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The mining pools of Chinese company Bitmain control much of the computing power allocated to Bitcoin mining. 42% of recently mined blocks have been mined by two mining pools owned by Bitmain. This is huge and it raises a worrying question: should we fear a future attack of 51%?
Bitcoin and the attack of 51%
Bitcoin draws its strength including its immutable character, it that is, it can not be changed. Once the blocks are created, the transactions that are saved are permanent and can not be deleted. However, the immutability of the blockchain is not absolute … It is likely to be undermined in a very particular case, that of the attack of 51%.
This attack, which is also called Goldfinger attack, is made possible when a group of miners, in the form of an entity like a mining pool, acquires a computing power of 51% or more. Therefore, thanks to this majority position on the blockchain, the group in question can decide to block transactions, to practice the double expense (19459006) double-spending to refuse the distribution of the rewards for the mining or still completely change the blockchain.
In case of abuse of this dominant position, the consequences of this kind of practices could be fatal to the currency, but we can not imagine the motivations of people who have invested so much in a production system would knowingly decide to undermine it …
Bitmain and its Phenomenal Computational Strength
Bitmain Technologies Ltd. is a privately owned company based in Beijing, China. Founded in 2013, Bitmain has three mining pools: AntPool, BTC.com and ConnectBTC. Only the first two mined the equivalent of more than 40% of the blocks created last week (the figures for the three entities are 25.7%, 16.1% and 0.2% respectively).
And the stranglehold of Bitmain does not stop there since the company is also the only investor of the mining pool ViaBTC, which has a significant computing power of nearly 9%. Bitmain could also influence other mining pools, such as BTC.TOP (12%). Remains that these 'pools' could be largely composed of independent minors, who could easily decide to change their pool if they perceive that Bitmain poses too much risk on the stability and credibility of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Bitmain is not the first entity to have a very high hash rate. In July 2014, GHash.io, a mining cooperative, temporarily exceeded the 51% computing power worldwide allocated to Bitcoin mining. To avoid any drift, minors have decided to abandon this pool and the company itself has chosen to limit its total Bitcoin network computing capacity to 39.9%.
For now, Bitmain has not not claimed want to limit its own power, which could already theoretically exceed 51%. Bitcoin is therefore no longer a crypto-currency really decentralized, which should worry many crypto-addicts and probably explains in part why crypto arrives in 17 th up to the recent ranking of the best crypto-coins published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies of China
Disclaimer: this type of investment being highly speculative, the various contents published here do not constitute in any way an incentive to invest nor a guarantee of success. So be careful. And if you decide to get started, do it with amounts you can afford to lose.
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