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by gruez 1898 days ago
>the NSA must have rows upon rows of servers that could be repurposed for a week or two to destroy the market

Their general purpose servers are nearly useless for mining bitcoin because their hashrates are orders of magnitude lower than the ASICs that professional miners use. If you want to 51% attack bitcoin you either need an absurd number of general purpose computers (possibly more than all CPUs/GPUs that exist on earth) or pour billions into making hardware that can only be used to mine.
1 comments
SubjectToChange 1898 days ago
$1B would be more than enough to design and manufacture all the necessary ASICs to cripple the network. They wouldn't even need to do a 51% attack to do so, e.g. selling coins at a complete loss would bleed the other miners white.
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gruez 1898 days ago
>$1B would be more than enough to design and manufacture all the necessary ASICs to cripple the network

Source? Some napkin math using the current bitcoin network hash rate[1] and the price/performance ratio of a yet-to-be-released bitcoin mining ASIC[2] suggests that you'd need $9.5B to take over the network.

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate

[1] https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021022419553...

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