let’s be clear - you read a headline of a tweet that confirmed your biases and rushed in to post this? How do you know this is a 51% attack? Did you read any more than the title of this topic? who claimed this?
I don't have any beef in this game, but the previous posters message does not require that the 51% attack is confirmed.
The claim seems plausible enough that people are debating if it actually happened or not, and if it is sustainable to keep it up. That's a big difference to 51% attacks being merely theoretical (which implies that they are unrealistic in practice).
51% attacks against proof of work blockchains have definitely happened in the past[1]. What hasn't happened yet is an attack on proof of stake (or more generally BFT consensus) as far as I'm aware.
I mean, doesn't Ethereum, probably the most prominent proof-of-stake coin, roll back the consensus whenever something happens that they don't like? It's easy to claim you're algorithm is safe when you're not actually running it.
> lots of you on this site were telling me that 51% attacks on blockchains were almost entirely theoretical
We have multiple private actors in multiple countries amassing compute and networking power for AI ambitions, each of whom could single-handedly pot most cryptocurrencies outside Bitcoin and Ethereum.
That said, something being possible isn’t the same as it being true. To my knowledge, no 51% attack of consequence has ever been launched.
Shorting the coin wouldn't work well because you have to take a long position at least temporarily in order to execute the attack; you would have to borrow 51% of the supply and also a bunch more coins that you'd then sell short, enough to more than compensate for the cost of borrowing the 51% and the risk of failure, and that would get more-than-proportionally expensive. Seems hard to make the math pencil out.
Taking a long position in a competing coin could maybe work but you'd have to be really sure that it would go up, instead of going down due to decreased confidence in the broader altcoin ecosystem.
> Just a month ago lots of you on this site were telling me that 51% attacks on blockchains were almost entirely theoretical.
Here's another one (and changing subject): point out that GrapheneOS, which is a privacy focused mobile OS, ONLY supports Pixel, which is a phone produced by Google whose interests are surveillance. People will tell you that your concerns are theoretical.
Shockingly, the Google-produced operating system that GrapheneOS is based on is easiest to build targeting Google-produced devices.
Google is also as far as I'm aware one of only two mainstream vendors, and the only one making flagship-tier devices, that reliably offers bootloader unlocking as a feature so you can install alternative operating systems without having to first crack the device.
My point was that if the people who control X have interest that X be Y, then X will become Y over time, even if it's not Y currently.
Sure maybe the people with Google phone X but over time we should expect that Google will find a way to Y, because that's where its interests lie. (And actually, we've seen it do exactly this many times. Chrome being the most obvious example).
Here's yet another example. If voters can be bought by promising them money, then we should expect that politicians will start promising money to voters in order to be elected.
Etc etc, do you see the pattern? My point wasn't actually about privacy, or Google, or Monero.
We can expect when Google puts surveillance chips in their Pixel phones, those will no longer be supported by Graphene. While they don't, may as well take advantage of them, right? Out of all the Android phones, Pixels are the most open (possibly because they don't have to follow Google's oppressive contracts with manufacturers).
>Here's another one (and changing subject): point out that GrapheneOS, which is a privacy focused mobile OS, ONLY supports Pixel, which is a phone produced by Google whose interests are surveillance.
The Google-proprietary software is entirely replaced. Why the FUD?
I guess the FUD would be on the hardware and also on the other piece of software, a fully separate OS if I understand correctly, that runs the radio side of things on the device...
