From: "Артём Литвинович" <theartlav@gmail•com>
To: bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Miner dilution attack on Bitcoin - is that something plausible?
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 21:34:37 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJRVQkDM390Y4sVzA8WwM93PY4UqUa8gvPKkT-iA2UcYL6FQ+g@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 976 bytes --]
Dilution is a potential attack i randomly came up with in a Twitter
arguement and couldn't find any references to or convincing arguments of it
being implausible.
Suppose a malicious actor were to acquire a majority of hash power, and
proceed to use that hash power to produce valid, but empty blocks.
As far as i understand it, this would effectively reduce the block rate by
half or more and since nodes can't differentiate block relay and block
production there would be nothing they can do to adjust difficulty or black
list the attacker.
At a rough estimate of $52 per TH equipment cost (Antminer pricing) and
12.5 BTC per 10 minutes power cost we are looking at an order of $2 billion
of equipment and $0.4 billion a month of power costs (ignoring block
reward) to maintain an attack - easily within means of even a minor
government-scale actor.
Is that a plausible scenario, or am i chasing a mirage? If it is plausible,
what could be done to mitigate it?
-Artem
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1098 bytes --]
next reply other threads:[~2018-06-18 18:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-06-18 18:34 Артём Литвинович [this message]
2018-06-18 18:47 ` Alexander Leishman
2018-06-19 13:54 ` Eric Voskuil
2018-06-18 18:49 ` Laszlo Hanyecz
2018-06-18 20:40 ` Bram Cohen
2018-06-18 20:51 ` Bryan Bishop
2018-06-19 18:58 ` Richard Hein
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=CAJRVQkDM390Y4sVzA8WwM93PY4UqUa8gvPKkT-iA2UcYL6FQ+g@mail.gmail.com \
--to=theartlav@gmail$(echo .)com \
--cc=bitcoin-dev@lists$(echo .)linuxfoundation.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox