Re:Founders Fund Makes Bet on Bitcoin
by kolinko on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @02:07PM
(#16054424)
It's not as simple.
Some networks use other hashing methods, so just comparing hash to hash is pointless - if anything, you could compare instructions per second, not hashes per second.
Then, for certain hash methods, GPUs/FPGAs/ASICS give no speedup, so even if there are far fever instructions per second, they would be just as expensive to attack.
Also, there are POS/DPOS, and other proof of sth networks, where it's not really about hashes, but about other resources - again, cost of attack would be a better metric here, not hashes.
But most importantly - after a certain point, a network attack is so unlikely that additional security matters much less than other system properties, like speed, ability to execute smart contracts efficiently, or the ecosystem of startups around it.
Re:Founders Fund Makes Bet on Bitcoin
by DennisP on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @02:14PM
(#16054505)
Exactly. Since the point of PoW is to make 51% attacks expensive, the best measure is how expensive it would be. Ethereum is approximately equal to Bitcoin on this measure.
Some networks use other hashing methods, so just comparing hash to hash is pointless - if anything, you could compare instructions per second, not hashes per second.
Then, for certain hash methods, GPUs/FPGAs/ASICS give no speedup, so even if there are far fever instructions per second, they would be just as expensive to attack.
Also, there are POS/DPOS, and other proof of sth networks, where it's not really about hashes, but about other resources - again, cost of attack would be a better metric here, not hashes.
But most importantly - after a certain point, a network attack is so unlikely that additional security matters much less than other system properties, like speed, ability to execute smart contracts efficiently, or the ecosystem of startups around it.