First there were CPU miners, meaning anyone who owns a computer had the ability to mine for bitcoins. Bitcoins could theoretically be mined by billions of people.

Then there were the GPU miners, and the pool of people who could affordably mine bitcoins shrunk from billions to millions.

Eventually some scientific computing FPGA designers will design custom hardware specifically tailored to mine bitcoins. No doubt this has already happened and will increase -- and these people aren't going to share their hardware design like the gamers did. The pool of people who can affordably participate in bitcoin mining has been reduced to thousands.

What does this mean for the security and long-term outlook of bitcoin?

Can bitcoin survive if the computational power keeps getting concentrated in the hands of elite experts with expensive educations and lots of capital?

How is this going to result in a secure and democratic currency?

How is it possible to avoid a single party or cartel from controlling 50% of the network when private crypto specialists are able to mine bitcoins with orders of magnitude less expense in comparison to the average Joe with a laptop who nevertheless wants to ensure the survival of an alternative, distributed currency?

Is bitcoin fundamentally flawed in the assumption that cryptographic power can be effectively distributed over the long term, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few specialists and their investors?

You can't know that SgtSpike. All you know is what he tells you.

He could easily be lying about pool statistics or could simply have his own unpublished datacenter that puts him over the top.

For all you know, the pool operators are colluding to enrich each other at the expense of everyone else.

Bitcoin is obviously deeply flawed and only gullible idiots are buying into this pyramid scheme.

How hard would it be for the top 3 pool operators to collude and skim off a few coins here and there? What is their incentive NOT to? It sounds to me like all the profit is for the pool operators here, and you suckers are just falling for the latest MLM. I'm sure last week you were buying Avon soap trying to get rich.

You are the type of people who answer newspaper ads that say "I made $10,000 per week working from home!!"

Gullible idiots who trust people on blind faith. Not the cryptographer's way.

The funny part is that bitcoin is supposed to be immune from governments... when in fact it is most vulnerable to governments. Governments can requisition more FPGAs than the public by far. Most people don't have massive GPUs in their laptops, how is this in any way decentralized?

Everyone who owns bitcoins got them by investing real money in specialized hardware. It's a joke.

This thread demonstrates why bitcoin is a joke and always will be.

You people flock to bitcoin supposedly to reclaim public, distributed control over a currency, and then you just give away the power to the first pool operator who asks for it.

What a joke.

The fact that people are actually arguing here that "deepbit would never do such a thing" is unbelievable. Is he Jesus now? Is he your new guru? I thought the entire point of bitcoin was that no one would be the guru, no one would have control.

And then you have the incredibly naive and ignorant argument that if someone abused the network people would "rally" to save it. What fantasy world is this? That's not what would happen. People would abandon the currency because they don't want to sink more money into a flawed concept and flawed community.

Amateur hour. The fact that one man already actively controls enough cryptographic power to break the validity of the currency with NO OVERSIGHT and people put their BLIND FAITH in him..... no serious person is going to have confidence in the currency when they learn that the exact exploit conditions presented by the creator have already been fulfilled, and not through investing significant personal resources either, but fulfilled because bitcoin users VOLUNTARILY GAVE AWAY their cryptographic authority to him. Amazing!

 

why would deepbit not steal bitcoins if he has 50%?

since it would be impossible to catch him doing it... i think people would have to assume that he is

THIS is what bitcoin needs to be a viable currency.

It needs a powerful GPU in every living room calculating while idle. This kind of strategy is the only way the public will ever gain substancial confidence in bitcoin.

We need many democratically distributed non-purpose built GPUs to make bitcoin a viable alternative currency.

They can...

That makes sense, thanks 1bitc0inplz, very interesting

I guess there are a few reasons someone with a few million dollars to burn might want to do this.

1. They have a vested interest in conventional currency. Think Mises.org conspiracy theories about international bankers who would see bitcoin as a threat to their economic domination.

2. A government decides bitcoin is illegal (esp because people aren't paying taxes!) and chooses this form of technological force to shut it down since conventional force is not sufficient to enforce the law in this case.

3. A malicious and bored millionaire just wants to do it for fun, to see if he or she can.

4. Someone thinks they could make a profit by sucking up all the bitcoins. Considering that people of limited resources are currently investing thousands of dollars in bitcoin speculation, maybe some angel investor with a billion dollars thinks this is a fun way to diversify his portfolio for a few millions.

5. A bored Saudi prince decides this is more fun than buying another private jet.

It would be interesting to see if someone could compromise the currency while still maintaining public confidence in it. That could be very profitable.

It seems to me that a currency which can be compromised by only a few million is on a precarious basis. How can the public really have confidence in a currency that may, unknowingly, be completely compromised by powerful established interests? I mean who is to say that the NSA has not already drawn up a project to cripple bitcoin? ~$2million to the NSA is utterly nothing. And, if we're being honest, they already have the hardware hooked into the net to do it. So it would likely be more of an opportunity cost issue rather than buying up the hardware.

Let's say you just keep buying FPGAs or GPUs until you have over 50% of the network and can dominate it.

How many millions would it cost right now?

I'm curious just how rich you'd have to be to take over bitcoin.

Could you do it with $10 million as a small business owner?

Could a hedge fund CEO do it with $100 million?

Could Zuckerberg do it with $1 billion?

Could the NSA or DOD do it with $10 billion?

How about the Chinese government?

Basically, how many people in the world have the power to fuck over bitcoin if they wanted to?