You got it wrong, it's the mining hash rate and not the nodes that counts. You also got the math wrong: 10,000 + 5,001 = 15,001 which is closer to 33% than 50%. There are currently 11,302 Bitcoin nodes and 1,315 Btrash nodes, don't pretend less nodes is better.
Then we have the hash rate, same algorithms are used. Bitcoin hash rate is now: 151.20 EH/s while Btrash is at 1.8 EH/s. It'll cost CIA 84 times more to interfere with Bitcoin than it would cost them to interfere with Btrash.
All in all, the hardware for taking over Btrash would cost you $43,920,000 and you'll need space and cooling for 16,363 devices plus about 20MW of energy supply. Meanwhile for Bitcoin you'd need: $3,689,280,000 for the hardware, 1,393,232 devices and 1.39GW of energy.
Not to mention that if CIA started to build something like that, it wouldn't go unnoticed and more people around the world would increase their own mining operations to prevent a 51% attack which is essentially only good for delaying on chain transactions anyway. This isn't really a big issue since Bitcoin now has off chain transactions while Btrash still does everything on chain.
Face it, not even China could do this, they did try it, remember all those coal plants they built, their massive mining facilities, how horrible they treated their workers and all of that, and still they failed. CIA has no chance.
Let's also not forget that a centralized operation would be extremely vulnerable if say a truck loaded with bombs would roll into the massive warehouse where they set everything up.
I meant 5,001 of that 10,000. Just how many altruistic nerds do you think are hashing this stuff? If it’s as small a number as 10,000, then it’s easily subverted by a gov org that has an unlimited secret budget. You’re speaking as if you think it’s unthinkable that a gov org would purchase and operate enough hashrate to make billions by manipulating financial markets in this single case because you want it to be that way. For I dunno what reason, maybe you think that tech is ultimately altruistic or something?
Yet we have ample evidence of those gov orgs doing way worse, way more evil (and more expensive & more complicated) shit to make a buck: drug imports from Afghanistan, China, Colombia; secret web/software companies that spy upon users; embedded staff within all MSM to manipulate public opinion; WMD in Iraq; giving almost all of Iraq’s oil to Chink companies; invading Libya to prevent a rival gold-backed currency from being formed; invaded Syria to control oil exports from region; scuppers every attempt by GEOTUS to actually end those wars etc etc. But somehow, in this unique case, you believe firmly that those same gov orgs cannot buy a few thousand computers? You’re dumb man.
SPEZZ; honestly, if you think 3-4 billion is not a price they’d pay to secretly control the great hope for the future of financial freedom, then you really are dumb. Bezos & Bill Gates are literally their slaves, and between them control like 300 billion dollars alone. Even economically speaking, your argument is pure hopium. 1.39 GW of power too, that might sound like an astronomical amount to a normie tech enthusiast. But it’s merely a moderately sized windfarm. Let alone a small nuclear facility or coal plant (guess who has access to decommissioned US Navy ship-borne nuclear power plants?)
This literally means forcing their way into peoples homes all around the world, find the computers hosting the nodes which can be anything from desktop PC's to Raspberry Pi one card computer chips hidden in cleaver places. Nah, that just doesn't make sense. Would make more sense to actually buy 10,000 PC's of their own.
Problem for them is that even if they did, they wouldn't gain any control by doing so because the already existing nodes will still exist and decide the rules. None of those would accept CIA spying on them or doing other nasty stuff.
Just how many altruistic nerds do you think are hashing this stuff?
Mining generates passive income, you don't need to be a nerd to want a space heater that also generate more money than the electricity cost for keeping it running, the information is public: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart
Yet we have ample evidence of those gov orgs doing way worse
I know what they're doing, they're pure evil and sometimes even worse than Nazi Germany. Still, they haven't yet managed to hack or manipulate the Bitcoin protocol, only the exchange rate to the USD which isn't even hard to do.
Last thing, what makes you think that one single centralized server that's 100% controlled by CIA, 100% rigged, censored, proprietary and all that kind of shit would be better than Bitcoin. It's like defending Dominion when paper voting exist.
Yea I mean, we’re clearly getting mixed up in semantics. My 5,001 number was exemplifying how few nodes are needed. As you’re saying now, buying 10k or 20k nodes would probably be way easier. 200k nodes would be easily manageable. They already have access to tech like that. Dell, HP, IBM, they produce millions of servers per month and none of them would look twice at some org buying 20k high spec servers. I have worked for massive companies who buy tens of thousands of servers/workstations/laptops every month just to keep operations running. So I mean, we aren’t talking about high numbers by any stretch.
As for controlling nodes, I’d expect that the regular tech enthusiast (even if he makes a moderate passive income) will expect a large degree of churn. Which’ll filter uncontrolled nodes out of the system fairly frequently. Whereas these guys will have unlimited budget to remain active, not to mention having access to the expertise needed to mask their actions. It’s already done, I’m sure. It’s unbelievable to me to think they haven’t already at least begun attempting to lock in their advantage considering the budgets and personnel they control.
Yeah, no doubt they could easily obtain millions of computers just like that and spin up nodes on all of them, sync with the network. Point is that every Bitcoin node holds a full copy of the block chain which is currently about 200GB in size, so even if CIA created 1M nodes they operate that wouldn't allow them to alter the chain or pose any threat.
They could change the rules for their own advantage but that would only result in a fork, where we get Bitcoin (original unchanged with 10,000+ independent nodes) and a new "CIA Bitcoin" with 1M malicious nodes that nobody would use.
The 51% attack has nothing to do with the nodes, it's about the mining hash rate. The difference here is that while a node could run on a $100 one card computer chip with a HDD attached to it, a mining device (ASIC) which is about 100M times more powerful than a regular PC at solving the SHA256 hash and does nothing else cost about $3000 per unit and provides 110TH/s using about 1500W of energy.
No doubt that CIA could easily cough up billions of dollars and build a huge data center with over 1M mining devices consuming 1.4GW of energy, but even if they did that, all they could do is to delay on chain transactions, causing payments to have a 50% chance to be verified in 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes as they normally do.
Double that setup and CIA could delay transactions to between 10 and 30 minutes. Sure it's annoying with slower payments and all that but that kind of attack isn't really a big threat. Also if something like that where going on for a longer time everyone might just agree to fork into a different algorithm than SHA256, to say something that works best on a GPU.
Monero do this all the time to prevent ASIC units. And with that simple action taken, CIA would suddenly sit there with billions of dollars worth of now worthless Chinese hardware.
It's good to be paranoid, don't get me wrong. All I'm saying is that arguing against Bitcoin is like being afraid of a certain brand of car just because the radio might be produced in China, and then go and buy a 100% Chinese car instead.
You got it wrong, it's the mining hash rate and not the nodes that counts. You also got the math wrong: 10,000 + 5,001 = 15,001 which is closer to 33% than 50%. There are currently 11,302 Bitcoin nodes and 1,315 Btrash nodes, don't pretend less nodes is better.
Then we have the hash rate, same algorithms are used. Bitcoin hash rate is now: 151.20 EH/s while Btrash is at 1.8 EH/s. It'll cost CIA 84 times more to interfere with Bitcoin than it would cost them to interfere with Btrash.
All in all, the hardware for taking over Btrash would cost you $43,920,000 and you'll need space and cooling for 16,363 devices plus about 20MW of energy supply. Meanwhile for Bitcoin you'd need: $3,689,280,000 for the hardware, 1,393,232 devices and 1.39GW of energy.
Not to mention that if CIA started to build something like that, it wouldn't go unnoticed and more people around the world would increase their own mining operations to prevent a 51% attack which is essentially only good for delaying on chain transactions anyway. This isn't really a big issue since Bitcoin now has off chain transactions while Btrash still does everything on chain.
Face it, not even China could do this, they did try it, remember all those coal plants they built, their massive mining facilities, how horrible they treated their workers and all of that, and still they failed. CIA has no chance.
Let's also not forget that a centralized operation would be extremely vulnerable if say a truck loaded with bombs would roll into the massive warehouse where they set everything up.
I meant 5,001 of that 10,000. Just how many altruistic nerds do you think are hashing this stuff? If it’s as small a number as 10,000, then it’s easily subverted by a gov org that has an unlimited secret budget. You’re speaking as if you think it’s unthinkable that a gov org would purchase and operate enough hashrate to make billions by manipulating financial markets in this single case because you want it to be that way. For I dunno what reason, maybe you think that tech is ultimately altruistic or something?
Yet we have ample evidence of those gov orgs doing way worse, way more evil (and more expensive & more complicated) shit to make a buck: drug imports from Afghanistan, China, Colombia; secret web/software companies that spy upon users; embedded staff within all MSM to manipulate public opinion; WMD in Iraq; giving almost all of Iraq’s oil to Chink companies; invading Libya to prevent a rival gold-backed currency from being formed; invaded Syria to control oil exports from region; scuppers every attempt by GEOTUS to actually end those wars etc etc. But somehow, in this unique case, you believe firmly that those same gov orgs cannot buy a few thousand computers? You’re dumb man.
SPEZZ; honestly, if you think 3-4 billion is not a price they’d pay to secretly control the great hope for the future of financial freedom, then you really are dumb. Bezos & Bill Gates are literally their slaves, and between them control like 300 billion dollars alone. Even economically speaking, your argument is pure hopium. 1.39 GW of power too, that might sound like an astronomical amount to a normie tech enthusiast. But it’s merely a moderately sized windfarm. Let alone a small nuclear facility or coal plant (guess who has access to decommissioned US Navy ship-borne nuclear power plants?)
This literally means forcing their way into peoples homes all around the world, find the computers hosting the nodes which can be anything from desktop PC's to Raspberry Pi one card computer chips hidden in cleaver places. Nah, that just doesn't make sense. Would make more sense to actually buy 10,000 PC's of their own.
Problem for them is that even if they did, they wouldn't gain any control by doing so because the already existing nodes will still exist and decide the rules. None of those would accept CIA spying on them or doing other nasty stuff.
Mining generates passive income, you don't need to be a nerd to want a space heater that also generate more money than the electricity cost for keeping it running, the information is public: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart
I know what they're doing, they're pure evil and sometimes even worse than Nazi Germany. Still, they haven't yet managed to hack or manipulate the Bitcoin protocol, only the exchange rate to the USD which isn't even hard to do.
Last thing, what makes you think that one single centralized server that's 100% controlled by CIA, 100% rigged, censored, proprietary and all that kind of shit would be better than Bitcoin. It's like defending Dominion when paper voting exist.
Yea I mean, we’re clearly getting mixed up in semantics. My 5,001 number was exemplifying how few nodes are needed. As you’re saying now, buying 10k or 20k nodes would probably be way easier. 200k nodes would be easily manageable. They already have access to tech like that. Dell, HP, IBM, they produce millions of servers per month and none of them would look twice at some org buying 20k high spec servers. I have worked for massive companies who buy tens of thousands of servers/workstations/laptops every month just to keep operations running. So I mean, we aren’t talking about high numbers by any stretch.
As for controlling nodes, I’d expect that the regular tech enthusiast (even if he makes a moderate passive income) will expect a large degree of churn. Which’ll filter uncontrolled nodes out of the system fairly frequently. Whereas these guys will have unlimited budget to remain active, not to mention having access to the expertise needed to mask their actions. It’s already done, I’m sure. It’s unbelievable to me to think they haven’t already at least begun attempting to lock in their advantage considering the budgets and personnel they control.
Yeah, no doubt they could easily obtain millions of computers just like that and spin up nodes on all of them, sync with the network. Point is that every Bitcoin node holds a full copy of the block chain which is currently about 200GB in size, so even if CIA created 1M nodes they operate that wouldn't allow them to alter the chain or pose any threat.
They could change the rules for their own advantage but that would only result in a fork, where we get Bitcoin (original unchanged with 10,000+ independent nodes) and a new "CIA Bitcoin" with 1M malicious nodes that nobody would use.
The 51% attack has nothing to do with the nodes, it's about the mining hash rate. The difference here is that while a node could run on a $100 one card computer chip with a HDD attached to it, a mining device (ASIC) which is about 100M times more powerful than a regular PC at solving the SHA256 hash and does nothing else cost about $3000 per unit and provides 110TH/s using about 1500W of energy.
No doubt that CIA could easily cough up billions of dollars and build a huge data center with over 1M mining devices consuming 1.4GW of energy, but even if they did that, all they could do is to delay on chain transactions, causing payments to have a 50% chance to be verified in 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes as they normally do.
Double that setup and CIA could delay transactions to between 10 and 30 minutes. Sure it's annoying with slower payments and all that but that kind of attack isn't really a big threat. Also if something like that where going on for a longer time everyone might just agree to fork into a different algorithm than SHA256, to say something that works best on a GPU.
Monero do this all the time to prevent ASIC units. And with that simple action taken, CIA would suddenly sit there with billions of dollars worth of now worthless Chinese hardware.
It's good to be paranoid, don't get me wrong. All I'm saying is that arguing against Bitcoin is like being afraid of a certain brand of car just because the radio might be produced in China, and then go and buy a 100% Chinese car instead.