February 2016
Beginner
130 pages
2h 43m
English
Content preview from Bitcoin EssentialsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Majority attack on Bitcoin
The design of Bitcoin allows for one obvious attack. The attack is called a 51% attack, after the amount of hashing power that is required to mount such an attack. At various times, mining pools have come close or have achieved 51% of the hashing power. A dishonest pool operator could use that hashing power to mount an attack. Therefore, a responsible miner should monitor the pool and when a pool gets close to that threshold, the miner should switch to another pool. Keeping the hashing power distributed is in everyone's interest.
51% attack
Let's now discuss what a 51% attacker can and cannot do. We'll start with what they cannot:
- An attacker cannot steal coins belonging to an existing address. This is because the attacker ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.