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That kinda doesn't matter when the amount of compute is trivially reproduced by '90's CPUs

You can just have a bunch of notes and vote out bad results. You can say "how do you know that 20 different machines you run that do not have hardware backdoor but how do you know software running ethereum is not backdoored ? There is no protection for the compute engine being backdoored, just the fact you'd need to get that backdoored software to most nodes.

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In order to convince one honest node you’d have to backdoor every node they talk to.

Multiple independent implementations co-exist on the network including many private implementations.

Perhaps the best defense is the vigilance of the community as they regularly build consensus around the head blocks hash which is hard to forge if the ledger contains any material impacts of an exploit.

Trivial detection of malicious acts is the feature.

It’s true it’s not perfect but your analysis trivializes the effort to compromise even one honest node.

Or you can get your raspberry pi, some desktop from the 90s and random used laptop and get 1000x the "secure computing power" that couldn't be reasonably hardware-backdoored too.

Crypto for compute is entirely useless use case.

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