How do alt coins survive the early stages if mining power can easily shift onto them and execute 51% attacks?

laboon / CS1699_Fall2018

CS1699 - BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND CRYPTOCURRENCY

MIT License

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How do alt coins survive the early stages if mining power can easily shift onto them and execute 51% attacks? #41

Closed hts13 closed 5 years ago

hts13 commented 6 years ago

Since there is so much hashpower on the bitcoin network. If a new alt coin appear, wouldn't these miners shift their power over to these altcoins to profit and exploit having a majority of the mining power?

laboon commented 5 years ago

Yes, which is exactly what can happen! We will discuss further in the section on altcoin infanticide. I believe you mentioned this in class for +0.5 EC

laboon commented 5 years ago

New altcoins avoid this by 1) flying under the radar or 2) using a different hashing algorithm. One of the problems with ASIC-resistant coins also means that it's easy to just buy a bunch of "generic" CPU or GPU computing power from AWS or another cloud provider.