There's been 2 people now under maybe a month that have brought up the governance vector of Hive and for some reason they seem to be under the impression that Hive can easily be "51% attacked".
It kind of made me facepalm a bit but I understand not everyone may understand it and I'm sure there's plenty of people outside of Hive and maybe even here who are under the impression that what happened when we forked to Hive is something that can easily happen again. So I spent some additional time explaining it to them and I thought I'd write a post about it for any other readers out there who may be interested, if anything to maybe feel a bit more secure?
If you have the time, or wanna just use AI to give you the scoop, you should read Tim Copeland's peace on what happened during the Steem fork: https://decrypt.co/38050/steem-steemit-tron-justin-sun-cryptocurrency-war
During the time Steem and Hive were quite the talk of crypto twitter, with Vitalik praising the community fork and that you can't just buy a community. In contrast to Ethereum Classic, Hive actually surpassed its predecessor to become worth more and get most of the community, developers, dapps, services, etc to migrate over.
Could this happen again?
What people call a 51% attack is usually something that can only happen to some blockchains, Bitcoin being one of them. Since bitcoin is quite limited as to what you can do with it, the main thing an attack would attempt to do is to double-spend, i.e. send 1000 Bitcoin to Binance, exchange it for usdt, withdraw, then suddenly you still have 1000 Bitcoin in your wallet because you convinced the whole network that you never spent it and tricked Binance that you did. Kind of in simple terms I suppose. This is why many exchanges and services often require multiple confirmations before they let you trade with your deposit or withdraw it. If you own more than 51% of the network, you have a "more than 51% chance" to find the next block and thus push a double spend in it.
I'm getting too old and haven't really spent way too much time when it comes to how Bitcoin works so please don't quote me on the above and feel free to correct any mistakes I may have tried to simplify and may simply be mistaken on.
The point of this post, however, is if something similar can happen to Hive.
and I'm try to make this short so I won't go into too much details or history of what happened way back during the Hive fork.
Simply put, to take over governance of Hive, which would then allow you to hardfork its code into whatever you like, you would need a supermajority of witnesses to either belong to your or be under your control and agree to update their servers with your hardfork code. This requires 17 of the top witnesses to accomplish and they all need to be running the hardfork code at the same time during a set date/time for the chain to fork. That's why every update is called a hardfork.
The last one Steem did stole over 28 million Steem Power from targeted accounts, but they even failed at stealing it as someone stole it back and then later they got sued to give it all back to the rightful owners.
Something many may forget is that Justin Sun was losing very hard with his fake witnesses. Every stakeholder was changing their votes from some backup witnesses to make sure they're voting for top witnesses to win back supermajority and even though JS was buying up Steem on exchanges, he couldn't get enough to stay on top. Even with Steem having gone from 15c to 70c+ if I recall correctly during his attempts. The community was overwhelming him, contacting afk stakeholders to come back and vote for real witnesses, people taking their liquid Steem from exchanges or other accounts/savings to power it up to beat JS and we were winning.
JS, being the weasel that he is, had a trump card however, something so unexpected and disgusting that I think no one thought would occur, but it did. He "tricked" or colluded most likely with Binance (he's related to CZ) and Huobi (CEO was also chinese) to take all of their customer's liquid Steem, this means any customer on Binance and Huobi who just held Steem on the exchange without knowing what it does or doesn't do, and power it up to use that extra power to surpass his fake witnesses into supermajority.
This caused a huge backlash towards Binance and Huobi, and while CZ and Huobi CEO pretended they got tricked under the false pretense that Steem was being "attacked" by "hackers", most people understood what had happened, at least the ones with a regular and higher IQ; that 2 of the biggest exchanges in the space had helped centralize a decentralized chain.
Okay, so what does this mean for us now?
If you look at the witness counter, you can see that the top 4 witnesses have over ~96 million Hive power worth of voters behind them. The reason I'm looking at the top 4 is because for supermajority you need 17 top witnesses, but even if they'd only get the lower end of spots, meaning rank 4 all the way to 20, they would need at least 96m HP to get spot #4 and the rest.
What we know:
There's roughly 500m+ liquid Hive in existence (excluding virtual hive (existing hbd converted to hive)), with 200m+ powered up and 300m+ liquid on exchanges/elsewhere.
Currently you would need roughly half of all powered up stake to vote for 17 new witnesses into position to attempt to overthrow governance.
One could think of a scenario where someone has been hoarding millions and millions of Hive on exchanges to attempt to do this again. Say they would suddenly withdraw 100 million Hive and power it up. The current barrier we have against that is that it takes 30 days for powered up stake to be effective in governance voting, meaning we would see this "100m Hive move" in time and we could react to it. We could warn the community not to vote for these fake witnesses and ask them to change their votes around to support the original top 20 instead, so their acceptance rate would grow from ~96m to 110+ as an example, overshadowing the newly powered up 100m hp, if we had reason to believe that they want to attack the chain through governance.
This does not mean that if a random institution or whale mentioned they're powering up 100m hive that we'd need to worry about their intentions, nor would their stake ever be at risk. Technically they could overthrow governance if they thought we were doing a bad job and they wanted to implement changes to Hive themselves, that's how the chain works and we'd have to go along with it.
If, however, they were malicious, and wanted to implement code that takes people's stake away, takes away their right to vote, starts censoring text from posts and comments, through hardforks, then we would fight with our voting power to push them back under supermajority. As has happened once.
and even in the worst case scenario, where let's say they'd power up 200m or 300m hive and we wouldn't be able to outvote them and they started to do malicious things with the code, we will always have the last option available that we did when we forked over to Hive. We hardfork again.
A new blockchain but including the old blockchain. Hive2 (cause I'm unoriginal) would airdrop every hiver the same amount of Hive as hive2 and same amount of Hivepower as Hive2power and same amount of HBD as HBD2 as long as they didn't vote in favor of the malicious attacker's witnesses which forced us to fork again.
So what does this mean. It means that every regular user, as long as they kept their witness votes on the same witnesses as usual (or whatever parameters we'd set up based on what happened), would now have two coins of the same balance and could yet again choose which chain they wanna be on. Do they wanna move to Hive2 where decentralization continues, where account's stake isn't stolen, where freedom of speech and censorship resistance continues to exist, etc, or do they wanna stay on Hive1 with their value. I.e. they could trade their Hive1 for Hive2 or Hive2 for Hive1 or keep both, as some did.
I hope you understand I was trying to simplify most things here to not make this post too long and bring too much trauma back to some readers who already went through it back then. My point being that the beauty of blockchains like Hive is that even in the worst case scenario's we survive and continue to thrive while attackers are left with the "bad" coins and don't get an airdrop because of their actions.
For those who have been asking me about these scenario's, I hope this post gives you a better overview of the whole thing. I don't believe Hive stakeholders would be against people/institutions/etc powering up a lot of Hive, it would make for a far more competitive pool and maybe they'd even use it better than most of us have been doing here, both in terms of curation and governance votes/proposals. I think we'd welcome that. The only thing we wouldn't welcome would be someone trying to undermine our values that we share that sets us apart from web2 boundries and politics and centralized limitations.
