Screenshot of Bitcoin Botnet
- Thread starter conjamuk
- Start date
Is it in a big room where you can dissipate a lot of heat?
If so, I'd buy up all the old mining rigs that are destined to hit eBay this year and use those... The video cards in them used to go for $1,000+ each but will now go for a mere fraction of that as ASICs start to displace them.
I'll be working on a big, in-depth How-to-mine-bitcoin post in the next couple of weeks.
Couldn't the govt just start mining bit coins themselves? For example, take the new data center in Utah the NSA is building:
Utah Data Center - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Switch that baby on to mining bit coins, and wouldn't bit coins became virtually impossible for anyone else to obtain?
It is available in my basement where I can dissipate as much heat I want to.
How much you think I can expect to make by investing ( let's assume 5k or 10k grands ) in equipment with free electricity ?
Extremely unlikely.
What's called for there is vast amounts of storage. Think of a stack of hard drives up to the moon.
What Miners, especially ASICs do is process vast amounts of the exact same equation over and over again infinitum... No flexibility whatsoever... Couldn't use notepad or calc on these things, they're extremely narrow-minded and don't need but 30 MB of hard drive space.
Well, we'd have to wildly speculate how much you can grab those used rigs for, but let's assume you can get enough to mine a Terrahash per hour with that money...
According to the mining calculator here: Bitcoin mining profitability calculator | Bitcoinx
Not paying anything for electricity, and adjusting the difficulty up (x1.5) to account for the competition from the first ASICs, it looks like you'd earn 76.76 BTC a day, or $3309 USD/d at today's exchange rate... But of course that will go down as the ASICs become common. Perhaps by christmas or next spring.
Not bad. But you gotta find the rigs in that budget and probably buy some big fans to push all the heat out of the room.
Edit: Oh yeah; how strong/powerful is your power supply? We'd be talking about a room full of fans and servers each guzzling Kilowatts all day long...
Well, I'm quite certain the US govt has some decent processing power at its disposal, and could put a few thousand of those ASICs to shame rather easily. If they flooded the Bitcoin market with processing power, wouldn't that virtually render Bitcoin useless for everyone else? If yes, then it's just a matter of time. Once the missing tax revenue becomes more than what it'd cost to render Bitcoin useless for everyone, that's probably what they will do.
They'd need ASICs to fight ASICs. We're not talking like 2 or even 10 of their fast processors equalling 1 asic processor here... More like 10 million to 1. Parallel processing like this is many orders of magnitude more powerful at solving the equation.
I guess in the short term, if Bernanke & friends were really interested in fighting bitcoin RIGHT NOW, then sure, they could produce the asics themselves and get a jump on us RIGHT NOW.
We'd know the day they control 51% of the network though. BTC would be compromised and we'd all know it.
The problem of the 51% attack is something designed from the very start, and is really the only achilles heel of bitcoin. Some people have even done their Ph.d Thesis on this very subject, although the one I saw was only concerned about high-end video cards back then:
attack - How much would it cost for a government to undermine Bitcoins? - Bitcoin Beta - Stack Exchange
But don't underestimate how many miners are out there and how many of the world's high-end video cards are in their possession. It was the norm for Gamers to go a Full year before getting their hand on the latest, greatest Radeon cards because btc miners had them all backordered.
These ASICs serve no other purpose, so we'll be getting 100% of them for a while unless someone else makes them independantly for the government... And don't forget, the existing pool of video-card hashing won't be going away all at once, it'll phase out as ASICs phase in, so there's never going to be a dip in the hash rate, only a climb.
If so then they have exactly two chances that I can see:
1. Right this minute before we have the ASIC power.
2. The day they've figured out quantum computing.
It's all about the leaps in processing power... Without taking advantage of one of those, they'll be fighting an uphill battle against thousands of miners around the world, and of course all of the tens of thousands of USERS too that run the client! -This is peer-to-peer afterall.
https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v2.4-SHA1-1d5951f6a04dd5a287ac925da4e626870ee58d60.html
Brain wallet, just remember a password, as long as nobody uses a rubber hose or you die, your bitcoin is safe.
Download that site from github, use it offline.
I'm just going to take a wild guess here, but I doubt the NSA does advanced cryptology using standard 2.4ghz CPUs. And I'm just going to take another wild guess here, and say the technology the US govt has available to them puts ASICs to shame.
Why would the govt use all those resources just to spend bitcoins from someone else's wallet? If that happened anyways the bitcoin supporters will just switch to a new hashing and key-signing algorithm, set a rollback date, and then continue as before the attack.
Oooooh that's nice... The closest thing I'd seen to that is Instawallet, which doesn't have any of those power features. Good share!
Your guesses would most likely be good ones. But you're thinking too linearly.
The race to process a single equation is NOT a race for more processing power. These ASIC chips are about as powerful as the chip in your 1982 Tandy football game... They only do one single thing but were designed from the microscopic level to do that one thing extremely efficiently.
I kinda doubt they have a computer now that could churn out 1 Terrahash of bitcoin mining... If they do, it's a room full of high-end gaming cards... And what the hell would the g-men have those for??
Luke, the important thing with bitaddress is to save a copy (it's all HTML + JS), then you know it hasn't been tampered with.
THE ASIC chips have a large number of transistors running at decent speeds, but their circuitry is very specific, just for hashing, much more powerful than anything from the 80s though.
THE ASIC chips have a large number of transistors running at decent speeds, but their circuitry is very specific, just for hashing, much more powerful than anything from the 80s though.
