Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Ethereum could afford a 51% attack on Bitcoin, and profit greatly from it
by
mjdamgaard
on 07/08/2024, 12:16:25 UTC
when doing an attack to re-org the blockchain to double spend your funds. each attempt is not going to happen in minutes. i was explaining that you first need to spend the funds and get goods or things of value in  another form to then want to reset the network and remove the transactions existance to then spend it again. this will take not minutes but hours.

like i said if you want to attack the network to get double spend value of any significance services already delay things like deposits and withdrawals via things like X confirm wait or 72hour for bank withdrawals or 1 day to deliver packages. so you have to wait more then 6 blocks before resetting the tx/block

[...]

so unless they are initially buying lambo's/mansions and ensuring the car/house is registered.. or they get $Xm's fiat in bank accounts that cant be cancelled/refunded/returned.. its not worth doing a double spend attack as its not as cheap as you think per attack

I think that out of all our ongoing discussions, @franky1, this is currently the most interesting: Can the attackers actually steal enough bitcoin that they will be able to make a profit, given that the value of Bitcoin does not crash?

Let me start by pointing out that the daily transactions is currently around $15B. The daily mining rewards (greater than the costs) are only ~0.13% of this, currently. So the attackers would need to account for only ~0.13% of the trade in the time leading up to an attack. And again, since they are rewarded in case of a crash (which is the whole point of this Goldfinger attack), they do not need to keep the USD, or whatever they are trading the bitcoin for (although they could simply trade bitcoin for bitcoin or tokens, at least in principle). They can rather spend the USD immediately to make new trades, then repeat.