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I don't think we're likely to see it used for torrent poisoning if it takes 110 GPUs 1 year to compute a collision - the electricity costs for such a rig would be enormous. 110 GPUs * about 300 W each = about 290 thousand kilowatt hours to break. Electricity costs of at least 10s of thousands of dollars. For a single torrent. You better be damn confident that those torrenters are going to go buy your product and that they won't just go to the next torrent down the list.

That said, attacks only get better, so it could happen at some point in the future and it's probably worth switching the hash function used sooner rather than later.



Malware infecting a few hundred beefy-gpu PCs isn't implausible.


"That said, attacks only get better"

In the case of MD5 collision research, initially it took a cluster of PS4 months to find one. But a few years later a laptop can find a collision instantaneously. So yeah, expect rapid improvement of SHA1 collision feasibility.




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