The mining reward is a special transaction in the newly mined block called the coinbase transaction. It's a transaction with no inputs, only one output pointing to an address of the miner.
Bitcoin does not allow these kind of transactions to be used as input for another transaction unless a certain number of confirmations has passed.
Thanks for the additional technical details. But I don't think it changes anything.
> Bitcoin does not allow these kind of transactions to be used as input for another transaction unless a certain number of confirmations has passed.
This means that in the hypothetical attack case, where 1008 blocks are replaced by 1009 blocks by the 51% attacker... then 909 x 12.5 BTC are immediately usable. While the last 100 x 12.5 BTC will be usable in 1000 minutes later.
In either case, the 51% attacker mines blocks faster than literally everyone else combined. So there's no period where of waiting that is safe against a 51% attacker.
The 51% attack is the end-all-be-all of a coin. If it happens, the coin is hopelessly lost. The entire cryptographical nature of the coin depends on the 51% attack remaining infeasible.
----------
In any case, the 51% attacker's 1009 blocks is longer than the 1008 "honest blockchain". So the honest miners (by default) will mine the 1009-long blockchain after the 51% attack.
So the 51% attacker's coins are safe and will be spendable in short order. Perhaps the 49% honest miners can "blacklist" his coins, but with 51% of the hashrate, the 51% attacker can always legitimize his own coins by using his own 51% hardware (since he can build blocks faster than everyone else).
"These new protections are included in both the Cloudflare Free Managed Ruleset (available to all Free customers) ..... "
having some burn in time in free tier before it hits the whole network would have been good?!
reply