51% attack on Ethereum more difficult than on Bitcoin — Justin Drake

Justin Drake of Ethereum Merge, an architect at Cointelegraph, said that it is cheaper to launch 51% attacks on Bitcoin than Ethereum.

Drake claimed that the cost of buying Drake would be much lower. 51% attack “Bitcoin” would be the cost “on the order of $10 billion.”

Drake has led the work on Ethereum proof-of-stake (PoS) implementation And was the principal architect of Merge, (the complete PoS event). His remarks echo a May 14 X post Grant Hummer co-founder and CEO of Etherealize – a company that focuses on marketing and product development for Ethereum.

Hummer stated that Bitcoin was a currency in the article. “is completely screwed because of its security budget.”

Hummer stated that it would be $8 billion dollars to launch a successful 51 percent attack. “virtually certain” If the price drops to $2 billion. When a group or entity controls more than 50% of the mining power or stake power on a blockchain, they gain control over that network. Hummer said:

“This will become blindingly obvious over the next decade. ETH is the only truly decentralized crypto-asset that can become the internet’s [store of value].”

Related: Coin Metrics research shows BTC and ETH are immune to 51% attacks

Ethereum Attack would Cost Much More

Drake describes that “to have 100% control of the chain, you need 50% + 1 of stake.” The cost and difficulty would be high, but not impossible.

“A rich nation state can probably pull it off.”

There were 34,168.987 Ether stakes at the time this was published.ETH() valued at nearly $89.6 Billion. ETH’s current market value is $44.8 Billion.

A much larger investment is still needed. Ether currently has a market cap of 316 billion dollars and 24-hour volume trading of 25 billion dollars (just over 8 per cent of market cap).

The ETH necessary for an assault is equivalent to nearly 14.2% market cap, and around 180% trading volume in 24 hours. A project of this size is likely to cause a substantial increase in the price of ETH, increasing the overall cost.

Related: Big miners pose a growing existential threat to Bitcoin

Ethereum as the last line in defense

Matan Sitbon is the CEO and founder of Lightblocks, a blockchain-interoperability development company. He told Cointelegraph Ethereum comes with an extra feature that can defend it against these attacks.

“Ethereum’s ultimate security lies not solely in cryptography or protocol rules, but in the community’s powerful social and economic coordination mechanisms,” He said.

Drake highlighted yet another advantage Ethereum has that Bitcoin does not. He then explained what he meant. “if there is a 51% attack, the social layer can identify the attacker and socially slash it.”

“This is a superpower of PoS that is not available with PoW,” He added.

Drake is referring to the social layer. This refers to supermajority humans in the network who decide which software will be used. Bitcoin’s simple proof-of-work consensus mechanism (PoW), which has been around for a while, is more reliable and less vulnerable to attacks. However, it does not have this feature.

Pavel Yashin is a researcher at P2P.org and told Cointelegraph: “if the centralization is detected,” Community members could fix the problem with a fresh fork. The old token was delisted from the exchange, while the compromised chain became irrelevant.

Hassan Khan is the CEO of Ordeez Bitcoin Liquidity Protocol, and he told Cointelegraph: “the debate around the feasibility of a 51% attack remains open-ended — largely because while theoretically possible, in practice the barriers are extremely high.”

The amount of computer power required to mine Bitcoin is estimated at 5,000 watts. “makes a sustained attack highly improbable,” Ethereum is a cryptocurrency. “PoS introduces additional economic and governance deterrents.”

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