Sunday, October 7, 2018

If I livestreamed the setup and execution of doing a 51% attack against the testnet for the sake of education would anyone watch?

Edit: Doing it. Next week going to attack the coin Einsteinium, 3:00 CDT, 4:00 EDT 1:00 PST

Event:https://www.twitch.tv/events/NyJSsF3hQkGHdnsKA2f4JQ

Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/geocold/

Edit: I think I’ll do it in like a week against a small coin like Einsteinium or the like. I might also set it up so if you donate a dollar to the stream you can send me some text that I’ll throw into my forked chains overriding transaction and give that money to the EFF (and pay for the minimal cost of renting hashing power). Stay tuned.

I'm considering doing a live stream of all the setup and execution of doing a 51% attack against against the bitcoin testnet so that people can see how it works in real life, not in theory. I'd also discuss how the attack works and every concept encountered along the way. I'd also talk about the security implications and how some coins go about preventing such attacks, the pros and cons of such tactics, etc.

Edit: Could also just attack a small cap coin. That would let me get into some interesting game theory from an attackers perspective about what coins they want to attack, what exchanges, in what order, and what would deter them. Which is equally interesting. One thing people don't often mention is the importance of the depth of a given coins trading books because with many coins there is so little liquidity that an attacker could only sell a few thousand dollars worth of the coin before crashing its price and making subsequent cycles of the attack hard.

Second edit: I realize I mistitled this and just said "the testnet" I was originally referring to the bitcoin testnet.


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