I know alt-coin supporters and specifically Monero supporters are ecstatic over a wiggle in their value, but there are larger problems such visibility raises. Without getting into technical details, lets just focus on the collective hashpower of the Monero network.
http://minexmr.com/pools.htmlThere's a graph near the bottom that shows the average collective hashing power of the major pools -
24.1 Megahashes/sec. This is a laughable minority, which brings to fore another potential threat. Lets say you're law enforcement or some other actor. All of these people doing things you perceive as illegal have adopted a poorly-defended alt-coin as their method of trade
(Citation needed - extremely dubious).
So, as a LEO you work on how to disrupt this network.
If this was Bitcoin, well, you have a lot of work to do if you're trying to be a majority miner and make your chain the "correct" one. Bitcoin's collective hashpower stands at an estimated
1,798,050 Terahashes/sec, magnitudes higher than a paltry 24.1 that Monero offers.
Guess which is easier to attack?
The point is, I'm extremely doubtful that anyone would jump on the Monero train and not have their network severely disrupted by law enforcement if it indeed became the "currency of the darknet". Its simply too small and too poorly secured.
What do they gain from such an attack against Monero?
They do not learn anything about the transactions from mining, and how to determine what transactions to attack? The most they could do would be to mine empty blocks and delay transactions by two minutes or so.
This sort of attack is not effective verses block-chains where the transactions are private, not public.
In fact they could already be doing this, no one would know, because it wouldn't matter.
And comparing the hash rate of a CPU mined chain to an ASIC mined chain is a false comparison. You should know better, sir. FUD rejected.
If the majority of bitcoin wallets implemented ring-signatures and required the use of BIP47 addresses (aka stealth), then Bitcoin could stop worrying about this sort of thing also, but too many do not care about their privacy until after it is violated, (and they find out).