Abstract
Ethereum and cryptocurrencies more generally are seen by long term investors as a hedge against inflation and a low maintenance way to hold and transfer value over long periods of time. But the network that these cryptocurrencies exist upon have become more and more centralised and are susceptible to global-scale outages which can provide a malicious actor the opportunity to perform a 51% attack. In this thesis we explore three possible scenarios that could result in these outages: solar flares, country-wide electrical grid blackouts and hosting provider failures. Data is gathered on mining pool’s location and hosting or load
balancing provider and a simulation of the scenarios is ran. The results show that each scenario causes a large reduction of the hashrate power in the network but also shows that the network remains resilient to any one mining pool being able to perform the 51% attack and it
remains as decentralised as before the scenario occurred.
Keywords: Ethereum network, Mining pools, 51% attack, solar flares