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Nope. They don't have enough computing power for a 51% attack anymore. Until they build their own bitcoin mining ASICs at least. The network is running at nearly 1 petaHash / second, with each hash performing ~1,300 32bit adds. So, in very apples to oranges terms, the network is secured by 1,300 petaFLOPS (and rising at ~2.5% PER DAY). The sum total FLOPS of the top500 supercomputer list from June 2013 is 223.6 petaFLOPS.

Right; actually half were generated by the end of 2010 or so. The difficulty level, the amount of computation required to get a Bitcoin, was very low until the end of 2009. It has climbed by 7 orders of magnitude since then. That's why the people who set up Bitcoin have most of the Bitcoins.

Bitcoin mining is barely profitable now. Bitcoin "difficulty" self-adjusts so that the number of new Bitcoins created per unit time remains constant. Currently, that number is about 6*50*24*30 = 216K bitcoins per month, worth about $900K/month. Every few years, the number of coins created per unit time drops, so that eventually there will be a fixed number of coins, 21 million. Around the end of 2012, half of all Bitcoins that will ever be created will have been created, and the production rate drops in half, according to a schedule built into all the programs that accept Bitcoins.

All Bitcoin "miners" are thus in competition for a fixed and declining amount of revenue. Many have already dropped out, as can be seen from the hash rate statistics. In areas with high electricity costs, even running existing hardware doesn't pay. Buying new hardware in bulk was popular in early 2011, but not any more.

Of course, if you can find some sucker to provide a GPU and pay for the power, the economics looks better. Hence the Bitcoin trojan. The concept of a VC-funded Bitcoin trojan is a bit much. Putting in $500K to suck money out of the system might pay off in the short term, but it's not something that can grow. If you put in $5M, you'd be competing with yourself for a finite revenue stream. Also, running a background GPU job on anything that isn't plugged in will produce some very angry users as their batteries die.

If you think mere rarity will make Bitcoins grow in value, go on eBay and see what collectable stuff from the Franklin Mint (once a big maker of "collectables") goes for.

I built a bitcoin mining machine two weeks ago. There's more you should know that TFA only hints at. First, check out these graphs. The total CPU power competing for the 50 BTC generated every 10 minutes has increased 10X every quarter for 6 quarters, and soon, it will drop to 30 BTC every 10 minutes. If you think you can make money given that bitcoin value is flat or falling, while you have to split pay outs with more miners every day, well... ha ha! That's a good one.

That said, I'm a happy miner. I was looking for an excuse to build a gaming machine anyway, and I was able to do a decent machine for about $430, with an HD5770 doing just over 200 MH/s. Even if I earn nothing for mining, I'm still glad I built the machine. I needed another Ubuntu server anyway, and the mining only loads the CPU 1%. Next year, I plan to put Windoz on it and give the machine to my son. I can hardly wait to see what he thinks of the graphics.

It is certainly true that early adopters have been rewarded. I do not think these inequities will be more shocking than those in the real world.

Look at this graph of the mining activity and difficulty over time (log scale). Activity and difficulty have increased a millionfold from what they were throughout 2009; if we figure there are about 10 million miners now (that's probably an overestimate) that means there were just about 10 peoples back then, mining the 3 million bitcoins created in 2009. That's just 10 people owning half the bitcoins created so far, or 1/7 the amount that can ever be created.

Inequality in current real-world economies has gotten pretty extreme, but Bitcoin makes them look like socialist utopias by comparison.

You think I am only referring to this: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ which is at least exponential and will only go down if bitcoin loses its popularity (and "value" obviously). What I was also referring to, and is more important because it is by design, is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time.png.

Very funny that you should compare it to e-gold. E-gold is an even more old-fashioned currency that our modern fiat money, since it was backed by gold bullion. But even so it was heavily involved in fraud, and that's why they were closed down and pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

I know somebody that has a rig that does 1700 million hashes per second and uses 1000 watts (using 4 ATI 6970's). If you plug it into here, you'll find he nets an average of $1450.89 per month considering electricity at $0.15 per kwh

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

I decided against doing it myself because the miner growth rate is so high right now. It's around 5% a day, which means if it continues at the same rate, in 3 months it'll be more like $170 per month for his rig.

Here are some charts showing the growth rate: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/