Bitcoin Forum

If a government can manufacture a train full of tanks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PTfF6wmqcU

Then it can easily manufacture a train full of ASICs. This won't be a 51% attack, it would be 99% attack.

Prove me wrong.

I hear governments only order ASICS from BFL.

So you're wrong about your predictions.

The government invented NASA and the Mars mission. Producing its own ASICs would be a piece of cake for them.

Ok on the serious side of things, your premise is still pretty weak.

First of all, if the U.S banking cartels aka government wanted to kill bitcoin, buying a bunch of ASICS would be one of the more challenging methods.

Second off, you can't even buy enough ASICS currently to do what you propose, in any sort of reasonable time span.

Third, developing their own would be difficult. Okay let's say it's possible.

They would just mine all bitcoins -- what use would this have?  

A 51% by the government could be seen and avoided.

I dunno. Could go on but I think it's a silly premise.

Easiest method would be merely just buying all bitcoins and crashing the market. But I don't see how the gov would be interested in doing so. It is far more feasible that the powers-who-be in the gov would instead just find a way to manipulate BTC for the monetary gain of the few people who would be making such a decision.

Besides even if the government did so the 'crypto cat' is out of the bag. A new coin would immediately be made and gain traction. The government moves to slow to counter the aims of a motivated, technology saavy population.

They invented Nasa? Seriously stfu because you are making us all dumber by reading your bullshit.

It is a United States government agency is it not?

I don't think invent is the word you're looking for, but yes.

I imagine a huge ASIC attack would be possible, but:
1. Why?
2. The government can't agree on anything. They would have to agree to attack, I doubt there are two people in the entire government than can agree on a single thing.

That's why we have BBQ coin, just in case things go south with BTC :P

yes i the government wanted to get rid of bitcoin they can, easily

At least BBQCoin can provide tasty treats.

If they REALLY wanted to, they could. Unless another government supported it. YOu have US with ASICS and CHina with ASICS... 49% 49% and then 2% eveyone else. Nothing changes. Except network hashrate. lol

In reality, I don't think the government wants to destroy bitcoin. Maybe an element within the government, but no the entire government.

If you have enough ASICs to dramatically outvote the network, and want to make Bitcoin unusable, a double-spend is only one tool in the toolbox.

If it was me in charge of the NSA's secret "Kill Bitcoin" project, here are some tricks I could do with a significant majority of hashpower:
1) Split the blockchain. Allocate enough hashing power to both sides such that they stay within 6 blocks of each other. As soon as the miners/devs/&c seem to come to a consensus over which chain to trust, split that one. Continue until there's tens of branches, each with similar blockheights.
2) Have a front deposit a large amount of BTC in major exchanges and sell them. Reorg the blockchain such that the deposit never happened. If the exchanges switch to the new chain, withdraw your free money and/or sue for securities fraud. If the exchanges stay on the old chain, you've just killed an exchange.

When a guy in China gets funded from an internet forum and starts building ASIC's in his basement (ASICMiner) and now has to watch out NOT to get 51% of the hash power then it's not very hard to imagine what a government can do. In the future it will be alot harder, but right now, it's not even something to think about. Of course they can take over the network by mining.

I'm so glad that some of you actually provided me the valuable opinions that I was looking for.

In this context one should not think of the government as it is described by its traditional definition. I was rather referring to entities such as the illuminati and/or reptilians.

So, now we can agree that such superpower would easily disturb the bitcoin network if it wanted to, possibly rendering it useless.

Therefore, I hereby speculate that proof of stake crypto currencies are superior to proof of work. Having said that, I'm looking forward to buying more PPCoins and maybe even NVCs in the near future.

You forget that having the knowledge about bitcoin and how to administer an ASIC isn't common knowledge. Otherwise we would have 20 ASIC vendors already.

Yes i know, and i don't think a government will do it. I don't even think it will be possible in a near future. But if they started assigning resources to it right now? They would probably be able to do it within 2 months.

we would just switch from sha 256 proof of work to something else.

That would suck for all the legit ASIC miners.

BUt not for me and my GPUs  ;D

I was thinking that maybe it would be possible to make an altcoin that has its proof of work algorithm randomly changing so that it would be impossible to make an ASIC for it.

Technically troublesome.

If the parameterization isn't fundamental enough, the ASIC could simply be built to take those parameters. If the parameterization is too fundamental, it's hard to prove that every algorithm which comes out of the randomizer is cryptographically strong against partial preimage attacks.

An intriguing idea, though.

And they're still using ship technology from the 1970s. Governments tend to move like leviathans... slowly and predictably. By the time they decide to use ASICs, that ship will have sailed and they will have spent millions on making the decision in the first place.

ive thought for a while that this would be a very worthy altcoin.

For the record those aren't tanks.  They are Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles (or Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicle if you are in the CAV).

Could a govt 51% or 99% Bitcoin ... sure. However that would simply move crypto-currencies to even better protected alt-coins.  Necessity is the mother of all invention.  As we all know the take down of Napster ending p2p filesharing forever ...

Great to see a shred of sense in an otherwise shit-tank of a thread.

There is little a government will gain by maliciously trying to attack the network and whatever they do gain will be taken back by the next thing.

AKA the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on crypto currency.

Why the fuck would a government want to wage a 51% attack.

If they wanted to shut it down they'd just take seize the exchanges and make it illegal.

Game over for bitcoin. If people are still using it illegally then they could 51% attack. They wouldn't need ASICs I'm sure that due to the massive investments in cyberwarfare, they already have more than enough computing power to outhash the entire network, let alone if it were illegal and thus most people stopped mining.

I'm very much looking forward to the first attack on the network from Mars.

OP, which government? Let's say, assuming for a millisecond that you're not trolling and are actually proposing a serious scenario, that the US government decides to take over Bitcoin by manufacturing ASICs like it's nobody's business.

The problem is, it IS somebody's business.

The next step: The Chinese government goes "hmmmm... the Americans are trying to manufacture these ASICs to take over the Bitcoin network. We could do it too, but cheaper", and off we go. Talk about currency wars.

And this is only two variables (US, China), it gets significantly more complex (and ridiculously more expensive for any one of them) if you add into the equation Russia, India, Japan, Brazil, Korea, Argentina, South Africa... I could go on.

There is no "the government".

Does anybody have the statistics on how much it would take to generate 75.095 Thash/s (the latest overall hash rate)?

If the government were to invest a billion dollars in ASICs, is the system at risk to 51% attack?  Perhaps yes.  What to do?

That's why we have BBQCoin, in case someone has a beef with the other coins, they turn chicken, and get porked.  Sorry, it's lunchtime here...  :P

Are you saying that once they ruin BTC something else will replace it?  The counter argument is that they start with the biggest threat (BTC), kill it, then move on to the 2nd largest thread which is easier to kill.  Extending this argument means that if the attacker can kill the biggest threat, they can kill all threats.

Yeah, I was only joking.  But in reply to your arguments, the smaller the coin, the easier it is to kill.  It Bitcoin goes, likely they all go.

we switch to scrypt and 1 billion dollars worth of government money poofs into thin air.

To one of the early posters, you cannot simply buy up all the bitcoin and crash the market to destroy a currency.  The more bitcoins someone buys, the higher the price will skyrocket, making it cost prohibitive to own a majority of them.  And even if they had the enormous amount of funds required to capture a majority of coins, selling them off to crash the bubble they created will only likely return it to its former price roughly after the market cools off.

It's spelled gub'mint, Vladimir. And stop being mean to the n00bs.

Could superman shut down the bitcoin network?

No... cause cryptocoins are made of cryptonite!  8)

And? 1 billion dollars is how expensive when talking about government? According to 2011 numbers, the US government spends $10.4 billion per day (http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_deficit/us_deficit.html). Do you think this number has gone down in the past two years?

The point stands, however, that it would not be very hard to make necessary decisions and changes to counter a >51% attack by anyone. Bitcoin might take a hit, but it'll develop scar tissue and become all the stronger in the long run.