Topic: Two new countries launches new currency respectively (Read 3380 times)

Since you played the religious card, this is as good a place as any to share with you my theory of what really happened on June 9, 2011. The mainstream media would have you believe that Harold Camping suffered a stroke on this date when, what really happened, he suffered a minor Bitcoin mining accident while building the ultimate GPU powered generator to control 51% of the blockchain. I look to seeing the billboards being changed any day now, instructing his followers to only trade using Bitcoin, because it's God's will.

To prove I'm not just offering up another conspiracy theory, Harold Camping used finite mathematics to HASH the Bible, and even factored in that his first bock may not be generated on May 21, 2011, but for sure will have 51% control by October 21, 2011, hence his hiding and not really being in a nursing home.

To further prove my theory, below is an image of the old billboard. All that needs to be changed is the logo on the left (already close to the Bitcoin logo) and the date. Feel free to Photoshop it, showing the changes, so that his followers would have a jump start in erecting (as in a phallic symbol) the new signs.

No, they could not. Any malicous change in the client would set off enough alarm bells that people would not upgrade and we would simply have to form another dev team. Bad yes, take over the network bad, no.



Goramit, did none of you read my posts on how difficult it would be to preform a 51% attack? You would need to build your own factory, at a cost of hundreds of millions, then build the cards (of other devices) at a large material cost (electronics do not have much of a profit margin, they would pay almost as much for a card as it would cost you, even with their own factory) and finally millions more for a facility and the power to run all these devices. This is already out of the range of any company.

I sometimes forget that there are 2 ou 3 guys in the world that could just team up and take over the network down 

Don't forget that the network hashing capacity could easily be 3 times as high in a few months, so your hypothetical adversary might better assemble those rigs really fast.

On a side note: bribing/hacking/blackmailing slush & tycho would surely be the cheaper way to go (even if only short term effective)

Why do you speak about BILLIONS?

It take like only 15 millions $ to do a 51% attack... a rich guy can happily do it without problems.

FruitCompany wouldn't not do that. It's stupid and it's not their style. They make gadgets, not currencies.

That was funny but then it struck me chillingly, more likely than Google, there's another company that could hijack and derail bitcoin entirely.

Let's say I operate a fruit market and have millions of worshippers with stores churning over US$4.6 billion and now I roll out FruitCoin based entirely on the Bitcoin concept with a central authority and demand that my apps developers fruit sellers use FruitCoin or else they don't get to sell in my fruit market.

Given the size of the fruit market and the almost religious devotion of fruit eaters, the marketing flair of my fruit marketeers, it could quite easily take over.

"Things that everyone would notice if they stopped doing."

Google: We once again apologize for interrupting your "search" with our daily brownouts. Google Search will be available in 3 hours and 47 minutes. In the mean time, enjoy the animated doodle of a Bitcoin mining rig.

Bitcoin: Imagine Your Potential

Yes, of course. It was a theoretical statement. It's not just "Let's install GUI Miner and we're good to go".  Probably most of those computers aren't even suited for mining... But they have enough knowledge and wealth to take over bitcoin.

I think we would notice if Google or Amazon diverted enough of their power to the problem.  They have a lot of computers, but they aren't idle, they are doing things.  Profitable things.  Public things.  Things that everyone would notice if they stopped doing.

That 51% attack is really easy for countries/large companies. I bet that Google/Amazon could easily take over the network if they wanted to.

Regarding the official currency, do you really believe that a country like Sudan could have a virtual official currency?! And how would they do that? Give smartphones and free Internet to the whole population? My grandmother doesn't know how to read. Good luck trying to explain to her what a bitcoin is.

If a country is seriously interested in taking over the block chain, why should they do it with GPUs? There is already a FPGA thread here and the wiki lists about 120Mh/s at about 20Mh/w.

Whole network is doing about 14TH/s so that would need about 12 million FPGAs equivalent and infrastructure to handle about 7MW. A country doing this would probably lay the design down into a single IC and send it off to one of the contract fab to produce, these don't need to be on cutting edge fab processes and so would be relatively cheap and importantly, supply isn't going to be a big issue because older process fab capacity are easier to get than cutting edge GPU fabs.

Not a single thread, no.  But thousands of them are here, as each new person makes their obligatory post describing whichever of the 5 or 6 well known potential/imaginary weaknesses they happen to notice first.

Also, see the Weaknesses page on the wiki.

Is there a thread essentially wargaming scenarios required to take over bitcoin?

searched "51%", "takeover blockchain" etc.  

It doesn't. As coin generation approaches zero, the value per coin should in theory increase since if bitcoin lasts that long it should in theory have a sufficiently established economy so becoming more valuable as people are aware there will soon be no more new coins generated.

If miners stop doing work because of the low coin generation x coin value, then difficult drops steeply to compensate so the network would still maintain the same block generation rate.

I'm more worried about the future when computing power keeps doubling, making the work already done worth less every year.  Will we also be running up to a point where miners won't be doing as much work? 

Sure a custom SHA hardware implementation would be expensive because of the engineering, but a 1-2 ghz chip with 5000 alus could probably get quite a lot done for not much more than manufacturing costs.

As i noted above, its not the cost of the cards thats the problem, its the supply. Fixing the supply problem requires either months of cornering the graphics card market, or the infinitely more expensive option of building your own cards. No amount of money can buy cards that have not been manufactured.

unless bitcoin can bankroll the continuing genocide there -

no chance.



banks can fund wars and enslave both sides at the same time.



as long as people want more than they can afford -

banks will always be king.

No you don't: maybe you need 2  times that for build and mantain it for 6 months. To run a mining farm of  30.000 superpumped 3x6990 rigs (that will do 3X the actual hash power) you need at least 500 full time employees (in 6 month at least 30 million $), (Godaddy has 1500 technical employees for 60.000 servers)
There are energy bill to pay even if is a governative installation (at least 20Million $ for 6 month paying 0,05$/KWh). Add a good 10 million $ of network infrastructure and connectivity (I don't calculate a redundant 10GBit connection to internet assuming a govern can obtain it almost for free) . UPS and backup generator will cost you another 50-60 million $ (we are talkin of a 90MW, a small power plant - a similar one, highly ecological,  built 4-5 years ago costs about 200M$). The cooler must be really efficient to work in a similar environment (one rig produce 1,5KW of heat, like a powerful server with 8CPU and 24 disks. But no server farm hosts 30.000 of that servers for what I know ): at least 30M$.   
The 30.000 rigs wil cost at least 40 million $ (I've considered a 20%-25% less than the wholesaler prices, probably lower than the price you can have buying a bigger stock directly from producers, and with no assembly cost).
Total: 200M$, plus the building, the connectivity, the security (both from hackers and physical assaults). If you're in hurry to build it you can easily double the costs.
Overall if a govern wants  to kill bitcoin, it's still a small investment to do.