Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin - What if governments restrict or block electricity supply for mining?
by
mocacinno
on 20/04/2018, 06:35:13 UTC
I remember back in ~2015, one of the bigger mining farms was rumoured to have >50% of the hashrate, and even then, it wasn't catastropic...

it wasn't a mining farm it was a mining pool called Ghash and it was lots of individual miners (and also their own hashrate) that were connected to that pool, when the article about the risk of 51% attack was published and these individual miners saw the possible threat drama they simply switched to other pools and their total hashrate dropped.

Your memory is better than mine, thanks for the correction Smiley
But even so, there was a point where this pool *could* have executed a 51% attack using their miner's hardware (without them knowing), but (obviously) they didn't... My main point is that even if a pool/farm controlls >50% of the hashrate, it is seldom in their own best intrest to attack the network. Those pools/farms are heavily invested in BTC, and an attack (and the following price drops because of the bad press) would probably hurt them a lot more than the BTC they would have stolen by remining some of the last blocks.