[loxias]

Always surprised at how few nodes there are relative to how loud the noise is about crypto. I don't mind deploying a service and running things myself, it seems there are only a few thousand of us in the world. Even Tor only has "a few thousand" nodes.

It might be cute to also see some derived statistics like "market cap/node", average size of transaction, and "estimated cost of 51% attack". ;-)

[sparkie]

The count is "reachable nodes", which is a fraction of the number of total nodes. Most people don't open a port to allow incoming connections and their node will only make outgoing ones. Bitcoin has closer to 50k users running Bitcoin Core, with many others using SPV wallets like Electrum.

https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/histor...

[TakeBlaster16]

> estimated cost of 51% attack

Someone already built that one here: https://www.crypto51.app/

[mandarax8]

Is it 'illegal' to attempt a 51% attack?

[wyldfire]

It seems very likely it would be considered theft or fraud.

[cowtools]

I mean maybe if you try to double-spend on purchases that you make with cryptocurrency, but small reorgs happen all the time and they would have to prove you intentionally caused the reorg in order to double spend.

[password1]

These numbers are really low, I think I'm missing something otherwise I don't understand why 51% aren't a common issue.

[TakeBlaster16]

Those prices are derived from a site called NiceHash that tries to commodify hashpower. Most people who want to monetize their mining hardware, just... use it to mine, not lease it to a reseller. So both the supply and demand are low. It's a weird market imo.

The last column is important to understand. It's answering the question: if you rented NiceHash's entire supply of compute power, how close would that get you to launching an attack? For any crypto worth caring about, the number is 0% or close to it. And for the others where it's >= 100%, attacks are a common issue for exactly this reason.

[latchkey]

It is a common issue. ETC was 51'd 3 times in a month not too long ago... that said, with the upcoming merge, it'll soon be the largest hash GPU/ASIC coin.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/08/29/ethereum-classic...

[cowtools]

If I recall, the problem was that they were using the same PoW function as etherium was, so people could just use their old ETH hardware to attack ETC. Pretty sure the fix was to switch to a slightly different PoW that entails re-designing the ASICs.

[latchkey]

Except they never switched.

For security reasons, there can only be one top coin per class of hardware.

sha256/bitcoin = asic

ethash/ethereum = gpu

randomx/xmr= cpu

Yes, there are ethash asics, but they are effectively just asic gpus with ram... the memory controller is the gating factor because ethash is memory hard [1].

The gpu balance will shift with the merge... all the hash will go to ETC and other shitcoins. $21m a day in rewards will go to $1.2m a day.

A lot of GPUs will be turning off as the profitability drops. As profit drops, large miners will sell to the retail market to cover their costs...

ETC will trend towards zero... miners will try other coins, but those will also trend to zero since they have no actual use (utility) other than speculation.

These next couple weeks are going to be fascinating to watch. This merge is not only the end of ETH mining, but it could also be the end of speculation profit for a lot of other (shit)coins.

[1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...

[cowtools]

Interesting, thank you for clearing this up.

However, I think you could have multiple competing cryptocurrencies in the ASIC class, because the ASICs are not as generic as GPUs or CPUs, so they cannot be easily repurposed for attack unless they are FPGA-based (doubful).

Anyways, I'm looking forwards to the new supply of GPUs. Hopefully we don't get the same thing again with Chia hogging up all the storage on the market or Monero hogging up all the CPUs.

[drexlspivey]

That's just how much electricity it will cost you to sustain the attack for 1 hour. You still need to find the hardware. You'll also need to find someone to accept your transaction (that needs to be bigger than those 2 costs combined to make it profitable) and give you cash in return. Then you can defraud them keeping the cash and coins by reversing the transaction.

[EddySchauHai]

It’s surprisingly complex to run a node unless you’re a seasoned developer, and even then when you add things like updates and potentially even slashing for mistakes it’s not worth it. I spent around two years contracting building test infra for different crypto companies by creating throwaway networks with potentially up to three different cryptos (for bridges) and it was a nightmare. There’s a definite startup idea there to make it easier like spinning up VMs

[c0mptonFP]

Compared to the shit sysadmins normally have to deal with, setting up nodes and spinning up custom nets is a breeze in recent years.

[imtringued]

Solana validators are very expensive so it is actually surprising that it is in the top 5 in terms of validators.

[overtonwhy]

Or "estimated cost to DDoS nodes". For a 51% attack can you DDoS rival nodes offline?