>>60797495
>what’s the difference between spending billions to buy up a pos coin and spending billions to buy/rent enough computers to take over a pow coin?
Logistics.
>The Monero network currently has a hashrate of approximately 5-6 GH/s. To perform a 51% attack, a state actor would need to control more than half of the network's hashrate. This means they would need to acquire ~ 3 GH/s of computing power.
>For a state-sponsored attack, the scale would be immense. A single high-end CPU like the AMD Threadripper 3990X can produce around 54 kilohashes per second (kH/s). To reach the required 3 GH/s (or 3,000,000 kH/s) for a 51% attack, an attacker would need over 55,500 of these CPUs. With each CPU costing approximately $4,000, the total hardware cost would be well over $222 million. This is a conservative estimate and doesn't account for the cost of motherboards, RAM, power supplies, cooling systems, and physical infrastructure.
>The most significant and recurring cost of a 51% attack is electricity. A single AMD Threadripper 3990X consumes about 280 watts. To power the required 55,500 CPUs, the total power consumption would be over 15.5 megawatts. This is a significant amount of power, comparable to a small city.
>Assuming a conservative average industrial electricity rate of $0.10 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), the hourly electricity cost would be over $1,550. For a sustained attack of even a single day, the electricity cost would be approximately $37,200. For a week-long attack, this would be over $260,000, and for a month, it would be over $1 million.
>The total logistical costs for a state-sponsored 51% attack on Monero would therefore be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars in initial hardware expenditure, with millions more in monthly electricity costs for a sustained effort.
And that's just @ the current hashrate. With a much larger active user base (millions) mining when called upon, these costs would go up by countless orders of magnitude.