ok lets tell you what mitigates 51% attack
a 51% attack just means that 51% of the network is malicious and plans to edit blockdata either in the past or ongoing
which can cause lots of orphans(re-orgs) if the honest network then wins a block and retains its own blocks
so lets deal with the details AGAIN
to be at 51% of the network does not mean 100% control it means equalish opportunity with a slight lead to make blocks. but the other side can also get lucky.. yes this means that the other pools can still have luck to produce blocks faster and orphan the blocks that were the dis-honest pools blocks
the chances of a malicious pool to make for instance 6 blocks in a row before the honest network makes a block to re-org back to blocklist of honest blocks is marginally small. thus for years now many people have had the strategy that for high sat amount transactions being at risk of being re-round and unconfirmed is for services and recipients to wait 6 confirms, as the 51% is more likely to make one or 2 blocks before the honest network gets its block
A "51% attack" is actually somewhat of a misnomer. It should actually be called a ">50% attack" if we wanted to be more precise. If the attacking miners controls 60%, 80%, 99%, etc., then it is still known as a "51% attack."
If one team of relay runners runs even just 6/4 = 150% the speed of the competition (in case they control 60% of the hash rate), then the would be able to overtake their opponents at some point, even if they start from a distance significantly behind them.
in most cases if dis-honest racers were running for 50 lengths on a different asphalt ring(edited chain) trying to catch up, and none of their blocks are yet to be seen by the olympic officials (network) even malicious miners with their livelyhood at risk will jump teams and want to just race on the asphalt WITH the honest runners
Ah, something just clicked. Maybe we have discussed two different things all along.
A '51% attack' refers to several kinds of attacks, both in how its executed and how the attackers gain a profit from it. In some versions, we are talking about miners who tries to collude in order to gain a larger share of the newly minted coin for themselves. And you are right, in this case, unless the attacking miners are very cohesive as a group, then it would be enticing for each individual miner to break ranks and join the honest miners.
This is not the kind of 51% attack that I'm talking about. I'm talking about an attack that targets the
traders, more so than the miners, namely by rewriting a recent part of the ledger in order to steal bitcoin.
They can in principle steal a
lot of bitcoin thereby. However, it is typically assumed that the value of bitcoin would crash as a result, meaning that such 51%-attackers would need to very quickly trade that bitcoin for other assets/commodities in order to make it profitable for them.
And then in a Goldfinger attack, the attack is then furthermore orchestrated by someone with a reverse stake in the blockchain (and I point to the fact that this opponent could in theory be a rival blockchain), which means that in case of a crash, their losses is covered by the gains from the reverse stake.
aswell as the wait X confirms if receiving high amount transactions, there is also the fact that the network wont let any mining pool spend the block reward for 100 confirms. meaning an attacker would need to sustain their block list for 101 blocks to be able to spend their first block win. that means having 100 blocks of their preference be the 'mainchain'
I have addressed this point earlier. My counterpoint is that increasing the confirmation period would already damage Bitcoin's utility as a cryptocurrency quite a lot, especially since we are potentially talking
months here. And they unfortunately can't extend the confirmation period retrospectively (relying purely on PoW). So they have to extend it continuously in anticipation of an attack if this is their mitigation strategy.
and not dont be silly and decide to rather talk about "milk is consumable" to avoid the point that production cost is different than retail cost
You seemed to argue that Bitcoin's price have a lower threshold that it can never fall below, and that the fact that Bitcoin miners spend a lot of money in the "production"/minting of new bitcoin somehow will always keep its price up. (And your milk example seemed to double down on that claim, unless I am mistaken?) By that logic, Bitcoin's price will rise towards infinity once the amount of newly minted coins drops to near zero, don't you agree?
you went too literal about the word milks to talk about it a consumable rather then realise i was talking about any product has a real production cost and a separate retail price
Oh, I've asked about clarification on this point earlier. Do you mind? Are you really saying that miners are able to sell their minted bitcoin at a higher price than the "retail" market price? Or perhaps the other way around: that the miners are only able to sell it at a lower price than the "retailers," similar to most other real-world cases, like the milk example?