The Ethereum Merge Architect Justin Drake told CoinTelegraph that it will be cheaper to start out an attack of 51% on Bitcoin than on Ethereum.
Drake said it will be “less expensive to 51% attack Bitcoin” and it will cost “$ 10 billion”.
Drake led the work to implement Proof-of-Stake (ProOF-of-Stake) and was a foremost architect within the merging (the entire POS transition event). His remarks reflect a post dated May 14th by Grant Hummer, the co-founder of Ethereum Focusing and product company EthleAlize.
In the post office, Hummer said that Bitcoin was “completely fooled due to his security budget”.
Hummer claimed that it will cost 8 billion US dollars to realize a successful attack of 51%, and said that a successful attack was “practically secure” if the prices are 2 billion US dollars. An attack of 51% occurs if a single entity or group over 50% of the mining or collecting of a blockchain network controls and increases the ability supply via the network. Hummer added:
“This shall be dazzling in the subsequent decade. ETH is the one really decentralized crypto-asset that may develop into the Internet [store of value]. “
Ethereum attack would cost loads more
Drake said that “you’ve 100% control over the chain, you wish 50% + 1 share.” He said that it will be extremely difficult and expensive, but anything but inconceivable:
“A wealthy nation state can probably do it.”
At the time of the letter there was 34,168,987 ether (ETH) value almost 89.6 billion US dollars. As a result, half of all ETH has a current value of virtually 44.8 billion US dollars.
Intercepted ether diagram. Source: Beaconcha.in
Nevertheless, a much higher investment would probably be required. Ether has a current market capitalization of $ 316 billion and a 24-hour trade volume of $ 25 billion (just greater than 8% of market capitalization).
The ETH, which is required for an attack, is sort of 14.2% of the market capitalization and 180% of the 24-hour trade volume. An organization of this size would probably result in a big increase in ETH price and further increase the prices of the attack.
Ethereum's last line of defense
Matan Sitbon, the founder and CEO of Blockchain Interoperability Developer Lightblocks, told CoinTelegraph that Ethereum had an extra feature against such attacks.
“Ethereum's final security lies not only in cryptography or protocol rules, but within the mighty social and economic coordination mechanisms of the community,” he said.
Drake also emphasized one other advantage, which he claims that Ethereum has Bitcoin. He explained: “If there may be an attack of 51%, the social class can discover the attacker and smash it socially.”
“This is an excellent power of POS that is just not available at Pow,” he added.
Drakes's statement refers back to the social class, which suggests the human super majority of the network, which decides which software needs to be carried out. Bitcoins of easier consensus mechanism (Pow consensus) has a smaller attack area and an extended track balance, but this function is missing.
Pavel Yashin, researcher at P2P.org, told CoinTelegraph: If the centralization is decided, the community could fix it with a brand new fork. The old token would ultimately be carried out and the endangered chain can be irrelevant.
Hassan Khan, CEO at Bitcoin Liquidity Protocol Orderez, told CoinTelegraph: “The debate concerning the feasibility of an attack of 51% stays openly because theoretically, the barriers in practice are extremely high in practice.”
He said that for Bitcoin the essential amount of computing power and energy “makes a persistent attack most unlikely”, while for Ethereum “POS introduces additional economic and governance offset”.
