How to make an attack 51% for $ 500

Not so long ago, two crypto-currencies - Bitcoin Gold, as well as Verge, were attacked 51% effectively, according to the results of the so-called. Double spending of funds was lost about 18 million dollars. Many believed that such technological attacks are based on very complex operations and are managed by highly skilled and rich teams, but it turns out that the necessary hash power is the ability to simply rent, for example, the NiceHash pool, and relatively inexpensively.

On the Internet, a website was created that calculates how much it costs 51% of the attack compared to different cryptic coins. The creator of the site, known in the social network Reddit as xur17, told the publication CCN, which led him to create such a resource:

A few days ago there was an attack on Bitcoin Gold, and I was curious about the cost of the attack with the rented hash capacity.The results of the calculations shocked me: someone could attack the altcoin with a capitalization of about $ 1 billion for $ 10,000 per hour and even less This prompted me to calculate the costs for the other coins, and again everything turned out to be cheaper than I thought.The purpose of the site is to attract more attention to the rather significant problem with altcoyines.Major mining pools have the ability to redirect the hashing capacity to smaller coins, and this by Wola attack them for a few hours. 

Below, you can see the screen from this site, which was published on Reddit. Other variants of calculations show a more "expensive" attack of 51%, although they do not take into account the possibility to rent computing power, instead of buying it.

The acquisition of equipment to run the mining will in fact be quite expensive, because to organize an effective attack, and even for small cryptonyms, you need a high-level technique in order to compete with well-equipped nodes. To organize such an attack on the bitcoin crypt network, you will need equipment worth about one billion dollars, and directly the electricity will cost about 500 thousand dollars for an hour.

In the last column, on the screen, the percentage of equipment that the NiceHash pool has is included. For example, to conduct an attack on bitcoin, it lacks 50 percent of the total capacity, there is only one percent. But with the current situation slightly different, the current situation is somewhat different: now NiceHash has 56 percent of the hash power of Ethereum Classic, as much as 79 percent of Bytecoin's crypto currency and about 250 percent of Bitcoin Gold crypto-coins.

Charlie Lee, very impressed with the numbers that were published on the resource cripto51. In his tweet-tape he wrote:

crypto51.app showed how easy it is to attack 51% with some small Kohins with the PoW algorithm, for some of them you can rent 100% of NiceHash's power and take off a huge amount of capital expenditure, for example, Bytecoin (about 1 billion capitalization) you can attack for only $ 557! 

In the event that the information on this site is correct, a large number of altcoyins are required to urgently review their systems that provide security. Thanks to the application of services like NiceHash, conducting an attack of 51% will be quite simple and very affordable for many events.

It is necessary to think: in the event that all this is true, everything is so cheap, then why are these attacks carried out relatively rarely? Users suddenly became very honest, they do not know it yet, or, still, the creators of the crypto51 resource do not take something into account in their calculations?

If the attack succeeds 51%, the attacker gains control over the hash of this crypto currency, he has the opportunity to double the spending of assets and achieve division of the block, generating various entries in the chain. Risks of making double expenses at all times have been a serious problem for crypto-currencies, the blocking and PoW algorithm itself must oppose this possibility. In the lockbox, immutable records of transactions are stored, and PoW in its work requires that users of the coin network, for checking the blocking blocks and including them in the core chain, deal with complex cryptographic equations.

Copies of the entire chain of blocking are stored on computers that are called nodes of the cryptosystem - nodes. In the largest networks, a huge number of these nodes, this makes them the most protected from such attacks, because for its successful implementation you need a huge amount of power and, accordingly, money. But, here networks with a relatively small number of complete nodes can be attacked without much effort. Anyone who managed to take control of 51%, has the opportunity, for example, to make a transaction, after deleting data about it and again spend the same money.

Theoretically, such an attack can be carried out in networks based on the PoS algorithm, but here the attacker needs to purchase a little more than half of all available coins in the markets, and this already makes such an action very expensive, especially if we take into account the fact that for large volumes of purchases, the cost the currency will immediately begin to grow.