Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell said that people calling for a bitcoin hard fork to provide protection against a “51% attack” demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the first cryptocurrency.
Greg Maxwell responds to the question: “Why not hard-fork Bitcoin to make it less vulnerable to 51% attacks?” (HT @AlyseKilleen ) pic.twitter.com/k9yb9KBc9I
– Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) October 6, 2019
He explained that truly decentralized systems use public voting to combat the problem of duplication (re-spending). At the same time, one cannot simply gather the participants of such a network for the election process, since this requires centralization.
Bitcoin uses voting by computing power, the results of which can be verified without third parties.
“When people talk about a 51% attack, they mean falsifying this vote by changing the generally accepted transaction history. But the fact is that a mechanism that will allow you to limit the ability of one subject to get too much power will almost certainly allow you to completely abandon mining , ”Maxwell emphasized.
In his opinion, today all known methods of abandoning mining involve centralization or hidden centralization.
“People are obsessed with this attack, they launched mysteries around it. If you are worried that someone will rewrite transactions, then you just need more confirmations in order to consider your transaction completed, ” he concluded.
Maxwell is convinced that the real threat to Bitcoin is that people can stop defending decentralization because of misunderstanding.
“The ability of systems with fake decentralization to change the rules without the consent of users scares me much more than the likelihood of an expensive attack for theft.”
Recall that earlier Maxwell criticized Vitalik Buterin for supporting “rescue hard forks”.
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