Research conducted by security experts Trail of Bits concluded that the notion of blockchain decentralization is a fallacy. In particular, the report claimed controlling the four biggest mining pools could disrupt the Bitcoin chain, with Ethereum faring worse at three entities.
“The number of entities sufficient to disrupt a blockchain is relatively low: four for Bitcoin, two for Ethereum, and less than a dozen for most PoS networks.”
The report was commissioned by the Pentagon’s research and development branch, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is tasked with investigating technology for potential military use.
According to the website Tech Republic, which targets IT professionals, the report added further doubts about blockchain technology at a time when security risk and crypto price instability are at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
“The DARPA commissioned report only adds more concerns about the blockchain and affects investors’ perception and confidence.”
Blockchains are not immutable
The report goes in-depth, covering immutability, the Nakamoto coefficient, which refers to the number of entities required to attack a network successfully, mining pool vulnerabilities, 51% attacks, network topology, and network and software centrality.
The most critical findings stated immutability could be broken, and distributed ledger technology (DLT) can be centralized via authoritative, consensus, motivational, topological, network, and software means.
Expanding further, the report mentioned Virtual Machines (VM,) which are used to include new features and execute security migrations, are a potential gateway to breaking immutability.
“Bitcoin and its derivatives have a VM for interpreting transaction output scripts. Ethereum uses a VM for executing its smart contracts.”
Through VMs, software authors and maintainers can potentially “modify the semantics of the blockchain,” which can include reverting the blockchain to a previous…
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