How Does a 51% Attack Work?

Maurice KAKPO Jump-start your best year yet:Become a member and get 25% off the first year BLOCKCHAIN SECURITY SERIES Popular Blockchain Attacks & Security Vulnerabilities — Part 1 51% Attack on Blockchain Chikku George Coinmonks Chikku George · Follow Published in Coinmonks 4 min read · Sep 1, 2022 Listen Share More In part 1 of this series, we will be discussing the 51% Attack on Blockchain. Whenever a transaction is going through the Blockchain, each miner will verify this transaction. They use powerful computers to mine a block. They constantly review the Blockchain to decide whether the sender has enough cryptocurrency he wants to spend and is not trying to fool the system. If the majority of miners verify a transaction, then it will be considered to be a valid transaction and a new block gets added to the blockchain. These miners can also group to form Mining pools to mine more efficiently. Basically, In a Blockchain a competition is going on among the miners. Whenever two or more miners solve the cryptographic puzzle at the same time, for a while there will be extra chains. But eventually, the longest chain wins over the others and then everyone follows the longest chain. Wait for a second! — What if someone gets more than 51% of the mining power and tries to manipulate the entire system for his own needs? 51% attack occurs when a miner or group of miners(mining pool) manages to gain more than 51% of the network’s mining power. Then the respective entity will have the power to control the entire network. If an attacker gets this power, he will be able to: Double-spend his money. He can pay with the same cryptocurrency twice or even more. Prevent transactions from being confirmed. Prevent the generation of new bitcoins. Image Credit: RLV ZCACHE Such a situation is considered to be under extreme security breach as all the network participants need to trust a centralized entity. Also, it will significantly drop the price of the cryptocurrency. How does 51% Attack work? At first, a single miner or a group of miners acquires more than 51% of the network’s mining power. This situation can well occur on smaller networks rather than on large networks. Once the attacker gets the power, he starts mining blocks on his private chain that operates concurrently with the public Blockchain where all the other nodes mine the blocks. The legitimate public Blockchain will not be aware of the existing private false chain. Meanwhile, the attacker transfers some amount of tokens to the legitimate chain and is not acknowledged by the false chain. Since the attacker has more mining power, he quickly mines the blocks on the private chain. Eventually, the false chain wins over the legitimate chain on length.

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11 месяцев назад

🅢ⓐ🅢ⓔⓝ 🅓ⓘ ⓢⓗ Автор вопроса

Attackers amass mining hashrate power or computational power to overpower the network. The more significant the percentage of computational power they control, the easier it is to take over the network.

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11 месяцев назад

Web3 Worker [Never dm you First]

For example, let's say that : If a malicious actor was to take over 51% of the hashing power of the Bitcoin network, they could make an offline OTC trade by sending a few bitcoins to a cryptocurrency wallet in exchange for USD.

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11 месяцев назад

Mohamed KALIF

it's well explained on the site too

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11 месяцев назад

Doris FANNOU

Sachith Navinda
Yeah

Yes

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11 месяцев назад