It’s not clear to me whether 51% attacks on crypto coins are illegal. If they are NOT illegal, 51% attacks have the opportunity to be turned into items for sale. Similar examples would be denial of service attacks from the past decade. DDOS attacks have a large percentage of “for the lulz”, 51% attacks don’t seem to attract the lulz crowd yet, which confuses me. I find many crypto coin ICO’s ripe for laughing at.

With little value offered by the myriad of crypto coins, why speculate in coins, when you can pwn them? The money has little monetary value today, so attacks on a large number of coins, an attacker has little to lose as these companies aren’t going to chase anyone. The cost per attack is really what drives a cyber attack business. As an attacker I’m going to take the largest dollar returns per hour involved in launching an attack. Right now, blockchain based attacks have huge returns on investment. Combine that with a low risk (jail time) vs high reward (money gained/notoriety) scenario and I’m not sure why we aren’t hearing about more attacks. Likely because there’s no law stating attacks must be publicized and the companies are keeping these attacks quiet.

With that out there, the startup idea of the day is to build a blockchain attack business. Again…this is only an idea. I’m not in the business of attacking blockchain for profit. I do believe crypto based business do a poor job of protecting users and their assets.