How Does the Availability of Specialized Mining Hardware (ASICs) Influence Attack Cost?
The availability of ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) increases the attack cost for well-established coins that use those ASICs, but can lower the cost for smaller, newer coins. For a coin like Bitcoin, the massive existing ASIC infrastructure makes it extremely expensive to buy or rent 51 percent of the total hashrate.
However, if a smaller coin uses the same ASIC algorithm, the existing pool of ASIC hashrate can be easily diverted or rented, making the attack cheaper and faster than if the attacker had to rely on less efficient GPU mining.
Glossar
ASICs
Architecture ⎊ Application-Specific Integrated Circuits represent a fundamental shift in computational hardware within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, diverging from the general-purpose nature of CPUs and GPUs to offer substantial gains in hash rate efficiency for specific cryptographic algorithms.
Availability
Latency ⎊ Availability, within cryptocurrency and derivatives, fundamentally concerns the speed at which a system can respond to requests, impacting order execution and arbitrage opportunities.
Specialized Mining Hardware
Mining ⎊ Specialized Mining Hardware, overwhelmingly dominated by ASICs, refers to integrated circuits custom-designed to execute a single, specific hashing algorithm with maximum computational efficiency.