Reminder to avoid 51% attacks

Hello fellow miners, I’m writing this topic inspired by Den_ace’s Reddit post about 51% attacks since we are still vulnerable to them.

Today nanopool has more than 50% of the total hashrate, 54.1% to be exact. (Although we have improved from the 60% of months ago)

That is really dangerous and has to be avoided, specially now that Bitcoin SV is said to have suffered a 51% attack.

As a miner, you shouldn’t tell much difference between pools, specially when nanopool has the highest fee, of 1%, when most pools have between 0,9% and 0.

Also, I have read unconfirmed rumors about nanopool giving fake hashrates to the miners, encouraging them to mine at their pool instead of others.

Being true or not, fake hashrates won’t make you earn more, as a miner you will earn about the same in different pools if your distance to the pool is close enough. (Not having a high ping leading to stale shares).

Only the pools with lower hashrates will take more time for getting a payout, but the amount payed out should be the same proportionally that the one you would get with bigger pools.

What are 51% attacks?

A 51% attack is an attack on a blockchain by a group of miners who control more than 50% of the network’s mining hash rate.
With more than 51% of network hashrate an attacker can:

*) Attack the network stealing ergo from others
*) Repeat transactions multiple times resulting in Double spending
*) Steal mining rewards, leaving miners without rewards
*) Reduce overall network security and trust leading to
Scaring off investors/exchange listings, etc.
*) Creating problems for the Blockchain/Project and hinder development
*) Insecurity leading to reduced values for the cryptocurrency
*) Destroy your profits

Additional problems with centralized network hashrate
Having too much hashrate (or anything) concentrated on one point creates single points of failures.
If those single points of failures (in this case a pool) are attacked, the whole system suffers.
If the whole system has problems and you’re part of that system, you suffer consequences.

Consequences could be:

  • Failed transactions/rewards
  • Reduced profits

Also, it is said many important exchanges such as Coinbase won’t ever list Ergo until it stops concentrating more than 50% of the hashrate in a single pool.

Help yourself, join a smaller pool, secure the network and support decentralization!

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Ok - why dont you have a list of the potential pools we can go to?

The most up to date list of pools available for Ergo can be found here:
https://miningpoolstats.stream/ergo

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I’m sorry i didn’t list them, Wert420 has provided a very useful link where you can check the pools.

I’m personally using herominers without any issue so far and I’m seeing many people recommending woolypoly.

In any case, today nanopool’s hashrate has moved down to 49%! That’s really good news! :rocket::rocket:

You are right ! But what can be done to solve this ? I mean, as a miner you should care for the project right ?