Maybe this is something that has been discussed before, but, what if a government, any government really, for any reason, decided to take down the bitcoin network or simply DOS the hell out of it ?
My calculation might be incredibly naive, but if I take the figures from bitcoinwatch[1], and fiddle a bit with the bitcoin calculator[2] :
- Right now (block 88894), 180 blocks generated during last 24h
- that's a block every 8 minutes on average
- average of 8 minutes for block generation would require 25 ghashes/s
So if my logic isn't flawed, the network as a whole crunches at approximately 25,000 mhashes/s
So, that's 42 Radeon 5970 graphic cards if i take the advertised figures here[3].
So anyone with a little spare money (let's say 100k$) can successfully :
1. generate at full speed with tweaked client,
2. stop right after difficulty increase, significantly slowing down the block generation and transaction handling
3. repeat after difficulty decrease,
4. sell generated coins,
5. increase crunching power
6. finish by undermining trust in bitcoins, (advertise your attack, refuse to include transaction in generated blocks etc.)
I don't think there's much incentive for regular people to donate CPU time which would make such an attack really hard :
- On regular computers, with most widespread OS, generating gets the fan to be really noisy (might seem like nothing, but I personnally hate loud computers)
- Generation rate is really slow unless you know how to get your GPU to do the work
I think bitcoin security could come from millions of people donating a few khashes/s and not a few people giving a bunch of mhashes/s. My point is that I don't really see an incentive for regular people to generate.
Is my logic completely flawed or should I just dump my wallet on mtgox and run ? =)
calm down, now cryptocurrency users have a lot, if we strong users maintain it, then the government will give permission to all of us, I am sure that can happen, depending on how our efforts are.
