at $24b to $100b is at current eth price, thats about 7m eth to 30m eth need to be sold*. this is way more than 1-4% of eth coin
its a minimum of 5% and upto 25%..

*.. and thats before even including all the factors of eth price crash whilst those coins sell meaning even more coins need to be sold just to get some (depleting) dollar price to then invest in asics

.. it is worth noting to sell eth, there needs to be a buyer. so new buyers would then take over the limited control of ethereum, which infact could be bitcoiners buying very cheap eth to then PoS attack the ethereum network, and arbitrage the ethereum market

so whilst colluding ethereum stakers sell out and wait months to get hardware hoping to attack bitcoin.. bitcoiners can market manipulate ethereum market and instantly attack ethereum due to its PoS system.. meaning bitcoin can attack ethereum faster than ethereum can attack bitcoin

if you check how ethereum (when it was PoW) had its own independent market sentiment and volatility based on its international variance window of value premium based on the differing mining costs due to electricity price variance... and then when going PoS you can see it become more of a shadow of bitcoin movement/wiggles cloning the ups and downs of the bitcoin market. and from the point of may 14th 2021 when it went very stable in comparison to bitcoins market. as seen by the bitcoin:ethereum market chart of the last 5 years where from may 14th 2021 the variance of the 2 markets went from instable to stable.

this is due to the bitcoin market taking control of the sentiment of ethereum market by arbitraging the market
check out the 5 year charts of the btc:eth market (stabilised where over 3 years the ratio only changed from 1btc:12eth to 1btc:20eth) whereby ethereum is slowly losing its ratio amount whilst still shadowing bitcoins price at the depleting ratio(slowly changing/losing its peg)

its went from a massive 1btc:60eth(2019 independent) to a 1btc:12eth(2021 controlled) when bitcoiners took control of ethereum sentiment and artificially fixed ethereum at a bubble market

this arbitrage ability KEPT the ethereum market up high even when the ethereums cost base of acquiring new coin by other means dropped by 95%
this means whilst the PoS coin acquisition market dropped to ~$50 a coin cost, the speculative market remained artificially held up at $thousands purely due to the arbitrage opportunities performed by bitcoiners

this bubble can burst
its also worth noting that you STILL think that its only going to need 1-4% of ether.. again i suggested you do some math, and i even done some math for you based on a hypothetical of freezing the prices.. now if you realise the 5-25% of coins will actually cause a price change.. meaning even 5% is best case of zero market crash, and its more likely to be a higher number of coins sold to get to the dollar amounts to need to buy the asics to perform an attack..

and as said, but worth emphasising
whilst ether stakeholders sell off and wait months to gather hardware to attack bitcoin but end up becoming honest bitcoin miners due to their ROI being at risk.. the bitcoiners whom could decide to buy up the cheaper ethereum can INSTANTLY attack the ethereum network due to its instant access to coin to then stake to then control code changes and block verification without need to wait months. so ethereum can be attacked far easier than bitcoin

so play some scenarios out and run the math. its fun and educational

for instance,
imagine the arbitrage market route of
ETH->USD->BTC
when a eth staker sells for dollar it causes a eth price decrease. then when they hand $ to asic manufacturers, those manufacturers could invest that $ in BTC causing a BTC price increase.
USD->BTC
then using the BTC to buy CHEAPER ETH,
USD->BTC->ETH
 the traders can repeat the arbitrage cycle and cause more ETH price crash, repeat
ETH->USD->BTC->ETH->USD

It's not rocket science to find out the Capital Expenditures of Bitcoin miners. Many are publicly traded companies with open reports. I think the authors of the referenced paper, Nuzzi et al., have been able to make a valid estimate.

Yes, it would take some time if the Ethereum stakeholders choose to set up the farms themselves, but it can be be done, even if it will take several months.

This is a bit of a tangent but you mention that Bitcoin's price would be unaffected. Personally I don't foresee that. It seems to me that when knowing that an attack is underway, some Bitcoin investors would already start to get uneasy, and some would sell their bitcoin. And since this will cause the price of Bitcoin to drop, the 51% attack will then only be easier to afford in theory, as the mining rewards would be decreased and some of the honest miners therefore ought to fall off. This could create a feedback loop where, once the attack is looming in the near future, more and more Bitcoin investors will migrate elsewhere, potentially to Ethereum.

And just to put things into perspective, if we assume the lower estimate of around $6B for the attack, then even if only 20% of the Ethereum investors choose to contribute in funding the attack, they will only have to part with money proportional to 5% of their owned Ether in order to afford it.

And while we are on that topic, there seems to be people here who doubt that the Ethereum investors would be able to withdraw even as low as 1% of the total Ether without causing a crash of the whole cryptocurrency. But even though I personally find this proposition kinda far-out, in reality most investors do not just invest in one thing. The vast majority of Ethereum investors would thus have other kinds of assets as well that they can trade, and most likely easily more than ~5%. I hope we can soon put this particular sub-discussion behind us.



If the attackers rewrite a large part of the ledger, they can keep all the transactions that they want while discarding or replacing all the others. If they thus make sure to trade a lot of bitcoin back and forth in the time before the attack, they can in principle steal vast amounts if they then keep all their incoming transactions but discard and replace all outgoing transaction from their wallets.

This is but one example of the harm they can do. It is widely accepted that a 51% attack would be devastating to Bitcoin. (But we can of course discuss it further if you are not convinced yet.)

YEARS not months. That much excess mining gear does not exist, so you would have to have been stockpiling for at least a year if not 2 or 3 to get that amount of gear. Or you could just take over the used markets and buy it all but then you are suffering from having an mixed batch of used equipment you have to deal with.

-Dave

Sorry I'm lagging a bit behind the discussion. My internet is not the best where I'm at right now.

Well, for the sake of the argument, let us just agree that it could be as low as 5% for now? And then we can always discuss later if it could be even less.

So as I understand you, you are saying that Ethereum's value is not at all based in its estimated use as a cryptocurrency (by the investors), now and in the future, but its value is instead based solely on some current money scheme, and one which is dependent on the existence of Bitcoin?

I hope I'm not the only one who doesn't know about this. Can you perhaps briefly explain how this scheme works to inflate the price of Ethereum? Or if you have some links/references, maybe you could give them?

I will posit, however, that if Bitcoin indeed has this security flaw and Ethereum does not, then it would seem to me that Bitcoin is the inflated cryptocurrency, and that Ethereum is bound to overtake it at some point, unless of course Bitcoin is able to mitigate this attack vector.

To your point about Bitcoin being able to attack Ethereum, the point of Ethereum's consensus mechanism, in its current state, is that at least a third of the stakers is supposed to confirm a block before it reaches finality. So that would already be 33% of the Ether required (assuming that intention of the attack will be leaked and that the Ethereum investors have enough time to join the staking process). This is $144B.

And what's more, the Bitcoin investors would only be able to grow their assets by ~30% if they somehow manage this, whereas the Ethereum investors would be able to grow their assets by ~200%, i.e. given that the attack causes the rival to take its competitors full share of the cryptocurrency market.

If the roles were reversed, on the other hand, and Bitcoin was ~30% of the price of Ethereum, the Bitcoin investors would not even have the money to afford the attack, albeit if we count only their wealth in Bitcoin assets.

And on top of all this, if you for instance read the 'Proof-of-Stake and Security' section of https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/#pos-and-security, it seems that the Ethereum investors would just choose to revert the 51% attack in case that it happens (similarly to what they did with the DAO). This is possible when the voting power of the cryptocurrency ledger is ultimately distributed to the stakeholders/investors rather than whoever controls a portion of the hash rate in the world.

What I am imagining is that the Ethereum stakeholders could first of all start being vocal about this security risk of Bitcoin. This wouldn't require any effort, really, and no risk. And already it might make some investors migrate from Bitcoin to Ethereum, which would thus grow their assets. In fact, I think they are bound to do this at some point, since it could potentially gain them a lot with almost no effort.

I've mentioned that once this migration has started, it might cause a positive feedback loop (due to lower mining rewards, which in turns makes the 51% attack even more affordable), causing more and more investors to follow suit. But let's assume that this talk alone won't exactly cause a total crash of Bitcoin yet (which is of course a reasonable assumption).

But now the Ethereum stakeholders/investors are in a situation where the more they talk about how they might actually consider an attack in some near future, the more the Bitcoin investors might get uneasy and start moving their assets to Ethereum instead. So while they might be hesitant to come out in support of an attack at first, with up to around a trillion USD on the line, they are bound, in my opinion, to be more and more bold in terms of being publicly open towards participating in an attack.

They might also very well invest some effort into drumming up public support for an attack, using the argument that the elimination of PoW would end up sparing the world from a large electricity consumption. Given how a very large part of the public is very mindful of energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, I don't think that will have a hard time at all swaying a large part of the public.

And after this whole (long) prelude, if the Bitcoin investors haven't already started to abandon ship, but stubbornly maintains that Bitcoin isn't at risk, and/or that a 51% attack wouldn't cause much harm to it, then the Ethereum investors might very well slowly start to band together to fund some initial acts of showcasing their power, e.g. by making what I refer to as 'partial attacks' in my preprint.

And if somehow the Bitcoin investors still cling to their blockchain, and also won't commit to try to hard-fork to a PoS consensus mechanism in order to mitigate the attack vector, well, then who knows, some of the Ethereum stakeholders might then even be bold enough to try to fund (perhaps anonymously) an actual 51% attack against Bitcoin.

Long story short: The whole process might take several months or years in total, and might include a large portion of the Ethereum investors in the end.

Wait, are Bitcoin miners able to sell their mined bitcoin to a higher price than the market price?? Who are buying these coin? It would make sense that the Bitcoin stakeholders as a whole could benefit buy making sure that the miners get enough rewards to continue keeping the hash rate high, but it highly surprises me if a few Bitcoin investors are willing to selflessly make sacrifices on behalf of the group in order to make this happen.?

Edit:
By the way, I promise to get back to you about your other points in the same post.

The fluctuations of the price of Ethereum does seem to follow those of the price of Bitcoin as far as I can see. The way I see it, perhaps as naive as I am, this indicates that these fluctuations are due to investors' overall confidence/regard for cryptocurrency fluctuating (put in simplified terms), whereas the relative regard for value of Ethereum vs. the value of Bitcoin remains comparatively constant in the meanwhile.

You seem to think that this is wrong. Is this an opinion you see mirrored elsewhere? Am I simply out of the loop in terms of how cryptocurrency is valued?

Is its price not ultimately based on how useful the investors foresee it to be as currency, and thus how many people will draw utility from the it and use it as a means of payment, in the present as well as in the future?

You also talk of some mechanism that ensures that the price of Bitcoin will never fall below a certain threshold. Can you perhaps provide a link or reference explaining this, or can you elaborate a bit more? It seems a tad unbelievable to be quite honest, but I'm happy to be corrected.

So, do you really thing while someone is buying billions and billions of dollars of mining gear over a couple of years (and not mining with it) nobody is going to notice.
Remember, other people will keep buying gear and increasing difficulty and that would make you have to buy even more gear (and not mine with it) otherwise you will be driving up the difficulty on yourself.

ETH being a POS coin with as I stated above 60% of it's capacity at 3 providers would be easier and cheaper to kill. Think about it $20 billion will get you 1% of Amazon stock and a complete buyout of Hetzner & OVH
With 1% control of the Amazon stock it would be simple to put a proposal out to the board an have them shut down all ETH nodes hosted there along with the others you could take out 60% of the ETH nodes leaving people hanging. And then watch as a bunch of the remaining stakers all start to sell to get their coins out before the total crash.

Could probably do it for a lot less Hetzner has 18% of all ETH nodes out there and the company is valued at less then $3 billion OVH has 12% of the nodes and it valued at a lot less add in a couple of others for for $5 billion you could control over 35% of the ETH nodes and close to 50% of the staked nodes. Then you come in one morning and shut them all off. Sit back and watch the chaos.

Most people staking have no idea what to do or how it works, all the know is they clicked a few keys and now their ETH is earning less then having sold it for cash and putting that cash in a savings account. (3.25% give or take for ETH vs 4%+ for a good savings account and if you want to lock up your cash like the ETH stake people have their ETH locked up you can get 5%+ on a short term CD)

If someone (or some government) wanted to attack BTC there are better cheaper ways of doing it then mining. EVERYONE knows this more or less. And as I keep pointing out since no person government has done it it just kind of proves that they know that even if massively attacked BTC would improvise & adapt & overcome.

-Dave