Just a quick reminder that even though we are 10 times faster than the 500 fastest super computers on earth (in doing what we are doing), we are far from out of reach to a dedicated attacker.

If I had the job to destroy bitcoin, I would borrow $20 million to build my own little asic mining op. $20 million is about what people claim BFL raised, right? Ok, make it 40 million then, but as I said, the money will come back. I only need it temporarily.

Lets assume you can mine almost at a profit, which is the case. Ok, lets do that. Lets increase our hashing power to 51% for $40 million. This is possible as there hasn't been more money invested in current ASICs. If we haven't been profitable before, now we are profitable because we can drive all the competition out of the market. All block rewards are ours. We don't interfere with any transaction as by that we would discriminate our blocks and the devs could counter our attack. We just mine all the bitcoins and behave but let the world know that nobody will mine except for us. We sell the mined coins to pay back our debt and divert hashing power that's being freed to other block chains that surely will come up. Now we can set the rules and have inflation at will.

Am I off by some millions? Am I missing some basic protection against such an attack? Are there really more miners that would try to overpower this attacker than there are miners that would just leave once it turned out this thing was ongoing? I doubt it.



I'm afraid this can only be countered by some proof of stake. Too sad PPCoin is not an option. I kind of hope that such an attack would drive the original bitcoin to proof of stake.

<tinfoilhat>Maybe we already operate at the mercy of IMF, FED, world bank, etc., we already have full approval and bitcoin is meant to replace the dollar. Not being destroyed long ago is a very bullish sign. What would be the sense in destroying Bitcoin rather later than sooner, now that VCs are entering the field? All investors are going to be pissed about whoever destroys bitcoin, so why have more enemies than necessary?