3 ms·

Many parties do. The question is if they'd find it worth the effort. There's easier ways of making more money, at least for now.

rocqua 7y ago
Almost by definition, its impossible for more than one party to control 51% of all hashing power. This leaves out any miners turned of because of power costs, and non-ASIC compute. I have no idea how big those are. My completely unfounded guess would be that all of AWS available CPU compute woudn't be enough compute for a 51% attack.
- ReverseCold 7y ago
  > CPU compute well yeah, CPUs are many orders of magnitude slower than ASICs
- untoreh 7y ago
  bitcoin electricity cost is the equivalent of a couple of small nations, or the full power of a nuclear power plant, its hashpower is equivalent to the top 500 supercomputers. (this info might be outdated by now). what secures it though is not the giant mountain of resources by itself but MAD (mutually assured destruction) which is hardly game theoretic. Its basically a way for people to park their money akin to real estate, so they wont ever attack the network as long as it keeps their money warm and fuzzy. Its not really decentralized (more like denationalized) and strongly vulnerable to regulations. However just like safe havens if a nation bans it others will welcome it, thats why it is unkillable. China despite having all the resources to crack down on bitcoin mining they wont do it because for the better or worse its like controlling a global currency, which they have been trying to turn the yuan into for a while
- gnulinux 7y ago
  > Almost by definition, its impossible for more than one party to control 51% of all hashing power. I suppose they meant, that many parties do have that much potential compute but they use it for other things. But they could in theory switch to computing bitcoin hashes and control 51%, and in turn some other party can do the same etc... Obviously you're right that eventually one party can own 51%, but that doesn't mean only one party can successfully perform 51% attack, since % of hashing power can change by time.

rocqua 7y ago

Almost by definition, its impossible for more than one party to control 51% of all hashing power. This leaves out any miners turned of because of power costs, and non-ASIC compute. I have no idea how big those are. My completely unfounded guess would be that all of AWS available CPU compute woudn't be enough compute for a 51% attack.

ReverseCold 7y ago
> CPU compute well yeah, CPUs are many orders of magnitude slower than ASICs
untoreh 7y ago
bitcoin electricity cost is the equivalent of a couple of small nations, or the full power of a nuclear power plant, its hashpower is equivalent to the top 500 supercomputers. (this info might be outdated by now). what secures it though is not the giant mountain of resources by itself but MAD (mutually assured destruction) which is hardly game theoretic. Its basically a way for people to park their money akin to real estate, so they wont ever attack the network as long as it keeps their money warm and fuzzy. Its not really decentralized (more like denationalized) and strongly vulnerable to regulations. However just like safe havens if a nation bans it others will welcome it, thats why it is unkillable. China despite having all the resources to crack down on bitcoin mining they wont do it because for the better or worse its like controlling a global currency, which they have been trying to turn the yuan into for a while
gnulinux 7y ago
> Almost by definition, its impossible for more than one party to control 51% of all hashing power. I suppose they meant, that many parties do have that much potential compute but they use it for other things. But they could in theory switch to computing bitcoin hashes and control 51%, and in turn some other party can do the same etc... Obviously you're right that eventually one party can own 51%, but that doesn't mean only one party can successfully perform 51% attack, since % of hashing power can change by time.