Dan Held: Bitcoin Won’t Be Largely Affected By a 51% Attack, Near Impossible to Reverse with Ease

There are many topics discussed around Bitcoin (BTC) and how it can be affected by a 51% attack. Bitcoin’s security has been growing over time and there are some experts that believe that an attack to the network would not be as effective as many suppose. Dan Held, the co-founder of ZeroBlock and Product Manager of Blockchain, explained that Bitcoin is secure and it shouldn’t be largely affected by a 51% attack.

Bitcoin Is Very Safe

The cryptocurrency community has been affected in the past by several hacks and attacks that were performed to companies such as exchanges or platforms dealing with digital currencies. It was possible to attack them and steal large sums of money from users. Thus, there are several individuals that do not trust the way in which Bitcoin works. Some of these attacks include Mt. Gox, Coincheck and Binance last week.

However, the Bitcoin blockchain has been operative for over a decade and it has never been attacked. According to Dan Held, the Bitcoin blockchain is very secure. He mentioned that Satoshi explained that there was not going to be a single authority or a central bank because the community was going to expand all over the world.

Held suggests Satoshi wanted to introduce a new system in which human decision-making could be removed from this process. Bitcoin was created to grow in the long term and focused on stability and transparency.

Held explained that as the price of the most popular digital asset rises, the block reward is also going to be increasing. This is going to attract a large number of miners that would help the hash rate to increase. That means that it would become extremely expensive to attack the Bitcoin network.

He mentioned on Twitter that there are several experts that believe that transaction fees alone would not provide adequate security. He went on saying that this is something that we cannot know since it depends on the number of confirmations that one would have to wait to process a single transaction.

15/ Critics often argue that transaction fees alone won’t provide adequate security. Short answer is that we don’t know. It’s subjective since the amount of confirmations one would wait for depends on the transaction size and health of the network.

— Dan Hedl (@danheld) May 15, 2019

In this article that Held wrote on Twitter, he addresses many other issues such as scalability and the way in which miners would continue working. He ended the thread by explaining that Satoshi’s experiment has been running for over ten years and that although there have been several attacks and a hostile environment, all data indicates we have reason to believe it will continue to exist.