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Comment by cbr | Hacker News Reader

    we'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously
    made almost entirely out of Bitcoin

I think we're more likely to find a very fast way to compute sha256 hashes than a 10T+ gold asteroid.

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As long as we can't preimage arbitrary hashes, the difficulty will adjust.

There are contingency plans for if a preimage becomes possible, and I suspect they'll move to a stronger hash before it's needed.

If you figure out how to hash 1000x more efficiently than other people and put that into practice without sharing your knowledge then you can cheaply get and maintain a hashpower supermajority.

(I'm not saying this is likely, just more likely than finding a large gold asteroid.)

People will notice soon enough, and they'll switch to a different algorithm. It takes time for the difficulty to go up, it only resets every 2016 blocks and is limited.

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