ASIC Attacks

Two opportunities for an ASIC attacks exist in this protocol - during partition, and cheating timeouts in Finality. For ASIC attacks during Partitions, the Rate at which bonds are unstaked is non-linear, and for networks with large partitions the rate is orders of magnitude slower then expected gains from an ASIC attack. 20 For ASIC attacks during Finality, the vulnerability allows for byzantine validators who have a bonded stake to wait for confirmations from other nodes and inject their votes with a collaborating PoH generator. The PoH generator can then use its faster ASIC to generate 500ms worth of hashes in less time, and allow for network communication between the PoH generator and the collaborating nodes. But, if the PoH generator is also byzantine, there is no reason why the byzantine generator wouldn't have communicated the exact counter when they expect to insert the failure. This scenario is no different than a PoH generator and all the collaborators sharing the same identity and having a single combined stake and only using 1 set of hardware.