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by thebean11 1610 days ago
How long do you think it would take a government to develop ASICs that compete with what’s on the market, and build enough of them for an attack (would need to be >50 of the power of all existing ASICs!)?

How much do you think it would cost?

I think you massively underestimate what’s involved there..general compute resources are just not going to help.
2 comments
nuclx 1609 days ago
Declare them illegal and confiscate them from the miners.
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thebean11 1609 days ago
Not even China did that. You think it’s likely?
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nuclx 1609 days ago
Not sure. This article [1] sounded plausible, when I first read it. It will be interesting to see how governments' stances will settle.

[1] https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is...

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b112 1610 days ago
Develop? Manufacture? They'd just buy them.

The cost is trivial.

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jack_pp 1610 days ago
That's easy to say in theory, in practice supply of these ASICs is much more limited than you might think. Maybe if they throw enough money at the problem they could buy from existing miners..

Even so, they would have to spend a very large sum of money on this, money which will simply be "burnt". If you would want to attack a coin that works on general compute then you can use that general compute for whatever you want thus that would be "free"

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thebean11 1609 days ago
The supply doesn’t exist. Attempting to purchase large quantities would drive the price up, obviously not trivial..
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b112 1609 days ago
Good grief. Outside of pandemic supply issues, eg, in normal times, a entity (gov, corp, billionaore), would go to a large producer, and place an order.

I assure you, they'd pay less per unit, in bulk, not more.

You think they'd buy off of ebay?! Amazon?

No! They'd bypass the little guy, and get a large run done themselves. And yes, it isn't a big deal.

If they had to, they'd put out a RFP and get corps to submit quotes on qty whatever.

Here's a secret... people love money. If someone wants a large order of something, it happens.

Even in the pandemic, if govs want anything, gloves, masks, they get it well before you or I, before corps.

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thebean11 1609 days ago
It’s not just “pandemic supply”..even in the more mature GPU market Nvidia isn’t even close to keeping up with demand. There is not a button you can push to spin up more fabs.

The fact that you’d compare gloves and masks to chips is telling.

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