It is always possible to rent the majority Hash through renting the hash through paying out over-market-value pool rewards, cost of attack is proportional to mining reward.
If the total mining reward is $100k per day someone with that amount of money can set up a pool and buy it by paying that money in return for the POW in whatever form it is in.
I think this attack would be way too uncertain. This is why banksters choose to subvert Core and the communication channels.Also, using general purpose hw is inherently more decentralized, enabling small scale mining which would make pulling off something like that successfully a lot harder.
I agree that it is not a good attack, it is expensive and seems criminal from the outside, and does not ultimately give the ability to bend the coin in a desired direction.
General Purpose Hardware is by default more decentralized due to there not being monopolies or barriers to entry. This is a side point, but do you favor BCH changing the mining Algo?
The bch community looks at the algo change just like how the useful idiots of Coretards looked at the capacity increase back then. We'll see where this attitude leads...
Changing the algo is not conceivable for BCH. Getting consensus would be impossible. (context: Just fixing the DAA reads like a civil war story.) Build better faster on new turf.
Is there a known way to prevent ASICs from being made? I know Monero is trying by frequently changing or randomizing the algorithm itself, but there is still the problem of pools.
Easy. with pow algo updates if needed. Bitmain learned swiftly to not develop asics for monero after their first attempt to fuck up the network.pools are not much of a problem as they don't control the HW. ASICs inherently bring centralization pressure.
ASIC bring additional centralization pressure without imposing a cost on the maker of the ASIC, it rewards the ASIC maker, it makes centralization even more profitable.
A malicious pool can pay to rent the POW by whoever has the general purpose HW and do what they want with it, there is no need to actually own any hardware, ASIC or otherwise to get--Majority POW power, all it takes is paying above market rate to rent the hash in a pool. There is no way around that. However, there are non-51% attack reasons why ASICs are bad.And ASICs still has the rent problem + additional issues, so it is no better at some things and worse at other things.