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Decentralized 51% attack...

Not the first very profound eth conflict.



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Note that there was a 51% attack against ETC which is not Ethereum (ETH). ETC already had very little usage and was known to be insecure before the attack.

ETH is a bad example. It had critical bugs and is more vulnerable to 51% attacks.

Wasn’t present-day ETH a 51% attack against now-called Ethereum Classic (ETC) because they wanted to roll-back a transaction/vulnerability they didn’t like?

Not trying to be snarky but Vitalik itself is ETH's 51% attack ...

What's the point of decentralized cryptocurrency when it falls down on the hands of one person.


Israeli researchers discovered the first consensus-level attack on Ethereum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32354896 - Aug 2022 (41 comments)

Not to mention that Ethereum has shown willingness to hard fork to punish/reward specific actors.

If an actor pulled off a 51% attack on Ethereum I'd be surprised if there wasn't an effort to just hard fork them out of their resources.


For the Ethereum attack that's similar to the CREAM attack, are you referring to the DAO attack, or something else? Can you please share some links on that incident?

ETH was forked because of a much smaller hack. So the most decentralized, stable choice in Etherium (the layer 1 itself) isn’t immune.

I think that statement is a little disingenuous. There haven't been any attacks that target Etherium proper, only bugs in smart contracts riding on top of Eth.

That's the social consensus, or "L0 consensus". It's a fork, so on only on this fork the attackers would lose the ETH.

The social consensus means that actual humans, in front of these 2 forks of ETH , the original chain being attacked, and the one where all the attackers stake has been deleted so it's safe (and also non-attackers "richer"), humans would call the latter "Ethereum" and use that. And the former would fall into irrelevance.


> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that [...] are fully trusted.

Wait, wait, I thought the hype peak is far behind us. Ever heard about 51% Attack?


Respectfully, you need to do more research on this.

Look up how ETC (Ethereum Classic) came into being.

Look up a 51% attack.

Look up forks from BTC to BCH and then BSV.

Look up Craig Wright and his claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Again, respectfully, your many comments here make you appear to be someone that just learned about cryptocurrency in the last six months and you have only the simplest of surface understandings of it.

You’re INcorrecting several people that have been at the forefront of cryptocurrency for over a decade.


It happened when Ethereum was less than a year old. The hack exploited a vulnerability that was arguably systemic, since it also existed in a lot of the sample code on ethereum.org.

When Bitcoin was a little more than a year old, it reverted five hours of transactions after a bug exploit.

Both blockchains have matured since then and don't do that anymore. An Ethereum cofounder's company lost over $100M in ETH, and the community refused its requests to restore funds with a fork.


If a bug was discovered in bitcoin that robbed 80% of its users in some unexpected fashion, the network would probably hard fork too. All ETH did was basically a 51% attack by stakeholders in the network.

One lesson is not to trust ANY contract to be immutable if it manages an outsized chunk of network capital. Another is that Ethereum will beat its private competitors, since for contracts to be trustworthy they will need to run on the biggest and most diversified network there is.


No. This was neither ETH, nor the Ethereum blockchain. Nor does this imply more issues indeed exist today.

You're boned. Then most systems including Ethereum are based on the assumption that the miners aren't majority controlled by an adversary. That may or may not be a sound assumption.

>Ethereum isn't a decentralized system-- as demonstrated by them editing balances to recover coins the ETH administrators personally lost by gambling on an ill-advised contract

Uh, I'm fairly sure this never happened but you're welcome to provide a source.


Eth isn't yet a grown up ecosystem when one party can push for a major network change like this, and there not be any question that it'll go through.

Democracy where one party wins every vote isn't really democracy.

Benevolent dictator works for software projects, but not for currencies.


> Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked

The exploits so far were NOT security holes in ethereum, they were poorly written smart contracts by third parties.....

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