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Comment by jack_pp | Hacker News Reader

I won't comment about the gold rush aspects of crypto right now because they're pretty obvious but regarding the PoW algorithm of Monero, I think that's its fatal flaw long term. Any coin that doesn't have a huge moat of ASIC miners backing it up is vulnerable to attack. You can't attack bitcoin without coordinating existing miners but any coin that can be mined with general CPUs could be attacked by govts or corps which have access to large general compute resources.

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Any government with large stockpiles of unused, general compute resources, could snap its fingers, and make large stockpiles of any compute resources appear.

The 'buy military gear' police budget of any medium sized US city, could be diverted for one year, and probably buy any specific compute resource you cite.

This just isn't a defense against governmental or corporate attack.

It's not even defense against a bored billionaire.

How long do you think it would take a government to develop ASICs that compete with what’s on the market, and build enough of them for an attack (would need to be >50 of the power of all existing ASICs!)?

How much do you think it would cost?

I think you massively underestimate what’s involved there..general compute resources are just not going to help.

Declare them illegal and confiscate them from the miners.

Not even China did that. You think it’s likely?

Not sure. This article [1] sounded plausible, when I first read it. It will be interesting to see how governments' stances will settle.

[1] https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is...

Develop? Manufacture? They'd just buy them.

The cost is trivial.

That's easy to say in theory, in practice supply of these ASICs is much more limited than you might think. Maybe if they throw enough money at the problem they could buy from existing miners..

Even so, they would have to spend a very large sum of money on this, money which will simply be "burnt". If you would want to attack a coin that works on general compute then you can use that general compute for whatever you want thus that would be "free"

The supply doesn’t exist. Attempting to purchase large quantities would drive the price up, obviously not trivial..

Good grief. Outside of pandemic supply issues, eg, in normal times, a entity (gov, corp, billionaore), would go to a large producer, and place an order.

I assure you, they'd pay less per unit, in bulk, not more.

You think they'd buy off of ebay?! Amazon?

No! They'd bypass the little guy, and get a large run done themselves. And yes, it isn't a big deal.

If they had to, they'd put out a RFP and get corps to submit quotes on qty whatever.

Here's a secret... people love money. If someone wants a large order of something, it happens.

Even in the pandemic, if govs want anything, gloves, masks, they get it well before you or I, before corps.

It’s not just “pandemic supply”..even in the more mature GPU market Nvidia isn’t even close to keeping up with demand. There is not a button you can push to spin up more fabs.

The fact that you’d compare gloves and masks to chips is telling.

That's true, but then again usually the miners using ASICs do so in large warehouses that draw lots of power and are part of large mining pools (some of which are publicly traded I believe) i.e it's easy to target a large portion of mining capacity with certain POW coins.

On the flip side, RandomX optimizing for general CPUs does mean that it can be easier for certain actors to launch a 51% attack on the network. However, it also means the network is more robust in a way. IMO it's a marginally better situation.

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