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A comment on Bitcoin security model: trust by computation.

Re:Bitcoin security model: trust by computation by platz on Friday February 21, 2014 @12:08PM (#7277934)
I think Andreas Antonopoulos said in a video that it takes about half a billion dollars to fool the blockchain for 10 minutes. Even though that's a lot, if certain actors (state or otherwise) got interested enough, wouldn't they manipulate the chain at critical moments for their advantage?
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Re:Bitcoin security model: trust by computation by alwillis on Friday February 21, 2014 @01:42PM (#7278568)
>I think Andreas Antonopoulos said in a video that it takes about half a billion dollars to fool the blockchain for 10 minutes. Even though that's a lot, if certain actors (state or otherwise) got interested enough, wouldn't they manipulate the chain at critical moments for their advantage?

That's out-of-date now; the total computation power of the Bitcoin network is 25,824,939.77 GH/s. It would probably take a lot more than $500 million now.

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Re:Bitcoin security model: trust by computation by gwern on Friday February 21, 2014 @03:26PM (#7279191)
It might take $500m to buy the hardware at current prices, but I'm sure you could bribe the ghash.io admins with well under $500m to hire their pool for a few minutes.
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