulk order in batches the hardware

as for your next suggestion about having ethereum users lock their ethereum and try to convince physical hardware owners of bitcoin miners to disrupt bitcoin whereby they only get paid after the disruption... um no just no.. the asic owners whom will still have hardware after the attack wont shoot self in foot for a temporary payday if it meant long term harm to their long term investment they physically hold

this is why asic miners dont even go full on extreme accelerating the hashrate as they know pushing the difficulty too fast too soon would affect their rewards.. so dont think that asic miners would suddenly jump ship just to attack their own investments for such a temporary payday that "may" not happen(ethereum holders lie about payout)

and lastly

you keep trying to make the false presumption that a 51% attack would lead to ethereum taking the top market cap.. and then win trillions because of it

sorry to inform you once again that the market cap $$ number is not real money stored in a vault waiting to be paid out..
the market cap is just a empty math number of taking the current price based on a small order of 0.0xcoin and then multiplying the number by how many coins in circulation.. its not based on real $$ held anywhere

infact if you only care about replacing a altcoin as the top market cap #1 stat.. do the simple thing.. create a altcoin with 5 trillion coins pre-mined/minted. sell 0.00x of those coins on a popular exchange for $0.01 and instantly create a market cap of multiple trillions.
yep a "#1 market cap attack" can occur at the cost of just $0.01

In terms of there being no cap on the total amount of Ether, I think the point is that while Ether is deflationary, the owners are also able to stake their Ether in the consensus protocol, which will yield them returns. The average returns gained from each ETH at any given time will be equal to the average reduction of value of each ETH at any given time due to the deflation. And since the average returns equals the average reductions, the value of the asset remains constant in time (when disregarding other factors, of course) in the eyes of the investors.


Well, it seems that we agree that in order to bribe any existing miners, the Ethereum investors would have to also compensate them for their loss of business. Therefore, whichever strategy these investors choose, i.e. bribing existing miners or constructing new mining farms, they have to ultimately pay the capital expenditures (CapEx) regardless. And that price is estimated to be between $6B and $20B.

I think this might be true for a Replay attack. But if the participating miners simply rewrites the blockchain ledger and steal a lot of bitcoin, but doesn't trade these for other commodities, then the trial will only concern the blockchain alone, and whether miners are legally allowed to construct such an alternative fork after x > 6 confirmations. Am I right in this?

And note that since the attackers true goal is to cause a crash rather than the steal itself, they would actually want to keep their stolen bitcoin on the chain.