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Let’s say you’re a tech giant or control a tech giant.

So you have access to money, computers & thousands of unique ip addresses.

Could these giants spin up so many unique nodes that they could perform a 51% attack?

Murch
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Trevor Wood
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In theory, it is possible. But it will be better to use all that power to do things right. With all that power, they could be earning more by actually mining bitcoin and protecting the network.

A 51% attack in bitcoin is possible but really improbable because the Bitcoin network is huge. Anyways, an attack like this by a large corporation or company would trigger all the alarms, and probably the price of bitcoin would go down, really down, making that attack probably worthless. So, the original idea of Satoshi remains; it's cheaper to play by the rules than to try to trick the network.

Jeremy Then
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  • I can't tell, I suspect an eclipse attack should be many orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than a 51% attack... – Mercedes Aug 11 '22 at 08:38
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Yes, but running a lot of nodes would give them little to no influence on the network. Controlling a lot of nodes on the network could aid in identifying originators of transactions, or might be useful to perform an , where an attacker supplants a victim's entirety of peer connections with their own nodes to control their inbound information.

To perform a majority attack (51% attack), you need to control the majority of the hashrate. Most nodes today do not contribute any hashrate to the network, the hashrate is providing by specialized hardware, ASICs.

Murch
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