Original archived Re: If Monero Can Suffer 50% Hashrate Risk, Why Can't Bitcoin?
Scraped on 18/08/2025, 12:13:42 UTC
The nature of Proof of Work is in a way that 51% attack is a real attack vector but it depends on a big "if". IF one entity can gain control of such a large hashrate they can theoretically carry out such an attack.
2 more things, you can't really compare any altcoins with bitcoin.
Also this already happened a long time ago in bitcoin as well. The mining pool was called GHash.io back in 2014 and it briefly gained more than 50% of the total hashrate (for real) and nothing was halted and nothing broke. The miners left that pool (switched to other pools) and its hashrate came down.
Two big ifs are like
No entity owns enough dominant hashrates to do 51% attack on the network.
Another bigger if is, when an entity has that dominating hashrate and is able to do 51% attack on the network, will that entity do this?
The network has grown so robust to allow for any entity to have that 51% hashrate and even in any eventuality like Pooya already exemplified from 2014, the likely scenario would be they did nothing with it and it only takes few minutes for this to happen. You’ll find miners switching other pools and not have the integrity of the network compromised.
These attacks also count as short term gains and mining though a rewarding activity, miners are more interested in the technology than these short term gains from attacks.