Topic: Medium-term market analysis (Read 3441 times)

Yes they could, exactly how I described.  By making an ASIC themselves.  Do you have any idea how much power it would take to 51% bitcoin without custom hardware?

Also, once again, since you didn't seem to catch on the first time, they specialize in breaking encryption.  Hashing algorithms are a different ball game and have different computational requirements.

Sure, but if they needed to they could have.
That was my point.

so  they have a building of computers working some number problems. ( trying to break encryption b4 anyone else can )
GOOD!
once they break today's encryption. and create another better encryption, bitcoin / all the world encryption can switch over to this new form of encryption


no they can not use their computing power to try and 51% bitcoin. their computers are needed for far more important number problems...

Fair enough.

The NSA specializes in cryptology and they don't have the right hardware?
 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/preemption/nsa.html


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People talk about the NSA having the fastest supercomputers in the world and having the largest concentration of top mathematicians in the world. What is that about?

... You're dealing with fairly sophisticated communications, particularly government communications; a lot of that is encrypted. It's put in the form of a code. These are very sophisticated systems that are developed by computers, and the only way to break those codes or those encryption systems is to have faster and more powerful computers than the computers that put them together in the first place. So NSA has the largest collection of supercomputers in the world. It has one whole building, several floors -- it's called the Tordella Supercomputer Building -- where all they have are supercomputers, the fastest and most powerful computers in the world. Plus, they have parallel processing there, which ties large numbers of computers together and makes them seem like one very giant computer.

So NSA uses all this computer power for a number of reasons. One of them is to try to break these codes. The hardest way is what's known as brute force, which is when you take all that computer power and put it on one problem and use all that force to try to break that system using every possible word/letter/phrase combination you could possibly use, that kind of thing.

What they look for most often are breaks in the system, what they call busts, and that's where somebody does something wrong; somebody makes a mistake; somebody is about to type a password, and they think they're typing it into their secure system, and they accidentally type their password into an open system. That's a backdoor way to get into the system. ...
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No serious player will enter or consider entering Bitcoin without serious platform/infrastructure on which network runs.

Running Bitcoin on CPUs/GPUs is amateur play, and very energy inefficient process; it was good for introduction and initial distribution, but it would never able to take off big time on GPUs alone.

There won't be necessary huge direct impact, but Bitcoin running on ASICs will show rest of the world that this project is taken a bit more seriously than some imaginary currency produced out of thin air by geeky kids on their gaming rigs as it will be backed by specialized hardware specifically designed and developed for the task of efficiently solving bitcoin problems and securing it. ASIC is a huge advancement for Bitcoin and will effect people's perception of the project.  Your average Joe-six-pack and Hockey Mom may not care, but business enterprises are going to start looking at Bitcoin in a completely new light, at least those who may have dismissed it before.

I think someone is talking BS. Most likely currently even NSA would have a challenge directly attacking Bitcoin with a 51% attack. I can't believe they have the right kind of hardware just laying around in those quantities. Remember that regular super computers are very inefficient at Bitcoin mining and even the fastest known super computer can do jack shit against the Bitcoin network. Perhaps some entity has enough conventional hardware to take a shot at it, but it won't be easy.

When ASIC's come online it is absolutely guaranteed that no one in the world can even dream of taking Bitcoin down without carefully planning it and investing a hell of a lot of money. That IS an improvement.

Yay, 1 qubit on silicon with over 80% accuracy.  The future is here!

Either you're really behind developments or expect a really short lifespan for yourself..

Quantum computers: http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2012/8755.html

Now compare the funding of a university with the funding of the NSA.

the crypto-freaks working for them, actually work for us  

their computers are necessary, its not like they can simply turn their computing power over to bitcoin...

I'm not convinced their computing power is enoght to make a dent in bitcoins computing power... point me to so hard facts?

quantum computers..... not in my life time!

Quantum Computers

Good luck with that (beyond toy sized models that take tremendous amounts of power) any time in the next 3 decades.

Also, why the hell would the NSA currently have custom hardware to compute SHA256 hashes?  Other than maybe a very tiny percentage of password storage, bitcoin is all that really uses it for secure applications.  The NSA is much more interested in cracking encryption.

Also, an improvement relative to the current situation where the first entity to bring ASICs online (NSA was just an example that you seem to want to focus on) could easily outhash the rest of the network at the current difficulty.

I didn't bring NSA up.
I just pointed out that if they wanted they could create a 51% attack with their current computing capability.
ASIC mining won't change that.
Moreover, they have a bunch of high end crypto-freaks working for them.
And they are investing in quantum computers.
If they happen to find an SHA256 algorithm for quantum computers then no ASIC will save you.

lol, why don't you show us how its done.

admit it your talking out of your ass

wtf dose the NSA have to do with this anyway....do they have 2000GH/s lying around doing nothing?

An improvement relative to what?
NSA has incredible crunchies.
BTC community generating BTC, even with ASICs, is childs play.

The point is once they are in the wild it becomes between 10 and 100 times more expensive to perform the same attack.

How is that not an improvement?

Even if/when ASICs are available the NSA could crunch the 51% if they wanted.
They would have no need to get investment back so can design their own stuff and duplicate them for realy realy cheap.
And as if the NSA has no SHA crunching capabilities already...
NSA SHA capability > bitcoin community SHA capability.
And this will not change anytime soon.

It greatly influences the security by eliminating an attack vector that is 10-100X as efficient as current mining.  If the NSA (who has their own foundry) wanted to attack bitcoin, they could easily produce their own asics and 51% the shit out of the current network for only a few million dollars.  Once ASICs are in the wild, they once again are forced to compete on number of units and that is a much harder battle to win.

Why do you think you understand 'outside folks' behaviour and why do you think they would care about how bitcoin is generated?
How (in what amount) will ASICs influence network security and stability and why would this be enough for a huge impact on how 'outside' people see bitcoin?
Remember that ridicule itself never prevented anything substantial from becoming popular, just helped it getting burried after it peaked.

ASICs will have huge indirect impact on Bitcoin economy from network security and stability stand point where Bitcoin will be taken more seriously by outside folk seeing it now (when asics hit market) runs on its own specialized hardware, which had to be R&D'ed first - this should provide great level of confidence in network and the project over all.  It won't be looked as though any pc gamer could mine Bitcoin with their GPU - for some outside people this fact provided plenty of fuel to ridicule the project without giving much thought what is it and how it works on the inside.

ACISs are GREAT step forward for Bitcoin.