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> It's also kind of funny that you could mine the shit out of Bitcoin with something like this, which would either pay for itself or crash Bitcoin, hard to predict.

Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism to counteract improvements in hashing speed (either because of hardware getting faster, algorithmic improvements, or more hardware getting devoted to hashing).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Mining: “The difficulty of generating a block is deterministically adjusted based on the mining power on the network by changing the difficulty target, which is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks (approximately two weeks) to maintain an average time of ten minutes between new blocks“

I think there’s more than enough range available here to handle a million-fold increase in hashing power.

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2016 blocks is a lot though. that's nearly $700 million in mining fees.

if someone had a monopoly on chips like these, they could dominate the network and freeze out other miners. which would likely tank the network and make those BTC worthless

That is a risk but not a new risk. It existed with the transition to ASIC miners, too, and didn’t happen.

I guess that didn’t happen because making ASICs is relatively easy, but even if it isn’t, what would be in it for a potential monopolist to tank the value of bitcoin in that way? They better take a large but not overly large part of the market and keep mining money for a long time, only speeding up when a competitor steps in.

> what would be in it for a potential monopolist to tank the value of bitcoin in that way?

Shorting BTC. But you'd have to gather a humongous mining farm / pool in secret, wait until right after the recalibration and then turn on everything at once, mining those 2016 faster. People would panic, enabling you to close your short positions.

After those 2016 blocks you can just keep mining for a regular return, although I'd just sell the farm to an organisation interested in doing so.

It's a fun theoretical attack, if capital intensive. And aside from the short positions (which you can cover instead of going naked), your capital isn't at risk because the worst result is that you'll own a crypto mining farm.

Presenting a quantum breakthrough could be cheaper than cornering noticeable capacity.

> because the worst result is that you'll own a crypto mining farm.

Bitcoin is fairly popular among criminals, so you might also get some people visit you to argue that is best for both of you to give them back the money they lost, using strong arguments such as threats of bodily harm.

With enough money you can buy security to keep yourself safe from low/mid criminals. Angry rogue nation states might be harder to deal with.

They've had more time to prepare than you which is their edge in the game.

So if you had a machine that could solve blocks at a tremendous pace, could you rapidly go through 2016 blocks with minimal transactions processed, then just switch your machine off?

The difficulty will have gone through the roof and transaction processing time by the rest of the network will then slow to a crawl.

Even with difficulty adjustments you could mine a shit ton, you would basically be mining all of the blocks every 10 minutes for yourself. And if the advantage is significant you could do a 51% attack.

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