Wall Street set to pour money into Bitcoin (NY Times)

[The Dharma Bum]

lol you need to command 51% of the computing power that is used to mine, that's the definition of the 51% attacks. If 51% of the mining power is consolidated to one controller, that is where the risk lies. My point is that you would need botnets to take over literally billions of computers to get to 51%. The computing power used to mine bit coin has become so large that frankly individual PC's etc are no longer a relevant portion of the market. All the real work is being done by professionals, with professional rigs, that are not going to just start diverting bit coins away from the rig controller.

Again, even if this were possible WHY would anyone do this? It's like you haven't thought this out. Why would you spend billions to get the computing power to take over the BTC network? If you ever got 51% the whole currency would collapse, and you just wasted billions for no return. It simply does not make economic sense unless you are willing to knowingly spend huge sums of capital to destroy the network...for whatever reason. No one is going to do that. Even if a malicious hacking group took over 51%, they would RARLEY if ever exploit it because it would destroy the market. It would be kept a secret, and may the could siphon small amounts of money, but if every became knowing someone breached the 51% the currency would collapse and so would any opportunity to make a profit from the exploit. haha, thats exactly why no one went for the exploit 6 months ago when it was MUCH MUCH easier to do.

EVEN THEN!!!! Assuming this is practical and assuming there is some idiot who wants to destroy the BTC market for no gain...there are dozens and dozens of other crypto currencies that do not have this exploit. It BTC goes to shit because of fears about this 51% attack, then litecoin, or name coin, or another currency very similar to BTC already on the market without such a flaw will SKYROCKET. This is why you diversify.

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

Those are cold storage for obvious reasons. You would literally have to build a processing bank equivalent to 33% of the processing power currently used + what you would be adding to the total sum.

Probably the US government could pull it off, but I don't see anyone else having that kind of resources to just burn down for no good reason or benefit. And I think the US will adopt crypto so not really a concern to me.

[The Dharma Bum]

Yea, and even the government would never do that because they could just outlaw it without going through all of that expense. lol literally a non-issue

[exploited]

[Stratego]

[Stratego]

Cryptocurrency in its current state is like allowing privatized money printing.

[Leviathan]

[exploited]

Jesus H. Christ.

Me: "This flaw works regardless of the size of the mining pool. This flaw wasn't revealed until a month ago, which is why it hasn't happened yet. You could be mining 0.2% of the total amount of BitCoins and it is still profitable. This flaw works now. It doesn't require 51%. It doesn't require 22%. It doesn't require 8%. It requires you to simply implement the exploit, and it works. Here is the evidence."

You: "51%! 51% 51%!!!!!!~~~~"

lolwut?