Topic: Impact of ASICs on Bitcoin security - page 2. (Read 3008 times)

Litecoin is not ASIC proof.

That is also true. BTCGuild and 50 BTC are really way to big. Lets go to ozco.in and Eligius

in the next months hashing power will skyrocket

The network is being secured by fewer entities.  The whole principle of Bitcoin's security is that the hashing power be massively distributed.

Explain why you think ASICs have ruined Bitcoin. I think its actually good for it.

While the market cap of Bitcoin might be around $1 billion, it would be difficult to create a double spend and "cash-out" $7.5 million to recoup costs. 

Anyone attacking the network in this manner is probably only looking to destroy the network at this point.

Yes, ASICs have unfortunately ruined Bitcoin.  If you're looking for security, use Litecoin.

This is all based on the assumption that BFL are incompetent.  They're not  thousands of 500Gh/s rigs are filling the racks of air conditioned data centers, waiting for that fateful flip of the switch.  Bwahaaaa

People do not tl;dr this. THIS right here is worth reading.

You bring up an excellent point. The one advantage Bitcoin has is that its history CAN be rewritten when 51% of the network agrees with you. Go back to before the attack happened and start from there again. If the attacker fixed his software as well, we could attempt to literally block his IP(s) but I don't know if that is possible from my understanding of p2p networking.

I will agree that every change to the hardware does open the door for the potential of a brute force attack.

However I think the "Could" has to be tempered by the "Would". Simply, ASIC's are shipping right now to legitimate miners and the hash rates are reflecting that. If you have followed Butterfly labs, I can tell you that the chance of ordering and receiving 300 units of that magnitude would require far more resources than just the 7.5M of cash (physically the ASIC's just are not available), so by the time someone could get that much hash power, they would need twice as much again.

But for the sake of argument, someone COULD get their hands on enough equipment and COULD overpower the network. Then they would not only have to outpace the blockchain building, but they would have to introduce something malicious to double spend or otherwise compromise the network. OK, lets say a government has all of this hardware, software and development power and has the will do to it, the end user community would only be "fooled" for a VERY short period of time (as soon as someone noticed a doublespend or other malice). At that point bitcoins would be worth nothing because everyone would know that they were hacked, so the entire effort probably could not have even repaid the cost of the hardware alone. To rectify the whole situation (and this has been done already), the blockchain could be forked by the "legitimate" development team, back to the point in time before the corruption began and let legitimate nodes and pools begin again with patched software and all of the previous bitcoins would be in tact.

It is a very real thing to consider, but I would be more afraid of Google Play being hacked and pushing out a corrupt wallet or other software that could easily constitute an economic majority in a matter of hours, and it would cost zero.

I dont think that the cost/risk/reward is there, since there are many other digital currencies and users could potentially just migrate (Mt Gox would be a perfect example)

Always good to keep doing the math though.

True, but the cost of also doing the research for manufacture of ASIC chips is very expensive. It would cost you about 3 million to just get that done, then another 5 or 6 million to manufacture the chips and hardware. Making ASICs isnt easy.

Was just using the pricing from BFL as an example.  Obviously you wouldn't be ordering from them.  You could very quickly build custom hardware here in China for far less money.

Time it takes for BFL to produce and ship 300 500GH/s rigs = 10 months to indefinite
Time it takes for BFL to finish current order chain = 10 months to indefinite
Hashpower increase once order chain is finished = Way more than 300 TH/s
Also, BFL has said that they won't sell enough hardware to 51% attack
So money required to create roughly 50 identities to purchase the 300 500Gh/s rigs? Millions of dollars.

Although the network hash rate has skyrocketed since ASICs have come online, the security of the Bitcoin network has declined substantially when considering the comparatively low cost of gaining 51% hashing power.  

In February, just prior to Avalon making their first shipment, the network hash rate was about 25-30 TH/s.  The network was being secured primarily by inefficient and expensive GPUs and it would have been very unlikely for someone to build the infrastructure to attack the network.  Perhaps not due to the cost of the hardware, but more likely the energy demands would make it next to impossible.

Cost of attacking the network at 30 TH/s prior to ASICs:

GPUs:  50,000 x 7950 @ $300 each = $15 million (add to this cost of power supplies, motherboards, memory...)
Energy consumption: 10,000,000+ watts

Cost of attacking the network today at 150 TH/s:

ASICs:  300 x BFL 500 GH/s @ $25,000 each = $7.5 million
Energy consumption: ~1,500,000 watts

So today it costs far less than half of what is did in February '13 to 51% the network while consuming only 15% of the energy.  

We used to think it was prohibitively expensive for any entity to destroy the network, but nowadays it's very feasible.  I'm quite concerned about this.