The Professor
1 min readFeb 25, 2019

Ethereum seems to be less susceptible to double-spend

Ethereum-type chain vs Bitcoin-type chain at same mining rate is - NOT Ethereum vs Bitcoin. However, they sacrifice by having to face higher bandwidth requirements, wasted computation on uncles, and more profitable selfish mining — trade offs. Highly misleading.

Furthermore, since their PoW is so different, have to normalize it. Energy cost is part of it, which Bitcoin obviously wins. But hardware is a much bigger component of cost. Chains are protected against miners double spending by reducing the market value of the coins and rewards they get, which makes them unable to cover the cost of electricity AND hardware. Those go hand in hand. Since Bitcoin ASIC’s are single purpose and not general equipment, their resale value is negligible and their supply is highly limited meaning 3rd party attack is infinitely more expensive and hardware in general makes electric cost look tiny by comparison — that’s what protects Bitcoin.

Ethereum depends on general hardware of GPUs which can easily switch to mine another coin or even be resold at almost full value, meaning hardware cost is approximately ~0. The tiny amount of electricity costs lost in attack is many many orders of magnitude lower than hardware costs incurred by Bitcoin miners and much lower than electric costs making chance of double spend on this Ethereum many orders of magnitude higher.

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