Quote from: portpho on May 17, 2011, 01:46:46 AM

Let's say you just keep buying FPGAs or GPUs until you have over 50% of the network and can dominate it.

How many millions would it cost right now?

I'm curious just how rich you'd have to be to take over bitcoin.

Could you do it with $10 million as a small business owner?

Could a hedge fund CEO do it with $100 million?

Could Zuckerberg do it with $1 billion?

Could the NSA or DOD do it with $10 billion?

How about the Chinese government?

Basically, how many people in the world have the power to fuck over bitcoin if they wanted to?

The network currently is about 2,000 Giga hashes at max.

It costs about $1 per Million hashes of computer power (for decent quality parts). 1000M hashes = 1 Giga hash.

You would need basically 1000, $1000 dollar computers. Total cost would be about 1 Million dollars would do the trick JUST for computer hardware.

Now if you didn't already have a facility to keep the computers, I imagine that would be in 100's of thousands or even a million or two for a data center capable of running that many computers.

Or one could potentially be leased. I would say the minimum upfront cost to control over 50% of the network would be around 1.5M dollars.