3 ms·
Bitcoins are only generated every 10 minutes (on average), so it would probably not be worth it for a company to dedicate a huge cluster of computers to it. At
by Tichy 16y ago
Bitcoins are only generated every 10 minutes (on average), so it would probably not be worth it for a company to dedicate a huge cluster of computers to it. At most they could earn 50 BTC/10 minutes, no matter how much computing power they'd throw at it.
It get's more interesting if a company could calculate blocks faster than all the other nodes combined. Then that company could forge the complete chain of transactions.
I think there are even numbers floating around in the BitCoin forums as to how much it would cost to build such a server farm atm. So yeah - with enough money you could ruin BitCoin, but why would you be motivated to do so? Also, it gets harder every day, as the network of nodes grows.
- contactdick 16y agowell the motivation to make money is a fairly strong one for a lot of people - many worse things are done every day because of it.
- Tichy 16y agoYes, but destroying BitCoin would not make you any money. At least I don't see how.
- aredington 16y agoDestroying BitCoin provides you lots of value if you have a vested interest in some thing that BitCoin threatens the value of.
- Tichy 16y agoFair point.
- Seth_Kriticos 16y agoYes. Though it would be hard to just out-compute the hashes without the community noticing. Just to put it into perspective: currently the network is crunching away at 16344 TeraFLOP/s ( http://bitcoinwatch.com/ http://bitcoinwatch.com/ ).