Is the part about it costing $25,000 Million to "trick the network" true any more, given the advent of ASICs into the mining arena? User 67117 on BTC Guild is currently processing 6,348.98 GH/s, or roughly 10% of the entire mining network. While not cheap, it appears it could be relatively affordable to hit the 50% mark.
The difficulty auto-adjusts to keep supply constant, so market forces will drive the cost of mining a bitcoin to just below the value of a bitcoin. Hence, ASICs should have no major long-term effect on the difficulty of taking over the network.
Arguably they'll even make it a bit harder since you'd need specialized hardware, and couldn't just buy up a bunch of GPU EC2 instances on a whim and take over the bitcoin network.
As of today, you can't buy the ASICs because they don't exist, so I guess it's true (plus minus a lot of millions as it is a rough estimate). But it will be a lot cheaper very soon for a brief period of time before miners up the arms race [-- see reply below for clarification --]
This is incorrect. Avalon has shipped a number of Asic units over the past 2-3 weeks, as confirmed by several trusted members of the Bitcoin community, including by one of the core developers of the Bitcon client.
My understanding (and it could be wrong) is that ASICMiner has made their own asics for their own use. They are not selling them.
Their business model is that they have a sub-pool in a larger mining pool, and they financed their operation by selling shares (denominated in Bitcoin). The shares pay out weekly dividends, based on the awards the mining pool provides to them.
There's a couple (very, very tiny) bitcoin denominated stock exchanges, and on some of them you can buy ASICMiner "passthroughs". These represent shares in ASICMiner that are controlled in large blocks by an individual. That individual passes through the dividends to the passthrough shareholders, minus a small management fee.
It's an elaborate system, but I guess money finds a way, even when it's bitcoin.
That is correct. ASICMINER went through an informal IPO, selling at the time the equivalent of $200k or so of shares. With these funds plus the project's creators own investments, they designed a custom 130nm ASIC. http://bitcoinmagazine.com/asicminer-starts-hashing/
Sorry, I didn't express myself properly. AsicMiner does have ASICs, and Avalon also has shown them to work. All I'm saying is that a government or individual can't buy today enough ASICs off-the-shelf to conduct the 50% attack.
