Quote from: smooth on July 23, 2014, 09:49:34 PM

Quote from: Roy Badami on July 23, 2014, 09:24:28 PM

Thoughts, anyone?

I don't think you can trust the ASICs in the way you suggest. The ones already delivered and paid for in the hands of customers, perhaps. But chip production costs are usually quite low, especially for mature processes with high yield. Manufacturers constrain their production volume in order to achieve a high selling price (or if they are mining themselves, to maximize profitability by not driving up difficulty) and recoup NRE.

But consider the same economics from the point of view of a rogue ASIC-developer. He can run off 10x or 100x as many ASICs at only modestly increased cost, and then use them to attack the network instead of for mining.

Yes, indeed, you could be right. I've certainly considered that scenario. But isn't the CPU scenario worse? There's a huge pool of CPUs already out there and assembled into machines.

Quote

The only real protection from this risk seems to be that it is usually more profitable to mine than attack.

[...]

Satoshi said something along these lines in his paper. [...]

Yes indeed. Satoshi's real genius was to create a system with the right incentives, at all levels.

As I said, this is still a "thought in progress". But I worry less about the evil SHA-256 ASIC plant then about the evil NSA CPU cluster. I think there are enough producers churning out SHA-256 ASICs as fast as they can (certainly including many we don't know about, that are just mining for their own benefit rather than selling miners) that the attack you describe is actually becomeing pretty unlikely.

roy