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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @anon 15 Aug 2023 \ on: In the case of a 51% attack, what should happen? bitcoin
The author's opinion:
Miners have high capital investment in the form of ASIC mining machines. These machines rely on SHA-256 being the mining hash algorithm in order to be able to create new Bitcoin blocks.
I believe that in the case of a 51% attack, the greatest threat the Bitcoin community has against miners is switching the mining hash algorithm. This would make all SHA-256 ASICs completely useless, therefore highly disincentivizing a 51% attack in the first place.
The new hash algorithm used could be provably randomly picked to ensure no advantage is given to any entity. The new algorithm should be easy to ASIC so that the same properties are kept for a possible future 51% attack.
Rendering ASICs useless would reduce the hash rare to zero and make the network much more prone to 51% attacks.
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That's a no-go for me. The 49% of non-malicious miners would be ruined afterwards and discourage others from following similar pursuits. Changing the hashing algorithm may not be beneficial either since we'd have to rely on cpu mining, which would make it a lot easier for a malicious party with resources to attack. The way things are structured now, the acquisition of asics will impose a new cost on attackers which trumps the marginal cost of allocating existing computing resources.
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