Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin network hashrate is currently around 550.000TH/s[1]. An asic miner with 4.73TH/s claimed capacity can be bought for $500 [2]. With a budget of less than $100M you could have similar capacity as current bitcoin network.

One thing that bothers me a bit is that it is hard to tell how decentralized these technologies really are. Especially when you go into direction where commodity hardware becomes useless and you need specialty equipment to do meaningful mining, there's a risk that the power falls into few hands.

This is probably not an issue for bitcoin, where the incentive to cheat would be to just gain monetary profits. In some other blockchains, serving different purposes things might be different. Governments with their deep pockets might be interested in building up capacity to be able to perform covert ops.

[1] https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty [2] https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/

Run the math for Ethereum and it's even crazier. Something like $15m in cloud computing resources and you can control the eth network valued at >$30 billion. For this reason I can't imagine "shorting" these cryptocurrencies will be possible any time soon as the incentives for attack would be too great. The price asymmetry could resolve in a number of different ways and it will be interesting to watch how it unfolds.

It would be valued as something closer to 0 if you did take it over.

If you take over the entire thing yes. But the DAO hack demonstrates how easy it can be for an attacker to make off with a whole lot of ETH.

It does? That attacker made off with 0 ETH. Admittedly they made off with some ETC.

> I can't imagine "shorting" these cryptocurrencies will be possible any time soon

You can short Bitcoin, Ethereum and many other cryptocurrencies on a number of exchanges right now.

> Bitcoin network hashrate is currently around 550.000TH/s[1]. An asic miner with 4.73TH/s claimed capacity can be bought for $500 [2]. With a budget of less than $100M you could have similar capacity as current bitcoin network.

The network hashrate is 5 million TH/s and, believe it or not, there aren't a million of these ~$500 devices you mention up for sale. You would have to produce them yourself, with fierce competition.

Many have looked at the numbers and thought "I can do that", and when their mining product finally ships, the difficulty has increased by a factor of 10x. Leaving them with 5% network hashrate instead of 50%, because it turned out they weren't the only ones thinking "I can do that".

judging from the link you provided is more like 5000000TH/s so you lost one zero

And I even double checked the number, but still missed that one zero. Thanks for pointing this out.

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