A reddit post recently revealed that the NiceHash cryptomining constitutes the majority of hashpower on the Dash network. Dash has a collective hash power of 1,900 TH/s and of this NiceHash holds more than 1000 TH/s spread across 25,000 miners.

Over $2.2 Million Earned by Single Miner

The user notes that the top three addresses over the last Dash blocks are in control of the same entity.

They write:

This particular transaction has three of the four top addresses as inputs meaning one entity controls all three. These three alone gather 53% and more. You can also see this started 6 months ago/around September last year, and I think the fourth unknown pool also belongs to this entity yet it is seperated on the blockchain. It started to gather a lot of hash at the same time.

The addresses in question are:

These addresses have mined 26,665 Dash till date. 51% create significant vulnerabilities in the blockchain network. Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin mentioned that networks should be vulnerable to 51% attacks as miner centralization is threatening to the network .

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Scenario Before Chainlocks

NiceHash accounts for the majority of the Dash cryptocurrency’s hashrate. The Reddit user Flenst concludes his post:

So it is possible someone could try to perform a 51% before DASH implements their chainlocks. The actor could start right away. Anyone offering a service with DASH must keep an eye on the chain as long as this doesn’t change and be very careful.

In November, Dash said they are introducing the new feature in order to combat 51% attacks. Such attacks are in the news again with recent issues surrounding Ethereum Classic. Chainlocks also deals with block reorganizations and modifies the “longest-chain” rules that Dash inherits from Bitcoin.

A sneek peek from Dash Improvement Proposal 8:

When a node encounters multiple valid chains, it sets the local “active” chain by selecting the one that has the most accumulated work. This is generally known as the “longest-chain” rule as in most cases it is equivalent to choosing the chain with the most blocks. If both chains have the same amount of accumulated work (and in most cases the same block count), a decision can’t be made solely based on the longest-chain rule. […] If another block is then received which extends the non-active chain so that it has the most accumulated work, it becomes the active one. For example, even if a chain is currently 6 blocks longer than any other chain, it’s still possible that a shorter chain becomes longer and thus the active one. This is generally known as a chain reorganization.

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