| > > What if Amazon Web Services simply assigned all unoccupied EC2 cores to this task? > Nothing. EC2 rented servers are far too slow to attack the network at this point, that's the point of having a faster hashing speed and overall difficulty.
The point he's making is one that was referenced in the original bitcoin whitepaper. If one user were to amass more computing resources than the honest users, that person would have the ability to over-ride the transaction record. This however would incredibly difficult given the global hashrates are probably coming close to terahash/sec levels. If one extremely wealthy person wanted to, they could get butterfly labs' developers to sell them the design for their new 600ghash/sec mining card, then go on to fill a datacenter with systems that have several of those cards in each of their systems. Consider what the following could do: 1) Supermicro X9DR3-F - server board with 3 pci-e x16 slots 2) Any 2U supermicro chassis 3) 3 Butterfly labs Monarch cards per server 4) 48U cabinet Those cards mine at 600ghash/sec, put 3 of them in a single server, and the single system can mine at 1800ghash/sec, or 1.8thash/sec/server. Fill a 48U rack with 24 of those systems, you're mining at 43.2thash/sec. Fill 10 cabinets with these systems, and you're mining at 432.0thash/sec. |