Bitcoin Forum

I have heard figures of $500 Million+ cost to take down Bitcoin. But that was last month, so I'm not sure how that figure has changed since then.
So how much would it cost to gain total control of some of the more popular coins like Doge, NMC or QRK?

By gain control, I'm going to assume that you mean a 51% mining attack. Let's take LTC as the 2nd most popular altcoin in terms of volume and market cap. Current network hashrate is 123,000 MH/s. Assuming that you took off the shelf GPUs and built mining rigs, it would cost no more than $1000/mh to put together a farm. Given that most of the equipment is readily available, a large farm could probably be constructed in 30 days, so you wouldn't need to overbuild massively to account for a huge network hashrate increase. I bet that anyone could probably take over 60% of the network for as little as $80m. As far as DOGE, QRK, etc - much, much less. Without doing the math, perhaps a few million dollars each.

Of course the question of motivation comes into play - if I had $5-10m to kick around, I would probably put it to better use than owning QRK.

Interesting, thanks for the info. Is it correct to assume the SHA-256 coins are exponentially safer than Scrypt? A few million dollars makes me a little uneasy holding serious amounts of the smaller coins.  :-\
 If someone had malicious motivations, what if they used some of those funds to simultaneously DDOS the larger pools and initiate the 51% attack? Probably more cost effective that way.

Until ASICs are widely available and widely deployed no coin is safe.

Even bitcoin might not have a large enough deployment of ASICs widely enough distributed yet to be safe, but if any are going to get there it would hopefully be bitcoin.

Scrypt is crappy for ASICs so all the scrypt coins are crippled by making it harder to get more brands of ASICs made and distributed to more different people, demographics, etc etc than SHA coins might be able to achieve.

All the anti-ASIC coins are basically botnet-fodder, ripe for any botnet to PWN for the LULs any time.

-MarkM-

its like you people dont know how scrypt coins work, mark have you ever mined a scrypt coin?
gpus are NOT just readily available..and NO you could NOT just set up a mining farm in 30 days and take over 50% of any networks hashrate other than shitcoins no1 cares about.
these gpus are very hard to get these days which is why they sell $150+ or more OVER retail price STILL...the whole point of scrypt coins is to deter asics and keep the mining more decentralized by being in the hands of millions of people instead of MAYBE 50 large companies who will eventually be the ONLY PEOPLE able to mine bitcoin once hardware gets that advanced..and everyone else will be wasting their time.
seriously you bitcoin miners dont see it correctly..more hashpower doesnt mean more secure
scrypt coins use TONS of memory which is EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE and you can NOT just make SUPERASICS SUPERCHEAP for scrypt coins like you can bitcoin now...and you never will be able to
this is why the network hashrate will never compare to bitcoin...BECAUSE ITS NOT THE SAME
this is what will make litecoin more unique down the road...but instead people just say OH LITECOIN BITCOINS NUMBER 2 YA COOL
yes asics will be made, and yes they will improve over gpus efficiency..but its not going to be like bitcoin where the network hashrate blows up WAY past the average persons ability to join in...this is why people love these coins so much...

You are thinking way too small maybe.

How many thousands of bitcoins does it cost to get your very own ASIC intellectual property?

Even right now while bitcoins are still pathetically low in value?

Making it more expensive to get your very own ASIC designed just makes there be less people / groups who will have them.

The cheaper and easier ASICs can be created the more different nations, corporations, early adopters, the proverbial "anyone who is anyone" to get their own, IF for some reason the masses choose not to spring for a free open source design.

The GPU crap was never about protecting the network, it was always about lining the pockets of the creators of the scamcoins of the day.

-MarkM-

what happens in 5 years when some chinese company owns 35% of the network, cex.io owns 35%. and some third company owns 25% and everyone else has 5% of the network that their trying to mine towards. this is exactly where bitcoin is heading at the moment, and thats not how these networks were made to be run. their made to be run by many many millions of random people
charlie lee of litecoin specifically turned to the scrypt equation to keep mining in the hands of the everyday person. yes alot of scamcoins use scrypt and gpus to mine them...but this is NOT AT ALL why GPU MINING was made. dont be rediculous. bitcoin is getting more centralized day by day and the developers know this and are not going to just let it happen

Like, say, all the millions of AMD shareholders?

Who else makes competitive mining GPUs?

-MarkM-

see this is case and point you dont understand.
have you tried to get an amd gpu lately??? YOU CANT! their all sold out! THEY ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO GET IN BULK. THE MANUFACTURERS only make x amount and have said they will NOT up production even though the demand for these things is OUT THE ROOF.
what you dont get is, amd would have to produce another 2 years worth of gpus, and sell them all to 1 person, for ANYBODY to have a chance to take over ANY DECENT SCRYPT NETWORK.
and THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN

What percent of AMD stock do you own?

What percent would you need to pocket 51% of the GPUs yourself, or at least to decide how many to sell to whom?

What other corp could you buy to control 51+% of all GPU production?

Your argument seems to be that the one company that could screw you all is too myopic to even know you exist.

Which is only the case because you are too pathetic to be worth bothering with.

Which is only because your pathetic little coins still have a market cap less than AMD's or within only a few orders of magnitude of AMD's.

So basically your argument amounts to "my worthless crap is worthless so no bullies consider me worth bullying."

-MarkM-

the scrypt equation+gpus=all the asic your gona get. you can make special chips or whatever and make your asics...but they will only be more efficient power wise. scrypt coins you cannot just make asics and quadruple the hashrate in a month like bitcoin it just doesnt work the same

You're personifying an impersonal blockchain network.  it was never "meant" to be run in any way.  it just is running.

i disagree with the way you think 'these networks were made to be run', but if you believe this is true, then 'millions of random people' should be running ASICS in the future.  this is also what MarkM is saying. 

everyone just has to embrace technology as it advances.  there is no use in fighting ASICs for scrypt:  they are here, and they will improve, and get cheaper over time.

Which means that scrypt coins are more vulnerable than SHA coins because less companies have the tech to build ASICs for it competitively.

You on the one hand claim you want MORE DIVERSE control of the tech, then on the other deliberately design so that only one company can make the tech thus control it?

You are contradicting your own arguments.

-MarkM-

in january 2014, this is true.

however, the bubble is in video card market.  once that bursts, people will start selling the equipment they paid too much for. 

as people switch off their overpriced equipment, hashrates will fall.  you now have both a supply surplus of video cards on the market, and a depressed hashrate.   this is the opportunity.

it doesn't have to happen now, but it will occur when the market gets a shakeup.  there is a lot of speculative value in altcoin, but little real value.

dude no. think about what im saying. if amd has been producing these cards for what, say 5 years now?
now, today, the demand is so high, that everywhere you go they are backordered...which means companies are waiting for AMD to MANUFACTURE more chips which they can only do X amount per day
so how many differant people have these cards you think now...over the past 5 years? millions
so your telling me, that all the sudden amd is gona stop selling to all their suppliers and keep all the cards they make from now on and all the sudden youll see the network get taken over? this isnt even rational

no i dont own amd stock

how can you compare asic companies to amd when amd was around WAY before bitcoin and has NOTHING to do with it or any other part of these networks..and bitcoin companies are just out to make money SPECIFICALLY OFF OF BITCOIN...funny?

Meanwhile the scrypt ASIC folk do not seem to have a problem of not being able to mass produce their products?

Or are you saying that since AMD cannot hire enough semicondictor manufacturers to mass produce more of their product the world does not have enough semiconductor plants for the ASIC people to get a timeslot to build their stuff because AMD has bought up all the timeslots?

(If so, seems like a market exists for more manufacturing plants...)

If GPUs cannot be manufactured fast enough to outpace the ASICs that makes the whole GPU line of FUD even more bullshit.

Seems you have not only made yourself be at the mercy of just one supplier but furthermore chose a supplier who is not competent enough to actually supply enough product...

-MarkM-

its not that amd cant, its that they said they wont. and if it were just that easy than somebody would have stepped in to fill that void already. yes companies are starting to make scrypt asics, but their not like bitcoin asics. theirs a reason amd is the only company manufacturing decent hashing chips for scrypt, no other company could without going bankrupt. mass producing asics for scrypt will never be like bitcoin because to get a true asic(say something along the lines of 100mh/s) would cost WAY more money to make/design than just buying the gpus
amd already has their r&d and doesnt have to change anything other than what their already doing. and im pretty damn sure if they could just make an asic, a company like amd would be one of the first ones to jump on the idea
scrypt asics will be designed more towards the electricity savings, meaning ill be buying a 5mh/s asics and it will cost me about as much as buying 10mh/s worth of gpus at this moment, but over time i will save x amount on electricity

So again you are saying you are at the mercy of just one company.

That is centralisation, it is totally against your claim of actually wanting to decentralise.

-MarkM-

lol dude, the company i buy my cards from, is not running this network. they dont even know what it is. so your statement is completly out of context. the centralization comes from the owning of the video cards, not the supplier. so your saying that because you can buy asics from 4 companies instead of 1, bitcoin is more decentralized??? WTF??? decentralization comes from the PEOPLE RUNNING THE NETWORK NOT THE SUPPLIER OF THE ASICS
you seem to not rememeber that amd isnt making these cards specifically for mining, their making them as gaming video cards and computer nerds happened to come up with a great mining equation to keep it in the hands of more little people rather than big people with big guns and big money

when a $300 R9 280x sells for $550, then the game is already lost to big people with big guns and big money.  
 
It's not college kids on student loans buying R9 280x's in 100-packs off ebay. 

Now you are back at "my pathetic crap is so worthless the company in control doesn't even consider it worth controlling."

-MarkM-

compared to asics? not at all my friend
you saying people buying r9s in 100 packs shows us you know not what you speak of lol

A $13 USB ASIC compares how well against a $13 GPU ?

-MarkM-

how much money is that making you?

Compared to my $13 GPU? Lots more. None of my $13 GPUs even have the programmability to mine.

Compared to my $150 GPU ? Lots more, using way the heck less electricity.

Heck its even more than my $400 GPU.

-MarkM-

its funny you say this, because i learned about bitcoin about 5 months ago, and just bought all my gpus maybe 3 months ago and have gotten my roi plus almost double so far...hows your asics been doing?
i was lucky and bought all my gpus 1 month before the boom :p

Depends on which coin you are talking about.

My CPU made me more money than all my GPUs all added together.

I don't have an scrypt ASIC yet so I have not made as much on scrypt coins with my ASICs as I have made on scrypt coins with my CPU. But as I said I also have made way the heck less on scrypt coins - or any coins, actually - using GPUs than with my CPU.

(GPUs use a lot of electricity, it was way more profitable to use a CPU on a low difficulty coin than to waste electricity on coins people were skyrocketing the difficulty of.)

-MarkM-

oh contraire, mon frère

here is a lot of 100 Sapphire R9 280x Tri-X OCs.  That's the good shit, no XFX.  seller has 5 lots to sell, which is 0.4Ghash of scrypt power.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SAPPHIRE-TRI-X-R9-280X-3GB-GDDR5-OC-UEFI-for-Bitcoin-Litecoin-100PCS-500-pcs-/321278787326?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item4acdb53efe

there's a 'buy now' button for your convenience.  free shipping.

i just wet myself
bought 5 of them! :))
haha those are so overpriced
so go and buy 5 of those=500 cards for $250,000, and now you have what .05% of ltc network?

It isn't the litecoin network we are worried about, it has more than half of the scrypt hashing power.

What percent of the DOGE network would he/she have?

What percent of the feathercoin network?

The Earthcoin network?

Today's latest scam networks?

Etc.

-MarkM-

i agree with you, which is why alot of alts need to die off
but in the mix of all the crap, their is gold(silver?)
doges network is plenty big enough now

If there are only two scrypt coins it is conceivable that both might have half the hashing power.

So sure, have two. But if there are three, one of them inevitably mathematically has to have less than half, so that one can go.

DOGE, unfortunately, has way the heck less than half even of just what litecoin has, so it is pretty pathetic. If that is the best we can do as a backup / spare it isn't looking like having two is likely to work very well at all.

(Absent merged mining, of course.)

But hey sure lets have a backup, in case all the litecoin miners do decide to forsake litecoin for a coin that so far has only a trivial fraction of litecoins' power.

-MarkM-

if you were able to buy 500 video cards, it really invalidates what you said earlier:


GPUs certainly are available.  and you could just setup a mining farm in 30 days. 400Mhash could take most altcoins for a ride. they don't even have to be forked to be manipulated.  and this is just what's available, new, in january, 2014.  

ya their available if you have $50000 to drop on $25000 worth of gpus, nobodys buying that crap from china lol, you know someone who bought it?
lol no i didnt buy them...

Of course YOU didn't, you are such a no-one you even think ASICs are too expensive for people to buy.

-MarkM-

wow, personal attacks towards a random person on the internet, some big person you must be...wtf what is your problem?

The OP's question was: how safe are these alt coins?

the answer is: about $250,000 could fuck most of them up.  

that's how safe these altcoins are.  one lamborghini safe.  

Huh? Nothing personal about it, I was addressing the arguments made by the nick/handle.

I couldn't care less whose sockie / account / nick / argument it is or is not.

-MarkM-

lol, rite, if you directly calling me out and saying "you" are a nobody isnt personal, im not sure why im talking to you at all, because you are delusional. nothing was said to you their, and all i said was that those graphics cards are double their original price and i highly doubt people are just jumping to buy them. goodnight