- Gregory Maxwell explains the nature of 51% attack.
- The believes many people misunderstand the fundamentals of bitcoin.
A well-known developer explained why bitcoin hard fork is useless against “attack 51%”
Those who call to fork bitcoin to protect it from “attack 51%” demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the first cryptocurrency, according to Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell.
He explained that truly decentralized systems use public voting to combat the double-spending issue. What’s more, it is impossible to “have people vote” as that would require a centralized party to govern the process.
Meanwhile, the bitcoin network uses a vote of computing power where the results of the voting can be verified without third parties.
“When people talk about 51% attack, all they are really talking about is people rigging that election so that they can override what everyone previously thought was the accepted order of transactions with a new order that changes some of their payments from one party to another”, he explained.
In his opinion, all known ways to abandon mining involve centralization or hidden centralization.
Maxwell is convinced that the real threat to bitcoin is that people can stop defending decentralization features because of misunderstanding.
“If you are worried that someone might reorder history using high hash-power collusion, just wait longer before you consider your transaction final”, he explained.
Earlier, Maxwell criticized Vitalik Buterin for supporting “rescue hard forks.”
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