[saalweachter]

The specialized mining hardware is a red herring.

The security of the Bitcoin network isn't a function of its hashrate or the number of nodes, though these things correlate; it's a function of the cost of running it.

Regardless of whether the network is run on specialized hardware, old desktops, or TI-83s, the network is only secure so long as it costs enough to run that any motivated attacker would have to spend more money than they can leverage to attack it.

[imustbeevil]

There is even a site that tells you how much money you'd need to run 51% attacks on different cryptocurrencies. (It looks like the site used Nicehash payouts as a data point but Nicehash is down/being updated so those values are no longer there, but I found an article with a screenshot from May last year.)

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/05/30/heres-how-much-it...