Cardano Staking with >51% Staking coins

Hi Everyone. I was just wondering, what would happen, if i have 51% of total staking coins and i stake it with many different addresses? So at the end, i will be the one receiving the most of the profits?

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Yes if you optimize the distribution of your coins to the various pools and stake 51% of the coins you will get 51% of the staking rewards over time. Good luck in your quest! :grinning:

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That is correct.

I believe if ‘S > k/2’ (stake is more that 50% of total stake) you may also potentially be able to launch a Sybil attack on the network, which is why property ‘a’ (impact of the pool leaders stake to rewards) exists.

@vantuz-subhuman might be able to confirm?

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Here is a link to a staking calculator created by a forum member:

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Here is a paper on Cardano staking theory:

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So basically, PoW is more secure than PoS while PoS is cheaper to run

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I wouldn’t assume that. The reason for all the papers on Oroborus (Cardano protocol) is to prove it is secure as a POW system. There are also many incentives in place to discourage bad actors. Controlling 51% of the coins would be rather difficult I think. Probably easier to get 51% of hash power especially for smaller POW coins.

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That’s not true. OUROBOROS is as secure as PoW. And that’s not an opinion it’s a cryptographic property of the protocol proven to be correct. It is as safe as PoW while consuming much less energy.

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yah but he mining hashes on PoW are dynamik, meaning if the hashes for a single entity increases, you can use extra hardware and computational power to balance that and decrease his mining power. In case of PoS, once u have 51% of staked coins you have it for ever, unless the no. of stakin changes drastically. But even in that case, you would be expecting the holder to buy coins go back to 51%

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I’m thinking it would take an impracticality large amount of money for one entity to purchase 51% of the coins. There are incentives in place to limit the size of individual stake pool’s as well to make sure there is a good distribution of pools with roughly equal amounts of coins in each where the pool operator gets an incentive to stake a large amount of their own coins. This prevents people from creating many pools operated by the same person.

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But you wouldnt know that. You can simple make different addresses and stake from them.

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You could, but the pool makes more money the larger the personal stake of the pool operator deposits. Pools that make more money will attract more people to participate in that pool. Once the pool gets to a specific size there is another incentive that kicks in to make it less profitable to limit it from getting to big. These incentives and probably others I’m not aware of are designed to create around 1000 stake pools of equal size. To answer the other question an adversary would have to create a group of 501 pool owners which is a pretty big number.

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IOHK has a team of very good game theorists working on these very questions to make sure there is more incentives to play by the rules than to break the rules.

You don’t necessarily get to keep 51% stake forever. If you started a 51% attack, the community would quickly agree to fork you out.

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To be fair, even in that scenario the attacker still has 51% of the coins.

Is that type of forking even possible in a system like Cardano btw? Based on Aggelos’ presentation at Crypto 2017 I would think it may be impossible? (link)

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I mean forking while also deleting the attackers’ coins.

I am altering the deal

Sure it’s possible. While voting and reaching consensus is the basic idea, there is nothing to stop you from forking Cardano. The software, docs and blockchain are all open source.

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