51% Attack on Other Cryptocurrencies Revisited: Is It Expensive? Not really

Husam Abboud, a researcher from a Brazilian university FECAP, has come up with an original method to calculate the price of a 51% attack — Rindex v2.0. Here're the results of his study:

• A successful attack on the #Ethereum Classic blockchain would only cost $1.5 mln. To drive this cryptocurrency to complete bankruptcy, scammers would need to invest $55 mln in the attack, but it would allow them to earn $1 bln, thus making up for their investment by a large margin.

• A 51% attack on the #Bitcoin Cash network would cost 250 #BTC ($1,875,000) per day, on the Bitcoin Gold network — only 26 BTC ($200,000) which is almost ten times cheaper. Scammers can continue with the attack until developers release a fix or until the cryptocurrency price goes down to a level which is low enough to make the attack useless. In this case, cryptocurrency may sustain a lot of damage.

It's worth noting that Abboud's calculation never accounted for mining equipment and electricity costs since scammers don't have to pay for this — they can just rent computing power.

For instance, if miners who control as little as 2.5% of the Ethereum network hash rate simply switch over to the Ethereum Classic network, they will find themselves in control of 51% of the network's computing power. In this case, the daily price of an attack will be equivalent to the reward underreceived by the miners and amounting to about 525 ETH.

#SPARTA is protected against 51% attacks by default

This publication is meant to once again highlight the idea that 51% attacks are quite real and can happen at any time, even due to a simple collusion by malicious network users. In this situation, bona fide users are in no way protected against the loss of all their funds which is a big disadvantage of cryptocurrencies using the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm.

SPARTA, on the other hand, uses the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm which allows you to use a regular computer to support network operations — miners' computing power is not relevant. At the same time, all users who own at least 1,000,000 SPA have equal chances of creating a block. In other words, neither high powers, nor a high balance will allow anyone to carry out an attack of this type.

Join SPARTA right now and build a new, truly decentralized, secure financial system that would give its members truly equal rights!