>Bitcoin in contrast takes 10 minutes to clear and settle a single transaction vs. Ethereum that takes 15 seconds.”
This is a misconception in the cryptocurrency space. There is no such thing as a irreversible payment only variance of the reversibility given the number of confirmations it has. The only criteria that governs if a transaction is safe is if it costs more to reorg it than the transaction is worth. 0 conf transactions are trivial to "reorg" or double spend. The time between blocks doesn't change this (why ethereum or other chains marketing on high block frequency is a scam).
See the double spend costs of various chains here:
e.g. any payment on ethereum that is more than $745 [1] is at risk at one block. Conversely, on bitcoin any payment below $78,000 is at risk at one block. The analogy to use is: Ethereum seats you at the restaurant faster but takes 100X longer to bring you the bill.
Ethereum is no better than paypal because (practically) no one can run a node that determines if a transaction has completed, because their blockchain is so poorly designed to make it onerous. Their entire marketplace is reliant on trusted third parties to verify transactions.
> e.g. any payment on ethereum that is more than $745 [1] is at risk at one block.
The attack cost is based on extrapolated hashing power rental costs from NiceHash. NiceHash has 4% of the necessary hashing power needed to carry out an attack on Ethereum, so you would not be able to complete an attack for this cost.
From the 'Learn More' page:
> Note that the attack cost does not include the block rewards that the miner will receive for mining. In some cases this can be quite significant, and reduce the attack cost by up to 80%.
I made this website a few months back, and the goal wasn't to show the cost to attack Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc - it actually shows the exact opposite - it would be incredibly hard to pull off an attack without buying a ton of equipment since there isn't enough hashing power available for rent.
The point was to show the large risk that smaller coins have to being attacked.
This is a misconception in the cryptocurrency space. There is no such thing as a irreversible payment only variance of the reversibility given the number of confirmations it has. The only criteria that governs if a transaction is safe is if it costs more to reorg it than the transaction is worth. 0 conf transactions are trivial to "reorg" or double spend. The time between blocks doesn't change this (why ethereum or other chains marketing on high block frequency is a scam).
See the double spend costs of various chains here:
https://www.crypto51.app/
e.g. any payment on ethereum that is more than $745 [1] is at risk at one block. Conversely, on bitcoin any payment below $78,000 is at risk at one block. The analogy to use is: Ethereum seats you at the restaurant faster but takes 100X longer to bring you the bill.
Ethereum is no better than paypal because (practically) no one can run a node that determines if a transaction has completed, because their blockchain is so poorly designed to make it onerous. Their entire marketplace is reliant on trusted third parties to verify transactions.
[1] 179e3/60/4 [2] 470e3/6