Decred in Depth: Preserving Chain Integrity

[justinsantoro]

Description

How Decred prevents chain splits, miner attacks, and upgrades consensus.

Audience

General Cryptocurrency audience.

Visual Style

Progress

Pre-Production

• Script
• Storyboard

Production

• Voice Over
• Visuals (animations)
• Music (music/sound effects)

Post-Production

• Assembly
• Picture lock
• Audio Edit

Release

• Upload
• Make Public

[justinsantoro]

Some useful Data:

As of November 1, 2017, at its peak, there was an estimated 10,833,159 TH/s of hashing power securing the Bitcoin network. So in order to successfully attack Bitcoin, you would need 51% of that which is 5,524,911 TH/s. Also, let's discount the fact that with the amount of money we're talking about here you could just pay to have your own ASIC built out in a fab for even less, but let's just keep it simple using released hardware. An Antminer S9 provides 14 TH/s @ 1415 USD. Thus, to achieve that 51%, you would have only needed to acquire approx 394,637 Antminer S9s 1415 = $558,411,355 USD. Now, for an apples to apples comparison, let's assume Bitcoin used Decred's hybrid system and thus we'll use the same coin supply, the same price per coin, and the same PoW hash rate. As of that same November 1, 2017 date, there were around 16,660,788 bitcoins in circulation at a cost of roughly 6740 USD per coin. Now, let's go ahead and use some less than favorable numbers and assume there is only 33% stake participation and calculate how much money it would take to attack the network by aiming to acquire 33% of the stake. Running the numbers, we can see ((1/0.33 - 1) 0.33)^3 = 0.29, so you would also need roughly 29% of the hash power in addition to 33% of the stake. So, 33% of 33% of 16,660,788 coins ~= 1,814,360 6740 per coin = 12,228,786,400 USD for the PoS portion. Now, you also need 29% of the hash power, so 10,833,159 TH/s .29 ~= 3,141,616 TH/s. Thus, you would need to acquire approx 224,402 Antminer S9s @ 1415 USD = 317,528,830 USD. So, in summary, you would need roughly 559 million USD to attack Bitcoin while you would need roughly 12.55 billion USD to attack Decred.

[raedah]

Tomasz Kaye (animator) is interesting in collaborating with us on this video and suggested this outline.
A run time of 4-5 minutes, specially recorded audio.

Decred: A fork-resistent cryptocurrency

1. What is a cryptocurrency fork?
2. Why do damaging forks occur?
3. Why are forks a risk to the longevity of cryptocurrencies?
4. How does decred minimize the risk of forks?