How much does it cost to make a 51% attack? The attack on some small altcoin coins is surprisingly cheap

Reddit members conducted research to learn about the cost to make a 51% attack on today's popular cryptocurrency. The results of the study are published on the crypto51.app website, many people are surprised, including Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin. Charlie Lee re-shared this result on his Twitter page.

1. What is '51% attack'? Can Bitcoin completely collapse by a 51% attack?

The researchers calculated the Hash Rate power needed to perform a 51% attack, then based on hiring the hash power from the NiceHash pre-coding service to figure out the cost needed to perform. this attack within 1 hour.

Cost of performing attacks 51%.

The results show that it will take US $ 554,000 an hour to make a 51% attack on Bitcoin but NiceHash only provides about 2% of the hash power of the entire blockchain Bitcoin network.

That's why making a 51% attack on encrypted currencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum is impossible.

As for smaller crypto currencies like Ethereum Classic or Bytecoin, just hiring the computational power from NiceHash is enough to make a 51% attack. Specifically Bytecoin only takes about 557 USD / hour to make a 51% attack and NiceHash can provide 225% of the hash power of this entire blockchain network.

Husam Abboud, a researcher from FECAP University, Brazil, has determined that: the cost of implementing a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic (ETC) is currently only about 55-85 million USD but there is can bring potential profit of 1 billion USD.

We can see that it is quite easy to make 51% attacks on small altcoin based on PoW (Proof of Work). For some altcoin, it is possible to hire 100% of the power of HashHash service from NiceHash without taking into account the hardware costs.

This worries Charlie Lee that the number of 51% attacks on altcoin is likely to appear more and more. Bad guys can use the 51% attack to commit fraudulent transactions, or withdraw money on trading floors before making a reversal.

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