Research shows: Large-scale use of ASIC mining machines can increase the cost of 51% attacks by 2,000 times

According to Cointelegraph, at the Unitize conference on July 10, Rod Garratt of the University of California, Santa Barbara, presented a research report he co-authored with Maarten van Oordt of the Bank of Canada. The report investigates the different costs of a 51% attack based on the type of equipment used to protect the Bitcoin network. The study shows that security can be greatly improved by simply switching the network to 100% ASIC mining. The main reason is that ASIC miners have little use and value other than Bitcoin mining, and attackers cannot get much return from selling equipment used for attacks. Therefore, in order to carry out a profitable attack, they will need to double spend a large amount of Bitcoin, which will greatly increase the cost and escalate the difficulty. The study estimates that if 100% of ASIC miners are in place, it will take 157,000 to 530,000 Bitcoins to attack and make a profit after the next halving.