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Increasing collective hash-power doesn't necessarily increase the decentralization guarantees of cryptocurrencies. It's more important that hashpower is distrib

by pradn 9y ago

Increasing collective hash-power doesn't necessarily increase the decentralization guarantees of cryptocurrencies. It's more important that hashpower is distributed among many people.

mrb 9y ago
My point wasn't about decentralization. It was about hashrate providing security. That's all. (Since you talk about decentralization, being GPU-mineable doesn't necessarily increase decentralization either. Bitmain could put 100 MW of GPUs into mining some random coin.)
- mrep 9y ago
  You don't even have to buy the gpu's. Just rent them from AWS, Azure, and google cloud for the time it takes to carry out your attack. digiconomist [0] estimates that current etherum mining cost is 1.7 billion a year, or 4.65 million a day, or 194,000 an hour, or 3234 a minute. Multiply by 5 for cloud on demand premiums and you could dominate the etherum network for an entire day for 23.25 million. You could also do it for free if you can manage to do it with stolen credit cards. I'm amazed it hasn't already happened to a cryptocurrency. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
  - ericflo 9y ago
    That's one of the reasons Google Cloud has fairly small quotas on everything now, and you have to request permission for more. They'd almost certainly stop approving you way before you got to $23m of GPUs, assuming they even have that many free in your zone.
    - mrep 9y ago
      Then split it across all 3 cloud providers, across all regions/AZ's, and across thousands of accounts.
    - nkurz 9y ago
      Wait. Are you are saying that if Google were to know that your intent was to legally mine Ethereum (or some similar proof-of-work currency) on a large scale, that they would refuse to rent you GPU's? This seems extremely unlikely. Why would it be in Google's interest to turn down any paying customer, much less one willing to pay millions of dollars a day?
      - dwild 9y ago
        It's that the kind of client you want? One that comes takes 10 billions $ a year worth of GPU (6 x 1.7) for only a single day. All that to give you bad PR afterward because that crashed the market of a popular cryptocurrency? Sure 23 millions seems fun, but handling that many GPU is expensive and if they doesn't have differents markets to support that usage, it's a big loss to them (and if they actually have the market, then, that single 23 millions isn't worth much either).
  - seppel 9y ago
    There are probably cooler things that you can do for 24 million stolen dollars than dominate the etherum network. Actually, using the hashpower to wash the stolen money by legitimate mining sounds cool enough. What can kind of cool stuff can you actually do when you dominate the etherum network?

by pradn 9y ago

Increasing collective hash-power doesn't necessarily increase the decentralization guarantees of cryptocurrencies. It's more important that hashpower is distributed among many people.

mrb 9y ago

My point wasn't about decentralization. It was about hashrate providing security. That's all. (Since you talk about decentralization, being GPU-mineable doesn't necessarily increase decentralization either. Bitmain could put 100 MW of GPUs into mining some random coin.)

mrep 9y ago
You don't even have to buy the gpu's. Just rent them from AWS, Azure, and google cloud for the time it takes to carry out your attack. digiconomist [0] estimates that current etherum mining cost is 1.7 billion a year, or 4.65 million a day, or 194,000 an hour, or 3234 a minute. Multiply by 5 for cloud on demand premiums and you could dominate the etherum network for an entire day for 23.25 million. You could also do it for free if you can manage to do it with stolen credit cards. I'm amazed it hasn't already happened to a cryptocurrency. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
- ericflo 9y ago
  That's one of the reasons Google Cloud has fairly small quotas on everything now, and you have to request permission for more. They'd almost certainly stop approving you way before you got to $23m of GPUs, assuming they even have that many free in your zone.
  - mrep 9y ago
    Then split it across all 3 cloud providers, across all regions/AZ's, and across thousands of accounts.
  - nkurz 9y ago
    Wait. Are you are saying that if Google were to know that your intent was to legally mine Ethereum (or some similar proof-of-work currency) on a large scale, that they would refuse to rent you GPU's? This seems extremely unlikely. Why would it be in Google's interest to turn down any paying customer, much less one willing to pay millions of dollars a day?
    - dwild 9y ago
      It's that the kind of client you want? One that comes takes 10 billions $ a year worth of GPU (6 x 1.7) for only a single day. All that to give you bad PR afterward because that crashed the market of a popular cryptocurrency? Sure 23 millions seems fun, but handling that many GPU is expensive and if they doesn't have differents markets to support that usage, it's a big loss to them (and if they actually have the market, then, that single 23 millions isn't worth much either).
- seppel 9y ago
  There are probably cooler things that you can do for 24 million stolen dollars than dominate the etherum network. Actually, using the hashpower to wash the stolen money by legitimate mining sounds cool enough. What can kind of cool stuff can you actually do when you dominate the etherum network?