As you may know, the hashing operation behind bitcoin is essentially the same that’s used to crack passwords. If you have a mining farm that can make a lot of bitcoins, you also have the hardware to open up, for example, encrypted databases.

So, bitcoin has no use, but states are absolutely interested in a computational arms race. That’s why I’m so intrigued by China’s turn on bitcoin. I saw some destruction of shitty GPU rigs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if China is just steering themselves out of bitcoin and organizing their mining capabilities. I’m thinking of that hydro electric dam, probably some secret ASICs too.

A player as big as that could take advantage of a time like when the difficulty doubles again and miners drop out, or some other opportunity in order to perform a double spend attack or just splinter the blockchain into a confusing mess.

Name a better targeted, more humane weapon. “Thousands of 36 year old white men are forced to stand in line to receive their temporary ape assistance. This aggression will not stand.”

    • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Generally not, and besides, Bitcoin mining uses a double sha256 hash, so mining hardware is useless for cracking even sha256-hashed passwords.

      • learntocod [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Hardware than can compute lots of hashes quickly (like a gpu) can be used to crack encryption

            • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty

              Set it to "all time" and "logarithmic scale." In 2013, ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) took over from GPUs and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) as the hardware used by Bitcoin miners, and the network difficulty soared to heights that left GPUs unable to mine even remotely profitably.

              • blight [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                i was under the impression that miners were buying up all the GPUs which was what was driving up GPU prices, but is that unrelated? if you have cheap or free electricity, does efficiency even matter? and it's not like crypto people are particularly rational

                • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  GPU mining is still a thing, just not for Bitcoin specifically (they're primarily used to mine Ethereum, unless some GPU-mineable altcoin spikes in price enough to make it worth shifting to that one).

                  And as for cheap or free electricity, power costs are actually a fairly small portion of total costs; much more painful are taxes and the truly big one, hardware costs. Hardware, after all, has a limited useful lifespan (and much more so when you're cranking it at full load all the time), and since difficulty tends to trend up except when the price crashes to truly extreme lows, it also produces diminishing returns over time (unless crypto prices rise, of course, but miners can't afford to bank on that, particularly given the need to cash out some of the proceeds immediately to pay for power and taxes, which are assessed using the value of the crypto as of the time of receipt).

          • learntocod [they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            That’s when I stopped paying attention. Sha-256 ASICS would still be useful for some cracking, especially older stuff they might have laying around to bang on. Also, I would be surprised if any state’s natsec cracking clusters could really bang out some sha-256s if they wanted to. If your adversary duct tapes their dick to the blockchain, why not shoot your computer cannon at it if the opportunity arises?