Can Bitcoin be attacked by 51%?
For small cryptocurrency miners, mining is losing its meaning day by day. With electricity prices expensive and large-scale mining pools increasing day by day, the market has become over-shared and unprofitable.. Due to this situation, the separation of small miners and the increase in processing power of large pools brought the risk of 51% Attack.
Understanding the 51% Attack Concept
51% attack or majority attack requires a high amount of hash power for such distributed networks. This type of attack can also occur during the confirmation of a person’s action.. By taking over most of a network’s processing power, a miner or mining pool can alter its transaction history and prevent new transactions from being confirmed.
Bitcoin miners basically use powerful computers to confirm transactions.. Usually many miners have mining pools that pool their processing power and working that way is more efficient for miners.. If one of such pools can collect more than 50% of the miners’ total processing power, they can manipulate the system according to their needs.
Bitcoin mining: Small independent miners & Large institutional miners
The amount required for a miner in America to process 1 Bitcoin is $3,000. For profitability, miners need to buy powerful machines and chips. Powerful machines mean more electricity consumption and more investment. The more electricity consumed, the higher the mining cost.. Electricity is one of the most important issues, especially for small-scale miners.
As the hash difficulty required to process Bitcoin increases, profitability naturally decreases.. For this reason, miners gather their processor powers and form a mining pool association.
As a result of a trend that started not long ago and recently and is growing rapidly, these pools are influential in the crypto money industry. they began to be. Moreover, chip producing companies started to produce special chips to increase profitability.. Bitmain and ASIC miner are two popular commercial mining companies.. According to reports, these two companies earn 3-4 billion dollars a year from mining alone.
Is the 51% Attack Realistic?
As a matter of fact, although there is such a possibility in theory, there is practically no such risk as of now.. A 51% attack does not seem likely at the moment, but it may be possible in the future.. Especially when it comes to Bitcoin, Bitcoin transaction approval working with the Proof of Work mechanism is done by miners.. If the majority of the mining transaction volume is in the hands of a person, this means a great threat to Bitcoin.
Ghash.io, once one of the largest mining pools, became this situation in 2014. it was pretty close. If a person owns 51% of the mining transaction volume at any given time, they can confirm double spend, prevent confirming a real transaction, and reverse old transactions.. It can perform this and many other operations outside the normal flow of the system.
A point to note is that if there are many pending transactions in the mempool, then miners can earn serious profits from mining. they can get. The probability of a 51% attack stands out as the most discussed topic in the crypto money industry and creates a cloud of doubt about the future of the industry.. It is vital for the future of the industry that this issue is resolved so that it does not come to the fore again.