You can rent hashing power on Nicehash, which currently has ~77MSol/s available for rent. I'm not 100% familiar with how the auction process works, but it looks like I could purchase 26MSol/s via a fixed contract for 1 hour for ~1BTC.
Am I misunderstanding something here, or can I maintain a 51% attack right now for ~$8k an hour. This can't be right.
It is risky, but it is right, that's exactly why took a while to happen. A relatively small botnet can overtake many smaller coins in hash power in no time, that's the hypothesis where I'd put the money.
It should come lower than that...rental price seems to be around 0.5 BTC/MSol/day, so the price for one hour would be 0.5 * 26 / 24 = 0.54 BTC, roughly $4k
Am I misunderstanding something here, or can I maintain a 51% attack right now for ~$8k an hour. This can't be right.