Definition of dead should be "can't connect to a node" not based on market cap. For example, BlakeBitcoin is alive as far as I can tell, bc merge mined with Blakecoin. You can totally fire up a client and transact in BBTC. Now it may not be worth much or have liquidity on an exchange, but that is not "dead" just "cheap".
Arguably you should factor in mining power too: if a cryptocurrency can be 51%-attacked easily (such as by an individual paying less than the cryptocurrency's market cap for servers in the cloud), then people shouldn't bring money near it.
You can easily 51% any and every coin for less than their market cap if you calculate just the cost of running/renting the hardware for a day. (Though really you don't even need it for that long)
I'm not sure if you would run into the problem of availability of hardware at some point, but if you're spending ~$76 billion to rent servers for a day, I'm sure you can figure out the details later.
But logically, 51% of the network cannot exceed the value of the network. You lose by a huge margin if you are spending more on protecting your money, than money you actually have.
What happens when you stop your 51% attack? The participants whose party you ruined can simply roll back the chain to before your attack and continue business as usual. 51% attacks are expensive because they must be sustained. Sure, you could try to take the coins and exchange them quickly, but if you attacked a coin with a big enough community (Bitcoin) the message would spread so fast that there would be a coordinated effort from stopping you cashing out. If someone just wanted to destroy a coin without caring to exchange for their currency of choice (like a government), well, even they would have to sustain a perpetual goose chase since people can just abandon the attacked chain and take up another and only provide support to the chain(s) that are not being attacked. It would take word of mouth, but we are using Internet where messages spread to millions with seconds.
If you make a longer chain than the rest of the network, then self-interested miners are going to switch to mining on top of your chain instead of risking their work on the old chain being for nothing. If the attack is short, then surely most miners won't be upgraded to be picky about chains in the time after the attack, and everyone else will know that and won't bother trying to make their miners prefer a losing chain.
If the point of the 51% attack is profit-oriented, then the attacker is going to do it long enough to get their double-spend confirmed and then stop doing the 51% attack.
Hmm, maybe market cap was the wrong comparison to make.
The cryptocurrencies listed in that article are doing pretty well for themselves mining-wise. I suspect that there may be tiny cryptocurrencies traded on some exchanges that could be 51%-attacked by an individual for somewhere between $1,000 and $100,000 to double-spend some high-value transactions. Maybe it's unlikely for the numbers to line up to be profitable and sure enough to pull off, but if it does happen, then that cryptocurrency is toast as soon as someone notices.
And, linked to that -- block creation rate. If a lot of miners exit a coin at once, it's possible for the hash rate and difficulty to diverge significantly, possibly even to the point that it may take days or weeks for a block to be mined. At that point, the coin is effectively dead.
Vulnerable, not dead. BTW even a 51 pct attack doesn't "kill" a coin, it just tricks users temporarily into honoring a double-spend. Networks can and do recover.
A 51% attack can kill people's confidence in a cryptocurrency, and finally wake traders up to the unsteady ground they're on. It's been a few years so I don't remember the specifics, but I remember seeing mentions of small cryptocurrencies that got 51% attacked, demand for it completely disappeared, most miners move off because it was no longer profitable, and no one at all kept mining because the difficulty value was left too high and had no time to adjust down to let individual miners mine easily.
If Bitcoin or a top-10 cryptocurrency got 51% attacked, I'm sure the price would take a hit but people would find a way to limit the damage. I'm mainly talking about tiny pump-and-dump-tier cryptocurrencies whose creators don't even love them any more but that inexplicably still have some trading volume.
Why would we ever want a blacklist when a whitelist is so much saner? The ether is littered with the walking corpses of coins intended only to deceive/P&D.
Relatively short list of "verified" (by a "team of analysts") crypto assets [1] (YMMV).
> Anyone can cook up a [new whatever] by forking and do a search-and-replace
Reminds me of how people created a plethora of new browsers on Windows systems by calling a Windows library function that creates a browser. If you didn't know better, you might think that they spent a million man-hours writing a new browser from scratch.
And around 2014, that's exactly where most new cryptocurrencies were coming from. IIRC, there were even a few web sites which would automatically perform that customization for you.
I rather prefer a list of ICOs with a high potential and long-term perspective.
That many ICOs are Ponzi or close to scam is nothing new.Such a list feels more like a personal justification for 'I don't need to invest, I won't miss anything and BTC and ETH were the last success stories in crypto'.
Jest aside, I think there is huge resentment towards cryptocurrencies. From people who missed it, to those who lost. The whole scene is riddled with scams and thieves, and yet it continues to skyrocket. I don't know how this resentment will be overcome, or even if it will be an obstacle to cryptocurrencies, but the resentment is something I've noticed rising at the speed of Bitcoin.
I think there is indeed a lot of resentment. I guess only time will tell if it's warranted; most of my friends have no idea what they are (I did a fair bit of mining in 2013-14, but alas got on the bitcoin train way too late and small to make any significant money!), but everyone seems to have an opinion on them which is formed by the media's representation of them through large negative stories of drug money and contract killings. Whether they do actually change the landscape of global finance/money remains to be seen (I'm a fair bit less positive than I was a few years ago, despite the rise in price), but there's definitely a big PR battle for them to overcome with the general populace; most who know anything about them have only heard negative stories.
Was this list automatically generated in some way? I'm trying to prune a large list of inactive coins right now, and manually checking their activity has been tedious.
