What Is the Relationship between Coin Difficulty and Vulnerability to a 51% Attack?
Coin difficulty is directly related to the total hash rate securing the network. A lower difficulty generally means a lower total hash rate is currently mining the coin.
When the total hash rate is low, an attacker needs to acquire significantly less computing power to achieve the 51% majority. This makes low-difficulty coins highly vulnerable, as the economic cost to launch an attack is much lower.
High-difficulty coins, like Bitcoin, are prohibitively expensive to attack due to their massive hash rate.
Glossar
Vulnerability
Exposure ⎊ Vulnerability within cryptocurrency, options, and derivatives manifests as quantifiable risk to capital stemming from imperfectly hedged positions or systemic dependencies.
Hash Rate
Power ⎊ Hash rate quantifies the total computational power dedicated to solving the cryptographic puzzle in a Proof-of-Work network.
Total Hash Rate
Measure ⎊ Total Hash Rate represents the aggregate computational power, measured in hashes per second, currently being dedicated by all miners to secure a Proof-of-Work blockchain network.
Coin Difficulty
Difficulty ⎊ Coin difficulty represents the measure of how challenging it is to generate a valid block for a specific cryptocurrency, a value that is inversely related to the probability of finding a block with a given amount of hashing power.