If you have the resources to attack one of the bigger altcoins, you probably have a significant investment in the cryptocurrency space, and a significant interest in protecting it. Compromising even something like dogecoin would cause a lot of questions to be raised and likely drop the value of bitcoin as well as all the cryptocurrencies using the same work function as dogecoin.

Right now, there's very little benefit to attacking a significant currency, because it would be very expensive and likely traumatize the whole system. Unless it's some power like the NSA, I don't think there's much to worry about.

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 2:38 AM, <rob.golding@astutium.com> wrote:

> But there's so much 'dry powder' out there (GPUs), I wonder if *not*
> supporting merge-mining is any better? At least the attacker has to do
> some unique PoW, so you hope it's costing them something.

With lots of people having access to 100TH+ there's not really much
'cost' to doing a 51% attack on an alt-coin beyond a short-term
diversion away from 'profitable' mining.

At least by supporting merged mining, more miners are likely to
'support' multiple coin types, thus making a 51% attack from an
individual/group less straightforward.

>> The rational decision for a non-scam altcoin, is to take advantage of
>> merged mining to get as much security as possible.

Exactly.

Rob

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