Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: If an attacker gets more than 50 % of mining power
by
Meni Rosenfeld
on 02/07/2011, 18:14:49 UTC
Reversing 1000 future blocks takes a week with 52%.

This is certainly wrong, and your other numbers are probably wrong, too. If you control 52% of the network, you must use one of your blocks to negate a legitimate block 48% of the time. So 48% of the network is producing legitimate blocks, 48% of the network is negating those blocks, and only 4% is left producing new blocks. The network would only produce 5.76 blocks per day.
My numbers are not wrong, they just relate to a different attack from what you have in mind. I was talking about building up an alternative branch starting from the current block, without releasing blocks during construction. After about a week, the honest network will have on average 1000 blocks while the attacker will have on average 1083 blocks, and with high probability he will have more blocks.