3 ms·

I don't follow your attack logic. If mining hardware becomes inefficient why would using it to "attack the network" be profitable? Can you say more about what

I don't follow your attack logic. If mining hardware becomes inefficient why would using it to "attack the network" be profitable? Can you say more about what attack you're thinking of? He absolutely did imagine speciality hardware would be used to mine: "At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware."

paulgb 4y ago
> If mining hardware becomes inefficient why would using it to "attack the network" be profitable? Can you say more about what attack you're thinking of? The idea is that under normal day-to-day circumstances, a big deterrent to dishonest mining is that miners are deeply invested in the hardware and attacking the network would devalue that investment (if it craters the market). Normally if you have a big mining operation, the winning strategy is not to “defect”. But halvings change the dynamic, because they take a bunch of hardware that was profitable one day and make it unprofitable the next. So for a brief period there's a bunch of hardware floating around that can't be used profitably to mine, and so has no value to honest miners, but has temporary value to dishonest ones if they can accumulate enough of it. I don't think this will be feasible for a while, but a few halvings from now it could be. > He absolutely did imagine speciality hardware would be used to mine I stand corrected, I hadn't seen that post: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/#selection-71.0-32.51 https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/...