Bitcoin Forum

Anyone knows a number on the Hashrate in which the Network becomes indestructible?

Whatever bitcoin has at any given moment in time?

I mean big enough so a coordinated attack by some huge network or in example if some big banking cartels want to bribe 3 or 4 major pool mine owners to give full control of their network wouldnt be possible to corrupt and screw all up?

Sorry if im saying nonsense but i wanna understand better how the network survive if such attack occurs because thats the modus operandi of the plutocracy since 1700s so its not unusual to think they will try to control the majority of the supply of this currency.

The bitcoin network currently has more hashing power than the top 500 super computers COMBINED.  I think it is pretty safe.  It would be safer if everyone was solo mining instead of pooling.   The attack vector is not on bitcoin itself it is on the pools

Perfect, i understand now. Thanks!

This can be easily solved decentralizing more the pool mining to prevent the merging of 2 or 3 major pools and the full control of the network, in the pace the things are going there will be thousands of pools soon.

Man this is a historical moment of insanely big proportions, being alive and actively participating on this total revolution of our monetary system will be something I am proud to contribute.

We are witnessing the transfer of wealth from a banking plutocracy to a collaborative community, inevitably the next step on the next decades will be a resource based economy with no need for currency at all.

Finally someone bridged the gap between our current model and Jacque Fresco's ideas.

What a time to be alive!! :D

That figure is really only valid for publicly available info.  NSA, for instance, is one of the largest electricity users on the eastern seaboard.

Bitcoin network is pretty safe for any small and medium size potential attacker. Even largest botnets are likely no match. But if anybody thinks that the power of 12,000 high-end GPUs is completely invincible is rather delusional. Well, for started, AMD can easily match it. Somebody joked that AMD should test their cards on mining in factories.

The comparison to supercomputers is not valid (it's a nice marketing gimmick, though). Supercomputers are optimized for parallel computation and fast links while Bitcoin is a distributed network. It's much easier to create a distributed network than a single supercomputer.

Moreover, Bitcoin network must work constantly. An attacker can rent the computation time for short bursts. It is definitely cheaper than buying 12,000 GPUs. Bitcoin network is likely out of reach for anybody except governments and large companies but is still vulnerable.

They must be mining like crazy... saying "aha... soon we wont need to stash money and hide it from congress... we will fund all the black ops with our precious... bitcoins...."

At least another 2 orders of magnitude of hashing power are needed. And they need to be decentralized. It should have happened two days before yesterday.

Any word on some ASIC sales? Can't we raise enough capital to get some cheap ASICs around the globe?

I thought you where trolling before, now i know.

If I worked at AMD, I'd suggest that.

I started my professional career at SGI, writing 3D graphics demos and benchmarks, some of which were used to "burn in" the new hardware.  Running a bitcoin miner along with a couple graphics demos (to exercise all the graphics hardware) might be a good way for ATI to make money on their burn-in process.

There an Amazon guy who claims that renting 10,000 of their GPU cores via Amazon EC2 for an hour costs less than 100 dollars:
http://video.nextconf.eu/video/1880845/data-without-limits (29:50)

In the future once a single company presses custom ships they have a good chance to monopolize the market as it's difficult to beat a company that invests in custom chips in a decentralized way with unspecialized chips.

amazon EC2 uses Nvidia so it doesn't work out so well for mining.

You'd still get profit I think for 10000 gpus working on hashing for less than a 100 dollars.

Good point. Now I'm scared again :P

deepbit is really close to that 50% share huh

When we have more power than the folding at home network :O

As I addressed previously this isn't a problem if mining is profitable because hash will continuously grow.  It may become a prolem when block reward drops and minin becomes less profitable.  Hash MUST grow to keep the network safe. 

Bitcoin is designed to deflate the supply which will deflate hash.  Inflation is GOOD not bad.  We need inflation to keep increasing hash to secure the network.  The currnt design is not sufficient for a safe network of ever increasing hash.

Hopefully someone will fix the fixed supply of bitcoins.  Otherwise the network will become insecure in the future.

sorry, haven't watched the youtube video of the amazon guy linked above. 10000 gpus for less than 100 dollars seems like an amazing deal and probably would make money - seems too good to be true.

i'm hust going by this thread and some other similar threads (started one myself but didn't find it when I did a search, didn't spend much time looking for it) http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8405.msg122625#msg122625 (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8405.msg122625#msg122625)

Not sure why you said that. As it currently stands, the network can be overtaken by less than 9 figures USD of unsophisticated mining hardware.

If it is possible to raise funds to develop and distribute highly efficient mining hardware, then we should be looking into it. Economies of scale may make the venture profitable as there is currently some demand in this market.

It's certainly not safe enough yet.  You could recreate the current networks hashing power with <$3-20M in hardware.