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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn’t attack Bitcoin by buying hardware. You’d steal it. An industrial-scale bot et, for example.

A massive bitcoin mining virus wouldn't help. Let's say there are 2 billion PCs in the world, as this random site estimates[1]. Let's say each of them has a high-end graphics card.. say, a GTX 1060 that can do 20 MH/s. Let's say your virus can break into every single computer in the world, and run all those graphics cards at 100% without being noticed.

Now your mining power is: 20 MH/s * 2 billion = 40000 TH/s, or 0.1% of Bitcoin's hash power.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-PC-exist-in-the-world

> 2 billion PCs

Hence my specification for industrial scale. More likely: a corrupt data centre system admin or government official. In any case, if you’re taking on the Bitcoin network, doing it with fairly-obtained resources would be silly.

data center can't compete with asic mining farms

I think the implication would be that you steal the asic mining farms.

IE, you somehow compromise 51% of the EXISTING hashpower, do your attack. It doesn't matter to YOU that their mining hardware will become worthless.

It seems very implausible. Anyone with that level of sophistication may as well look for exploits in bitcoin exchanges and steal the bitcoins directly.

A corrupt data center official has much easier options to attack bitcoin at the network level. For example, a rogue sysadmin at a major Tier 1 ISP could use BGP hijacking to mount a partitioning attack against the network.

See the paper “Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies” [0] for more details on this.

[0] https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/files/btc_hijack.pdf

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