Quote from: deepceleron on November 11, 2011, 02:27:10 PM

2016 blocks = 100800 BTC. At the start of a new difficulty, a dedicated agency like the NSA could probably mine 100,000 BTC in a day. Keeping the same hashrate they could mine another 100,000 in four days at the new difficulty they set. If you doubt this, remember the NSA has their own chip fab...they might have even tested their tech, search for "mystery miner"...

Looks like mystery miner only mined a max of 500 GH:

.. which is now less than 5% of the global hashrate of 10 TH. I'm guessing this is someone at Pixar or some other render farm.

To mine an entire difficulty adjustment in a day would take 14 times the current network speed of, or 140 TH, which is 280 times the mystery miner's peak hashrate. We're safe from this mystery miner, but it doesn't say anything about the NSA, who does have the resources to

I'm guessing most of the NSA thinks bitcoin is cool - they're just a bunch of crypto-geeks, after all. It's about what the top brass thinks: is bitcoin an emerging threat that should be taken out, or is it a technological breakthrough that should be nurtured, not fucked with? My guess is the latter, but not for reasons of the public good. Rather, with their intel capabilities, the public blockchain could be a boon for their investigative teams.