Massive attack requires massive resources.
Maybe foreign government? Heck, domestic government?
Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
121–130 of 218 posts
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#122I have no proof what so ever, this is just a conjecture: there are powerful government and private entities who profit from manipulating the current monetary system. I have to ask: is it unreasonable that state actors would try to crash Bitcoin out of self interest?
One issue with this is do we even have any evidence somebody can reliably short Bitcoin at the level a government would want to? It seems hard to believe a government could do more damage to Bitcoin than just declaring that it's banned in their country, anybody using it gets {significant penalty in their country}.
Governments don't have to short it. Pulling money from digital currencies back into government controlled ones seems like benefit enough.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#123The most fascinating thing about this whole process is watching the btc community try to keep it moving. As someone who doesn't know anything about digital currencies, this seems like one of the first major tests of an philosophy of unregulation.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#124It's interesting to watch actually, submit a transaction to the network at the moment and there's a rogue node that will mess with the padding of the signatures and rebroadcast it faster than the original. It confuses the reference client into duplicate display, which is what Gox is relying on for the failed/success display. That they're winning races over the normal related transactions isn't that unnatural as the t…
There's also a story here about responsible disclosure. People are making the case (and I tend to agree) that Gox should have contacted the other exchanges in private to discuss this problem before going public with it. There's a very good chance this widespread attack is a direct result of Gox's announcement.
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Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a non issue, honestly. This issue was known about as early as 2011. You can only modify non-essential pieces of the transaction, but it does change the overall transaction hash. These poorly coded exchanges were looking for an exact hash match to pop up on the block chain, instead of looking for the deposit/address. The actual security of the system is not really impacted at all, and the core Bitcoin clients co…
> You can only modify non-essential pieces of the transaction, but it does change the overall transaction hash. That's the thing I don't get. If one is going to allow non-essential changes, shouldn't one _not_ include those data in the hash? Alternatively, should one simply not allow changes, period? I've not read the Bitcoin paper, just summaries (been too busy, and it's outside my area); perhaps there's a good reas…
The important bits are signed with an ownership signature, and the whole transaction is hashed to be added to the block chain. As long as you don't trust the transaction hash (which isn't designed to be secure) you won't have an issue.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
One issue with this is do we even have any evidence somebody can reliably short Bitcoin at the level a government would want to? It seems hard to believe a government could do more damage to Bitcoin than just declaring that it's banned in their country, anybody using it gets {significant penalty in their country}.
Governments don't have to short it. Pulling money from digital currencies back into government controlled ones seems like benefit enough.
So the claim is they'd be doing something like these attacks? I just struggle to believe that's the most effective way for them to deal with the problem, when the US Government coming out with "Bitcoin is illegal due to {plausible sounding terrorism story}, possession is a felony" would utterly tank it overnight.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I don't condone this kind of abuse, that's exactly what I'm preparing for. If BTC drops below $500, I'm buying more.
If BTC drops, below 500 or less, why exactly 500? Why not wait for 400? I'm new to this but maybe we need to make it easier to move money from wallet to wallet, from wallet to "hard" currencies and back, etc. Right now it's practically impossible to get verified on an exchange, get money out, paying anywhere with it, etc. You are lucky if you have a bitcoin ATM where the rate is probably not that good but at least yo…
Mycelium (Android wallet) lets you import and export private keys. I wouldn't know if it's grandma compatible (mine doesn't even use computers), but seems fairly simple to me if you understand the basic concepts.
To build something easier, you'd probably need to "hide" Bitcoin and just present a balance and a simple way of associating "contacts" (with enclosed addresses).
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really true? Could a botnet not conceivably make transactions out of your wallet? Doesn't the distributed ledger have tentacles reaching under your mattress?
http://learncryptography.com/51-attack/ I guess it would be possible.
No, a botnet can't ever achieve 51%. One modern ASIC rig is equivalent to a few thousand average CPU+GPU computers that make up a botnet.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#129It's interesting to watch actually, submit a transaction to the network at the moment and there's a rogue node that will mess with the padding of the signatures and rebroadcast it faster than the original. It confuses the reference client into duplicate display, which is what Gox is relying on for the failed/success display. That they're winning races over the normal related transactions isn't that unnatural as the t…
Also worth noting is the fact that the Bitcoin Price Index has been massively resilient to all the bad "news" thats been pouring in this month. It has been consistently hovering around the 670-700 mark.
I wish I didn't buy at $900 and at least would've sold soon after, otherwise I'd buy some now. These events where some pretty major bug is found in Bitcoin are great opportunities to buy Bitcoin at a "low price" (as low as you can get in that moment in Bitcoin's history). I'm not worried about the bugs themselves because I know they will be fixed.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
No coin is immune to this. What, you thought other coins had their own code? Nope, they are all just a copy/paste of Bitcoin's code. Specifically Dogecoin was "coded" (copy/pasted) in a Friday night, according to it's founder. So I don't know what you were expecting.
Just curiosity. I thought they copied the code from Litecoin and I was not sure if in any of the intermediate steps someone decided to fix this. It will be interesting to see how each developer set and community handle this problem (and the future problems). Disclaimer: I don’t own BTC or DOGE (or LTC or any other virtual currency).
There isn't really any development team comparable to that of Bitcoin in a different coin. Things that get fixed in Bitcoin are not fixed in other coins. But if another coin happens to fix something, it will be fixed in Bitcoin too.
Typically a copycoin will only have the same fixes as Bitcoin depending on when they decided to copy it. But then they will invariably lag behind.