asic miners creating conflict of interest?

[mimarob]

Just read an interesting post on the topic of large orginisation trying to take out the bitcoin network.

A multi-mega-dollar industry could develop an asic similar to what is discussed in other posts here, than flood the network with hashes and either corrupt it with 51% majority or pick most of the coins making miners go bankrupt.

Another scenario: a public open asic chip is developed and everybody seems happy with ever increasing hash rates.

Now suppose there are indications of weaknesses in sha256 algo, with the current gpu path one could switch to another algo and make some kind of transition.

With a dedicated asic, the majority of the network would be very reluctant to changing into another crypt algo since their miners can not be reconfigured.

This would lock the bitcoin network into a corner where we are stuck with an obsoleting platform waiting for final disaster when the laptop-toy/iphone-app of sha256 cracking is published.

What do y'all think?

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[Theo]

The solution to the multi-mega-dollar ASIC industry is to change the hashing algorithm and let their multi-mega-dollar project become worthless. If they didn't burn enough money, do it again. The solution to the ASIC lockdown is to change the hashing algorithm anyway and let the miners either use GPUs again or buy new ASICs.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

The solution to the multi-mega-dollar ASIC industry is to change the hashing algorithm and let their multi-mega-dollar project become worthless. If they didn't burn enough money, do it again. The solution to the ASIC lockdown is to change the hashing algorithm anyway and let the miners either use GPUs again or buy new ASICs.

It would be much better idea to simply allow multiple hashing algorithms to be used in block chain so whole network can make a switch over night.
This would make it even more fun.

[mimarob]

yes but this raises the question who is actually in charge of the bitcoin network, in order to have a new algo accepted, it had to be accepted by the majority, problem if the majority is gaining on the present system and refuses to change...

[bcpokey]

This topic doesn't make any sense. ASIC miners have horrible short term cost-efficiency.

If someone wanted to commit multi-millions of dollars to destroy bitcoin they would simply buy up a bunch of AMD video cards, build a data center, and bring those online. Not only would it be more cost effective, it would be simpler, and there'd be nothing you could do about it via "changing hashing algorithm".

But bitcoin is really not an attractive target at the moment for such a thing. It's profitable enough that someone might want to join in, but not so powerful as to threaten anyone. So, flying under the radar is its biggest strength at the moment.