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Crypto Talk Radio: Basic Cryptonomics

Leicester on Sybil Attacks in Crypto

29 Jan 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 15.964 Leicester

No, not Sybil Shepard. CryptoTalk.fm. My name is Leister. I'm your host. An out of cycle update for something brought to attention that I thought was fascinating and I felt I would share it with you.

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I'm not going to share the subject matter because unfortunately there's a coward who has precluded doing so it's fine because we can use some of the supplementary information for educational purposes, which is what we do. A Sybil attack. S Y B I L attack. What is a Sybil attack?

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i thought it was good for you to hear from a different lens and an attempt to simplify and just to caveat for some that don't seem to understand this this is an interpretation people are encouraged to go and research it themselves create their own interpretation for their own reasons meanwhile i can make my own interpretation it is incumbent look it up on people to do their own interpretation that's the whole point

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You should never blindly follow a single person as gospel because then you get into a cult. Now, having said that a Sybil attack at a high level in order to define it in a way you'll understand, I have to simplify what leads to it. Everybody I think understands the concept of a, blockchain. It is a ledger. It is an accounting of transactions over time.

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The accounting of transactions has to be maintained. The maintenance of the ledger is so that the integrity of the chain is persisted. Look it up. We have to make sure that there's acknowledgement of each transaction. So when you go in your wallet and you sign for something, you approve something, you are telling the chain, yes, I am saying that this is my transaction.

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Yes, I'm authorizing to do this transaction, whether that's connected to an application, whether it's sending crypto to somebody, whether it's receiving it, unless the receiver is an asynchronous, which is a different thing. I won't get into here. Point is that there's that first acknowledgement. You are acknowledging I'm making a transaction. I want to commit it up.

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When your transaction goes up, we'll talk about proof of work because I think it's easier to, for people to understand it. When you put your transaction up there, there are a whole set of miners and by end E R S out there, and they're looking for blocks.

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work and as part of the working of blocks they are rewarded in whichever token say bitcoin sure inside the block are a number of transactions yours included that all get then processed usually there's acknowledgements so there's one person finds it they process it and say this is a transaction that i'm committing then ultimately multiple are also finding the same.

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And then there's computations and calculations that occur in order to do what's being asked.

Chapter 2: What is a Sybil attack in cryptocurrency?

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And then there's precision and other things we will not get into here. Suffice to say, there's a consensus that generally goes along with this, that I'm describing to you, which that purpose is to ensure the integrity of the transaction prior to it being fully committed on the chain. This is why,

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Sometimes you'll do a transaction and it'll say, like, say if you're buying something online or using cryptocurrency and you send it, it'll say, we're waiting for this many confirmations. That's how many times somebody, one of these have checked in to say, it's good. It's good.

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And they'll ask for like two or three or something sometimes up to like 10 or 20, but usually it's like two or three just to check in, to make sure that it's really committed and it's not going to get rolled back, which is rare, but could. That process, once it's done, then they're saying there's an acknowledgement that it's been recognized on chain. We see that it's recognized on chain.

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We're good to go with it. Now we're okay sending you the whatever currency or whatever product. They have their own acknowledgement. Let's say it's a crypto that they're sending you. They have an acknowledgement that they got to wait through when they send it. It's usually pretty quick because it's outbound, but they have an acknowledgement and that shows up in your wallet and then you're done.

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And then yours, if you were to look at that transaction hash, you'll see on the actual scan, you'll see that there's a number of confirmations that keeps happening. So it just keeps happening over time. And this all goes to the integrity of the process. in certain of these to make all this happen, to actually create the so-called network, to enable everything I just described, you have nodes.

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The nodes are the heart and soul of what make the thing run in simple form. And there's always multiple of them. Part of the problem I would argue with nodes is, and this lends to the Sybil attack, Part of the problem and the flaw with nodes is the assumption that everybody has the best of intentions.

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As with any network, if your underlying servers, your routers, your computers, if you have a malicious actor powering this thing, it affects the network and drops its security and creates vulnerabilities. Now with something like blockchain, It's not like it could infect your computer or any of that because it's not running locally on your device, generally speaking.

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But what it could do is it could compromise the value of your assets. If you connect your, your wallet to a D app that's been compromised, or that is attached to a node that is compromised or is attached itself to the chain, but the chain has been compromised at a point, then your assets could be drained. So depending on where that compromise is happening, Your wallet could be affected.

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You, the physical, you would not be, but your assets, your stored assets could be recently. I talked about Monero and the 51% attack. The 51% attack is a type of Sybil attack. It simply means that an operator, a node operator is able to control at least 51% or more of the entirety of the network. And when that happens, It allows them to essentially control what's going on.

Chapter 3: How do blockchain transactions maintain integrity?

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They're saying that upfront, but behind the scenes in secret, they're in collusion with the leadership of the project.

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do you know that they're they have your best interest at heart by doing so if they're not transparently talking about things that are to your detriment that they were aware of that's what happened with the ship ecosystem and certain others so that's my feedback to you is consider sometimes you're not going to know going in you're not going to know that this malicious activity begins to happen

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post launch. Sometimes a project can launch and it's fine. And then after launch, this happens. That's what then causes the pump and dump graph that you often see on projects.

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