Topic: Im fairly confident the NSA (US Gov) Can 51% Any Coin At Any Time - page 2. (Read 7044 times)

I'm more than pretty confident they cannot 

They're the NSA.  If they wanted, they could spend <1% of their budget, have some nice 28nm ASICs fabbed and mass produced and take like 80% of the network.

Good news though.  They don't give a shit.

Couldn't some big gov entity just swallow up a bunch of ASIC wafers and get 51% that way? If a government really wants to kill Bitcoins, if the banks wants to kill Bitcoins, it shouldn't be too hard to get that type of computing power.

Even  if they managed to 51% Bitcoin-

It would only come at major expense
And we could easily move to another coin, forever

The Government can't do anything more about crypto-currency than they could about Pirate Bay

First news for you: their budget is limited. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States

Second news: the USA actually tacitly approves of Bitcoin: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/fincen-bitcoin-users-not-regulated-exchanges-are/ - They would rather make money from it (via taxes) rather than destroy it, makes sense, right?

I wouldn't be surprised at all if they could do it, nor if they have a contingency plan for taking down the entire Internet at least briefly.  If not the NSA, then some other TLA.  

The question is why would they want to?  

I'm sure they are watching with fascination, but I think they'd be a lot more likely to use Bitcoin themselves than want to destroy it.  I'd guess the same about the CIA.

So people here are like "Even if this three-letter agency were to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money just to disrupt a civilian network run partly by American citizens, I would do nothing but get others to harden my network", really?

Not necessarily. Imagine the aggressor is several governments united that decide to take over mining, combined with a 1% Tobin tax payable as transaction fee.

51% attack won't affect existing coins, it will just make people hoard more and spend less

Already solved. AMD stock up 5% today on news 3rd gen video game platforms will be chock full of Hash power.

We call it the Strategic Hash Reserves.

This after recent reports of video game companies operating mines with customers' in-home compute cycles...

When the bitcoin market cap is 1 trillion, the mining network hardware would be worth roughly 10B at minimum, so the NSA need to at minimum invest 10B to have a remote chance to 51%, also the government usually can't work that efficiently, more like 30B investment. Good luck getting that budget passed in Congress.

This.
and you don't need to create an entirely new system of ASIC hardware that would stick out like a sore thumb.  

much easier and cheaper for covert agencies, hack people, hack the trust system.

i.e. let's talk destabilisation conspiracies.

step 1, create a screen and cover identity for one group, the hook, and the bait.
all you need to do is set up a large pool and invite people in, as to create a poisoned network node for confirming a larger pool, this needs to be "super secure" and well respected. think p2pool. this would be the security bait.

step 2, destabilise the other large pools and select a nominal target, so you can create a monopoly from the rubble, a big fish.

step 3, find an insecure server that hosts a large 40% pool, set up a tap/backdoor on the machine(s), insert your double-spend or false transaction record binary instructions into custom compiled pool daemon's and regular people will do the hard work of hiding data in the network.

step 4, establish trust in the big system and the little system at the same time, so that a general public will believe in following/propping up the big fish, while detail oriented people will move towards the security bait which has the hook.

step 5, you can keep the big fish away from the hook for as long as you need the system to work to do what you want it to.
after which, you can remove either the fish or the hook, and the system won't notice the loss. remove both, and tampering becomes more obvious.

The reality of doing this would be difficult to hide due to crypto being rooted within the protocol itself, it's the confirmations, or lack of, that matter in this kind of setup. The best analogy would be FOX news. you don't need to create or mock up news from scratch to insert a message, all you need to do is modify the content a little bit and then repeat the process, the other networks will propagate the false news as if it were accurate, forcing others to also confirm the "new" news.

I totally agree with the OP. If some school kids can buy chips in China for some 20M USD, then the CIA can do so, too. Just for context: 20MUSD is about the amount the USA print every 15 minutes at least for the next 3 years.

Bitcoin definitely has made it on their radar, too.

My conclusion is that we already have the blessing of these circles. One version would be that Satoshi is the CIA. After all the $$ will fail, so what else would you do? Gold standard? Bitcoin is much easier to accumulate in the USA than gold. We know that at least 1 million BTC never moved and most likely are in the hands of Satoshi. We don't know how many of all the later coins also went back to Satoshi. Maybe Bitcoin is a scheme to aggregate 50% in the USA with controlled increase in popularity until 2020. Maybe the $$ crashes earlier.

Well, I bought some mɃ earlier today. No matter if it's the mark of the beast with full support by the US government or the cool free money we all dream of, I believe it will live. A 51% attack is not the end of it all. We will find a way.

& the CIA's jurisdiction is outside the USA. If anything, they would benefit from BTC because they can do all manner of covert payola ops to foreign bad guys and the like. If Ollie North had btc he would have never got caught. my guess is they already have btc and are looking to move it on to all the shifty terror groups they do business with on a daily basis. crime pays, especially if you the gubmint!

The american intelligence agencies have no incentive to bring down bitcoin. Unless the NSA receives an executive order to kill bitcoin, they simply won't do it.

CIA to NSA:"WTF dude? We just finished the transition from cash in shopping bags and you did this?"

I can assure you that the NSA has bigger things to worry about than bitcoin.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2917/how-fast-is-the-bitcoin-mining-network

The biggest challenge will be to stay one step ahead of exa, zetta and yotta as they come.

Without ASICS they would have trouble getting enough power into any known facility.  If it is not ASIC they would not be able to do it easily even with a large budget.  

bullshit

bitcoin is the most powerful computing effort undertaken by humans to date...by an order of magnitude and then some