[jnbiche]

> All that mining does is give the person with the most hashrate more voting power in which transactions will be accepted. Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin's security.

This is completely wrong. The higher the difficulty, the harder it becomes to attack the network, which is a critical feature. If anyone who rented a data center could attack Bitcoin at this point, it would be even less stable (much less!) than it has been already.

[woah]

No. Read what I said. "Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin's security."

If everyone can use technology to push a higher hashrate, then what has changed? The people who can get their hands on new mining chips first have an advantage for a little while, but in the end it's a zero-sum game. The pie is 100% of hashing power/block validation power. How can you divide a pie into more than 100%?

[lmm]

If a dedicated data center is more effective than a commodity data center then that increases bitcoin's security, because it means a greater proportion of the hashrate resides with people who have an expensive long-term commitment to bitcoin and it's more expensive for an outsider to match that.

[ozmbie]

That's circular logic thogh. If you built a data center capable of staging a 51% attack, you haven't made the network harder overall. You've already gained enough power to do an attack.

It might encourage others to compete, and the arms race continues. But if too much of the network is controlled by a minority, then it's not automatically more secure.

[zaroth]

Only certain types of attacks are based on hashing at a rate which is a significant percentage of the network hash rate. Many other types of attacks have nothing to do with hashing, for example, the transaction malleability attacks.