4 ms·

At USD$6.5B for a 51% attack (scraped off a website)... ... that's a smidge over 1% of the US military budget.

• SilasX 8y ago
  Doesn't mean it's easy to get approval to spend that "smidge" on an attack.
  • ethbro 8y ago
    "smidge over 1%" It's not easy, but it's not impossible (to parent's bombastic assertion). I believe the Manhattan project spent something like 0.55% of the US military budget (against ~2013USD$900b yearly budgets, which seemed the peak in 1942-45). http://www.dictionary.com/browse/smidge http://www.dictionary.com/browse/smidge
    • SilasX 8y ago
      Because it had hard-won political approval; a bitcoin attack would face similar barriers. And I know what smidge means, I was expressing ire at your attempt to sound folksy.
      • ethbro 8y ago
        Fwiw, I'm actually pretty folksy.
• spiorf 8y ago
  51% lets you censor transactions. You need more than that to reverse a week old tx. Way more. You have to outrun the rest of the world and gain a week of advantage. So if you have 90% of the hashrate, you go 9 times faster than the honest miners. Every day, you can erase 9 days of blockchain. But that 90% means that you build a mining farm that is 9 times greater that the current hashrate. Redo the math on the costs and logistics of that.