The Danger of 51% Attacks Is Exaggerated: Sterlin Lujan
Cryptovest
Published Sep 19, 2018 07:04AM ET
Updated Sep 19, 2018 08:20AM ET
The Danger of 51% Attacks Is Exaggerated: Sterlin Lujan
On September 14, Bitcoin.com ambassador Sterlin Lujan spoke at the NEXT BLOCK conference in Sofia (Bulgaria). He talked about the psychology and evolution of money and how cryptocurrencies can disrupt fiat’s hegemony but also touched on how governments can try to hinder this process. In an exclusive interview for Cryptovest, Lujan elaborated on his views. We publish this extensive interview in two parts, with the biggest risks for cryptocurrencies being the focus of this week’s conversation.
In this part of the interview, Lujan shares his views on the internal and external risks for cryptocurrencies, their future, and the reason the risk of a 51% attack might be overrated.
What are the biggest security risks for cryptocurrencies as a whole?
The biggest security risk for cryptocurrencies right now is developers.
In the case of Bitcoin, we had an unfortunate situation where the protocol was neutered by the developers. They didn’t scale the cryptocurrency to meet market demand, and this had drastic consequences for the market share. To me, this is a security issue: if you can’t trust the developers to scale the technology and grow it with market demand, you are effectively damaging the utility in the use case of the cryptocurrency. In all honesty, the way developers approach open source projects can potentially cause harm to these projects.
I think the outside security risks are much less visible and much less likely to occur than the internal risks. Being able to protect cryptocurrencies as cryptocurrencies is extremely important – 100%!
You probably are going to get to this in a minute, but other people think that mining centralization is a security risk for cryptocurrencies. I think this problem is overstated.
What about Bitcoin Cash? Do you see similar security issues for it as well?
Yes, if the community has some type of irreconcilable differences on how to properly scale. I don’t think [the existing differences] are that intense, and there’s not as much divisiveness in the Bitcoin Cash community although there are some differences that could potentially harm Bitcoin Cash.
But even in the worst-case scenario, where the cryptocurrency does get harmed, there will ultimately be one strong cryptocurrency that has a better, stronger network effect, meets market demand, and keeps people with the solution. So, that does tend to cancel a lot of the negative consequences.
It’s just a shame when we see short-term damage happen to cryptocurrencies as a result of “development incompetence,” for lack of a better term. It’s my hope that we can continue to grow and scale these blockchains in a way that’s efficient and makes sense.
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