Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: A proposed solution to adjust for lost Bitcoins: wallet 'heartbeats'
by
Foxpup
on 09/04/2012, 15:03:10 UTC
My guess is that a single entity will acquire 51% sometime during the next block reward cycle. (that is during the period when the block reward is equal to 25, starting in December of 2012). If the individual is malicious (admittedly unlikely), the developers will likely be taken by surprise and won't have time to save the blockchain. This idea of waiting for bitcoin to die before taking precautionary measures is foolhardy.

It won't take anyone by surprise, and the blockchain won't need saving. There's nothing to save it from. There's just not a whole lot of damage you can actually do with 51% of the hashpower. Block other people's transactions? The transactions will get through the instant you lose your 51%. Double-spend your coins? You'd need to double-spend a lot of coins at once to make it worth the amount of money a 51% attack would cost, because it only works once: as soon as your coins are first double-spent, everyone will realise that the network is compromised and will refuse to trust any future large transactions until it's clear the attack is over, at which point it's business as usual again. No precautionary measures are needed because the network is already designed to handle this threat.