One FUD that I still hear every now and then is the possibility of a 51% attack.

This is never going to happen

Yes, the biggest 3-4 mining pools have more than half of the hashing power. Yes, about a dozen pools have almost all the mining power. But that is not the point. You forget that pools consist of individual miners. It's not a dozen people, it's a dozen pools that consist of many many miners!

Also, it's in the miners self interest to keep the network working. That's incentivization, baby! You don't believe that? We have literal proof that it works because in Monero the biggest pool approached the 51% mark and after a short campaign their hashrate fell: https://www.monero.observer/minexmr-top-monero-pool-hashrate-drops-from-50-to-38-percent/ (No, I'm not a shitcoin shill. But I think shitcoins are still a useful idiot to try out and observe things.)

Also, here is an Antonopoulos video why the government-51% FUD is bs as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM&ab_channel=RodolfoD%C3%ADaz

Ok, bye

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @nout 21 Mar 2022

Agreed that the "51% attack" as usually understood by novice is not a risk.

There is a nuance though. If a single pool has large amount of hashrate, then there is elevated risk of censorship (see this article) and at some point it looked like that this may happen with MARA pool, but thanks to community backlash that got reverted. There are some possible mitigations, like StratumV2...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @JustSomePleb 21 Mar 2022

I agree, the cost and power required is prohibitive. Section 11 of the whitepaper covers the case where to fraudulently modify a block and created an alternative chain you'd then have to try and keep up with outpacing the future blocks being produced on the original chain which gets exponentially difficult.

This is definitely a very unlikely FUD 😁