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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

This is just a warm-up for taking on Bitcoin.

I doubt any single party owns enough compute to perform 51% attack on Bitcoin. Not now, maybe in the future if bitcoin's popularity significantly dies, they can do that.

Many parties do. The question is if they'd find it worth the effort. There's easier ways of making more money, at least for now.

Almost by definition, its impossible for more than one party to control 51% of all hashing power.

This leaves out any miners turned of because of power costs, and non-ASIC compute. I have no idea how big those are. My completely unfounded guess would be that all of AWS available CPU compute woudn't be enough compute for a 51% attack.

> CPU compute

well yeah, CPUs are many orders of magnitude slower than ASICs

bitcoin electricity cost is the equivalent of a couple of small nations, or the full power of a nuclear power plant, its hashpower is equivalent to the top 500 supercomputers. (this info might be outdated by now). what secures it though is not the giant mountain of resources by itself but MAD (mutually assured destruction) which is hardly game theoretic. Its basically a way for people to park their money akin to real estate, so they wont ever attack the network as long as it keeps their money warm and fuzzy. Its not really decentralized (more like denationalized) and strongly vulnerable to regulations. However just like safe havens if a nation bans it others will welcome it, thats why it is unkillable. China despite having all the resources to crack down on bitcoin mining they wont do it because for the better or worse its like controlling a global currency, which they have been trying to turn the yuan into for a while

> Almost by definition, its impossible for more than one party to control 51% of all hashing power.

I suppose they meant, that many parties do have that much potential compute but they use it for other things. But they could in theory switch to computing bitcoin hashes and control 51%, and in turn some other party can do the same etc... Obviously you're right that eventually one party can own 51%, but that doesn't mean only one party can successfully perform 51% attack, since % of hashing power can change by time.

There isn't a state actor or company that overturn Bitcoin with computing power.

You can't be serious.

Bitmain does.

Source?

I mean, real technical capabilities not just mention of facilities in Texas or whatever.

They manufacture the bulk of Bitcoin mining gear. They hold all the IP. They have all the manufacturing contracts. They have heaps of their own hardware and the capability of manufacturing more at cost.

They are the prime mover in the Bitcoin space, and have an outsized impact in other crypto mining spaces. They are the undisputed ASIC leaders.

What's your point? If Bitmain decided to 'overturn' Bitcoin all their gear would become worthless.

What if crashing Bitcoin helped them in some way, like pushing people to Ethereum where they also sell metric tons of mining equipment?

You're saying it's impossible, and now you're saying nobody would bother. Don't move the goalposts.

You know for sure what the processing power in Utah is?

Doubtful.

That's why they just overturn the Devs.

The scale would be orders of magnitude bigger.

So? That just makes it harder, not impossible.

This vulnerability was baked into Bitcoin from day one. There is no outcome under which Bitcoin is not 51% attacked. it is an inevitability as sure as the heat-death of the universe.

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