On 05/18/11 07:42, Eugen Leitl wrote:

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It is possible for any current governmental agency to hijack the entire system, due to their access to supercomputer infrastructures and/or immense budgets. This will however become less and less possible while bitcoin continues to grow and is already a massive and technological challenge which I do not see any governmental institutions execute proper.

I'm not so sure that's true. Given the network at all times knows the amount of nodes out there (hence the 50%+1 rule for consensus) it would be trivial for a NSA (Nation State Actor, not TLA) to stand up 50%+1 virtual nodes fast enough to gain consensus and usurp the currencies (tokens) if I understand correctly the mechanism for determining legitimate tokens from the EconTalk interview. Am I missing something here?

It's not quite "amount of nodes" as "CPU capacity". You'd need to have more than 50% of the processing capacity of the system to consistently win the "races" to find the next block. Currently, the system is going at about 1.5 trillion hashes per second (my macbook does about 1 million per second, for comparison). So an attacker would need a not-inconsiderable heap of real hardware, rather than just a load of virtual nodes. Within their capacity for sure, but still not something they'll do lightly. ABS -- Alaric Snell-Pym http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE