LINK TO WIRED ARTICLE: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

Im dont have a degree in computer science and couldnt do any calculations even if we had real numbers about just how powerful the NSA's combined hashing power is, but given the scale and rate of development of massively parallel computing power the NSA has developed for code breaking, and given that they employ thousands of the smartest and best programmers and cryptographers in the world, and given that they have an unlimited budget, its seems obvious to me that the US Gov could have the NSA 51% attack any coin at any time. They have machines which make your Avalon look like a Casio watch from 1980.

Sorry for the downer, and hey at least Bitcoins have bounced back a little today. But to me this seems to be by far the biggest threat to Bitcoin and all the altcoins. Sorry if this has been posted or discussed here before, I did a quick search but didnt find much.

"the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop."