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Obviously the concern is not the ASICs themselves but the ASIC designers. (Using miners here in the colloquial sense of human collectives/corporations backing t
by WorldMaker 4y ago
Obviously the concern is not the ASICs themselves but the ASIC designers. (Using miners here in the colloquial sense of human collectives/corporations backing the machines than than the specific sense of the raw machines themselves.)
Yes, a practical preimage weakness in SHA-256 is a nightmare scenario with huge implications to the rest of internet security beyond just get. It's why I sometimes can't sleep at night knowing how much energy bitcoin spends daily on a continuous massively distributed partial preimage attack on SHA-256.
- marktangotango 4y ago> how much energy bitcoin spends daily on a continuous massively distributed partial preimage attack on SHA-256. I would not be concerned about this. The way the asics operate is they discard the results. Also, the hashes are random strings which don't compress very well, so storing trillions upon trillions of them (for later analysis) is not practical.
- WorldMaker 4y agoAgain, the point of the fear is not the specifics of current operations (ASIC details; which y'all are talking about as if all of the miners are using the same hardware), but the fear of future operations and that there's an enormous industrial preimage attack effort at all. One that we can see in real time, in global energy consumption graphs. Maybe you find "cold comfort" that because we can watch it in real time if someone discovers a weakness we will also watch its repercussions and the subsequent horrifying fall in real time, too, but I certainly don't.