UPDATED: You only need the bottom 51, not the top.
Now that market cap of BTSX is reasonable high and the top 51 delegates have over 10% of the voting shares it's an interesting exercise figuring how much it would cost to unseat the top 51.
So with a market cap of $70MM shares the cost of unseating the 51 delegates would be:
50th delegate has 10.11% and the 101st delegate has 9.2% of the share votes for an average of say 10% of shares voted.
$70MM USD market cap. 10% is $7MM USD to buy enough votes to unseat all 51. That is of course assuming you could amass $7MM USD worth of BTSX without raising the price at all.
That leaves the attacker to ponder how they could net more than $7MM USD out of the attack.
I think this FUD angle would ignore the profit motive within the Bitshares ecosystem and focus on more sinister themes:
Perhaps there is a certain legacy industry that would see market share evaporate if Bitshares is successful...
Or perhaps the bad actor has substantial holdings in another tech (ahem) that would benefit greatly from damaging Bitshares.
Either way, pure profit motive does not seem adequate to justify this type of scorched-earth attack.
I think the answer is simply that should a bad actor somehow acquire the required stake and attack successfully the delegates/devs of the day will just fork and carry on.
Let's run through the exercise for kicks:
The attacker would likely have to acquire the stake off-market, as the slippage from acquiring on-market would be unmanageable.
Right away the attacker is going to run into a problem - most folks with large stakes are not selling at these prices.
If I'm reading sentiment correctly, most large stakeholders seem to consider $0.5-10/BTSX the floor for profit taking.
So now you're talking $1-20bn cap before large lots of BTSX become available and that means a $100m-$2bn stake.
The attacker would have to be willing to sacrifice the value of the stake. Ouch.
But let's assume the attacker has acquired the stake (somehow) and carries out a successful attack.
What has the attack accomplished? Proof that the platform can be attacked?
Now, if the delegates/devs are smart they fork... and decide to burn the attacker's funds.
A serious attack is transmuted into a very generous donation to BTSX shareholders.Bitshares should really have an attack response plan in place to this effect.
Fork & Burn has a nice ring to it.