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A comment on Electric currency could trash cash (1999). Parent comment

Re:Electric currency could trash cash (1999) by sillysaurus3 on Sunday December 24, 2017 @09:01PM (#16002244)
https://notehub.org/nz8d0

Basically, the longest chain is considered correct. And it has to work that way. It's why BTC is sybil-resistant.

So the attack is to get >51% of the hash power together, then mine in secret, creating a perfectly valid longer chain with a different tx history.

Publish it, and watch the world burn.

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Re:Electric currency could trash cash (1999) by mavdi on Sunday December 24, 2017 @09:38PM (#16002331)
I wonder what would be needed to gain 51% hash power? How many super computers would that be?
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Re:Electric currency could trash cash (1999) by gruez on Sunday December 24, 2017 @11:12PM (#16002598)
>How many super computers would that be?

you're asking the wrong question. mainly because bitcoin mining is done with ASICs and not general purpose computers. I would be surprised if the bitcoin network hashrate isn't higher than all the general purpose computing power in the world combined (converted to double SHA256 hash rate).

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