How much would it cost right now to attain 50% of the network?

[1bitc0inplz]

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

The difference with deepbit versus a single entity (government, rich prince, etc) is that deepbit does not own it's computing power. It is at the mercy of those that give it to it. And, people are a fickle bunch. If anyone even slightly suspected that deepbit was up to no good, that could adversely effect any evil plot it's operate may or may not have.

And... as far as "since it would be impossible to catch him doing it... i think people would have to assume that he is"... there is a sentiment of supporting other pools just to keep things balanced.

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[1bitc0inplz]

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

No, it's not impossible to catch. In order to "steal" coins, he would spend them on some item or service and wait to receive it. Once he did, he would direct deepbit to build not from the current block, but the one prior to the transaction. It would have to generate all of the blocks that have passed since and surpass the length of the current chain, at which point the transaction would be erased, giving him back his coins.

It would be fairly obvious this was occurring, and all of his miners would jump ship, because it is not in their interest to take part.

Exactly what I was trying to get at... you just beat me to it 

Now, if he controlled all this power himself, people would be able to see that something was going on, but would be powerless to necessarily stop it since he would be able to validate his own fraudulent transactions.

[bulanula]

Come on people don't be fooling yourselves. Some government agency could bring this whole project down in the time it takes to generate a block ( roughly ten minutes ).

If deepbit.net can do it then the US gov. or even somebody like Google can mess this up pretty quickly and make it unprofitable in a second.

[BitterTea]

Come on people don't be fooling yourselves. Some government agency could bring this whole project down in the time it takes to generate a block ( roughly ten minutes ).

If deepbit.net can do it then the US gov. or even somebody like Google can mess this up pretty quickly and make it unprofitable in a second.

Don't just say they can, tell us how.

[bulanula]

Come on people don't be fooling yourselves. Some government agency could bring this whole project down in the time it takes to generate a block ( roughly ten minutes ).

If deepbit.net can do it then the US gov. or even somebody like Google can mess this up pretty quickly and make it unprofitable in a second.

Don't just say they can, tell us how.

LOL are you joking ?

This whole gimmick network can be taken over pretty quickly.
 
Do you really think that the US gov. could not defeat some gamers in their basements with ATI cards etc. !

Military technology is years ahead of that available to mere civilians. The NSA are talking about building exaflop computers already etc.

Not to mention a huge budget of billions of dollars. Geeks will never match that.

Even the Chinese have them ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-I#Tianhe-1A does about 4.7 petaflops and bitcoin has about 25 petaflops total hashing power ) ! Keep in mind that all this is released to the public but behind closed doors they have supercomputers that are for the military and many times ( 10x even ) stronger than what universities have etc.

LOL again !

[BitterTea]

All you're saying is that they have lots of money and some computing power. That does not fulfill all the requirements necessary to "take over" the Bitcoin network.

[bulanula]

All you're saying is that they have lots of money and some computing power. That does not fulfill all the requirements necessary to "take over" the Bitcoin network.

LOL if you have money you can do anything you want.

For all I know the gov. is watching and infiltrating this community and evaluating what to do from now on.

The Bitcoin thing is a threat to national security and according to the dumb patriot act you are all "terrorists".

Bitcoin is untaxable, used for drug dealing / weapons etc. so they can find all of these reasons to take it down etc.
Drugs are untaxable and that is why they are illegal and cracking down on them etc.

The government likes control. Bitcoin = less control.

This unfortunate day will come but some people here seem to think that it will not happen. I assure you it will, not that I want that though, don't get me wrong.

[portpho]

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.

[BitterTea]

Even if they cared enough to gain 50% of the processing power before it is able to become more mainstream, that doesn't mean Bitcoin would be broken. They may make life difficult for us, at least for a while, but I feel that either Bitcoin would adapt or some other crypto-currency would take it's place.