[silk] Bitcoin

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

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

>> 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