Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Surely this isn't a 51% attack on bitcoins, right?
by
jjiimm_64
on 12/10/2011, 22:19:57 UTC
The overall security of the network is not really under threat, since 10 Terahashes per second isn't a mark reachable by any known network or supercomputer.  This does highlight the risks to the bitcoin network at large associated with pool mining.  Concentrating the mining to a single server for the purpose of income stability also creates central points of failure/attack.  I don't mine in pools for this exact reason, and don't think anyone with any substantial hashing ability should do so.  10K small lights are harder to shoot out than a dozen really big ones.


This brings me to another point..  in a conversation with a colleague he said " What if IBM or some other entity with tons of computing power bring it online all at once?"  He mentioned something on the order of "3 trillion teraflops/sec" or something that one company has.  

I did some rough calculations of the TFlops of of all the vid cards encompassing 11Thash.  I think I came to about 100,000 on our network.

I know that teraflops does not equate directly to hashing power, but I would like to know if anyone knows of the biggest competition to our network?