Wonder if the math will ever work out such that collision mining is more profitable than actual mining ... Math is above my pay grade

The future data center abundance is never going to materialize into cheap compute this way.

optimism

Can't, its just diminishing returns for attackers... even the latter CC models had sub-optimal entropy so now there's a bounty on those mid-range bits which incentivizes deeper and deeper seed generation

Cost of generating those somewhat higher entropy seeds isn't much of a deterrent, will be done with bot-nets and malware just as mining has been at points

bitcoin

At what point can this attack be considered over?

theonceler

Can't, its just diminishing returns for attackers... even the latter CC models had sub-optimal entropy so now there's a bounty on those mid-range bits which incentivizes deeper and deeper seed generation

Cost of generating those somewhat higher entropy seeds isn't much of a deterrent, will be done with bot-nets and malware just as mining has been at points