![]() However, it appears that NiceHash could be used to commandeer the BTG hash rate for under $4,000. The attack made headlines, and it was assumed by many that a huge operation was behind the crypto-heist. In fact, both Verge and Bitcoin Gold suffered a successful 51% attack just a week ago, with Bitcoin Gold losing $18 million to double spending. The far right column which indicates that NiceHash only has 2% of the hardware required to attempt an attack on the Bitcoin network shows that the service could successfully be used to attack smaller networks like Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Private, MonaCoin, Bytecoin, and many others. However, it’s also possible to simply rent the hashing power from the NiceHash service which already has the hardware required to bring many different altcoins to their knees, according to xur17 of Crypto51.app. The hardware required to attack the Bitcoin network would cost over $1 billion, and hourly electricity costs over $500,000. While other websites have much higher estimates for the cost of a 51% attack, they did not factor in the possibility of renting the mining equipment instead of buying it.Ĭryptocurrency mining rigs are very expensive, and the hardware required to execute an attack on even a small coin with few mining nodes to compete with would be astronomical, requiring server farms full of top-tier rigs and the electricity required on top of that. The picture below is taken from the crypto51 website which was posted on the cryptocurrency subreddit of Reddit yesterday. Hashing power is easily retargetable, so not only can people rent hashing power, the larger mining pools can redirect hashing power at smaller coins for a few hours to attack them.” The goal of the site is to drive more attention to what I see as a pretty glaring problem with these smaller coins. This got me to calculate the same figures for other coins, and again it was cheaper than I thought it should be. I did the math and was honestly kind of shocked – someone could attack a cryptocurrencies worth close to a billion dollar for < $10k an hour and even less than that if you include the block rewards. “There was an attack against Bitcoin Gold a few days ago, which made me curious what the cost of an attack would be with rented hashing power. The site developer who goes by /u/xur17 on Reddit spoke to CCN.com about their motivation for creating the site: A website has been created that estimates the cost of a 51% attack on different cryptocurrencies, allowing attackers to maliciously double spend, meaning to spend the same balance twice.
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