BITCOIN MINING ATTACK! Shadow Mining, Chain Reorg, Difficulty and 51% Attack - Programmer explains

[scottflower]

I’d love to see you debate Andreas A on this. 👍🏼

[chuckstrickland]

I like the short burst of knowledge, if you keep it up I will end up with a complete understanding of Bitcoin and Blockchain.

[WillzMaster]

Loving these type of videos... you have to keep doing them more often!

[marta]

OMG! Nowadays I don't see this as a unlikely scenario... unfortunately. Thank you Ivan for those small information pills, very enriching!

[OlivierBCO]

Great job Ivan to educate and to grow this community. It is a win-win for all of us. Thx again!

[kevalan]

This attack would destroy the value of Bitcoin, so it is doubtful that anyone would want to do this for financial gain. However, this would be an attack that the Fed might consider if it wanted to kill Bitcoin's credibility. And since the Fed has basically infinite purchasing power, it is completely plausible that they will do this at some point, if you ask me.

[nahappy]

I love short videos u putting here and there.

[JohnSmith-ffde]

If it is just a question of buying expensive hardware then surely the Fed could easily take BTC down? All they have to do is create 100 Billion give it to their friends and there you go.

[AboveBeyondVapor]

Certain groups have probably done some kind of shadow mining from the beginning. The technique was just not publicized.

[king_panda]

Great content. Been watching you for 3 years!

Deserve a shirt. :)

[OlivierBCO]

Couldn't we add some additional security in the protocol to prevent this kind of shadow mining attack at a low cost? Preferably through a softfork? I was thinking about hashed onchain metadata randomly created that we could add into the block headers.

[beny.]

Imagine spending 100 billion in hardware + 100 billion in electricity to do this, getting all the bitcoins in the world, then realizing that your bitcoin is now worthless 😁
😁😁

[xZeroTheGreat]

If there're enough businesses and individuals keeping the true history, chain will just split again by hardcoding points of divergance. Bitcoin is splittable, but indestructible. It's likely that shadow chain even if with more cumulative PoW will be used by a minority. We learned that the longest chain doesn't always win since forks in crypto had began

[rere]

Ivan, does this problem exist in proof of stake too? Is it worse/less severe/the same?

[thegreatest]

Ivan - Why not make a hard copy of the chain, periodically after a certain number of blocks, that cannot be changed or rolled back? like a save point in a game that you can restart from if anything truly crazy happens such as one of these attacks. I'm sure there must be a reason why its not feasible to, for example every 100, 000 blocks make it a point of no return in the network? this would give much greater robustness and make the chain less fungible. What am I missing ? thanks for all you do!

[norepetitivebeats]

The only reason some group would actually want to do this would be to destroy Bitcoin. I suppose it's in the central bankers interest but not really anybody else's in the long term because what use is a destroyed blockchain to anyone? The value is in the fact that it is secure and decentralised. An attack like this would render those factors redundant.

[stevenvanderheide]

What about the companies producing hardware? Wouldn’t it be easy for them

[rattle_]

Really loving these videos with explanations lately!!!!

[michaelkroger]

The world's largest number of miners are in China. I think 80% of the hashrate is in China. If the Chinese government decides to take over these miners, they could use the hash power to take over the block chain and change it to their liking, or am I wrong?

[AJ-hgki]

About the only thing that has any potential in this area is quantum computing, but when some entity invents a quantum computer they are not likely to keep it secret and conduct an attack on a blockchain. As one of the comments below says, a hard fork is always a solution anyway. Good video in terms of education on blockchain theory though, I like this guy he teaches very well.