Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 218 posts

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#151

Post by smrtinsert »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #126
smrtinsert wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I don't think they have to, I'm just saying they could benefit. All a govt really has to do is outlaw it like Russia just did recently I believe.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#152

Post by maaku »

shachar wrote: post #84
waterlesscloud wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The attack started prior to the disclosure.

No, someone intentionally or accidentally used gox's poor handling of mutant transactions to extract double-payment from their customer support team. Gox blamed the bitcoin protocol for their own stupidity. Then after the press release, someone started a massive DoS attack against the bitcoin network. What happened to gox over the last couple of months is totally different from what what is going on right now.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#153

Post by maaku »

yetfeo wrote: post #145
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bitcoin developers "admitted" long ago that that behaviour is not quite optimal, and they are actually working on fixing it, albeit not quietly, because that would risk breaking bitcoin, as would doing so fast. It's a non-issue in so far as it does not prevent bitcoin from working as it should if you do implement things as the original client does it, it's only an issue because it's something you might easily get…

> It's a non-issue in so far as it does not prevent bitcoin from working as it should if you do implement things as the original client does it This is not correct. The original client gets one edge case wrong and it is this that is causing the issue with most of the exchanges that use it: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xm49o/due_to_activ...

Yes, but the bitcoind reference client fails safely: the child transactions are orphaned and no funds are lost. It's behavior alone is not exploitable.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#154

Post by nmcfarl »

branchan wrote: post #92
anigbrowl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are these things called safes...

Are you going to put the safe under your mattress? Or do you think a secure encrypted and password protected wallet stored on a tiny USB drive or SD card might be more secure?

I've had a significant number of USB drives, (and SD drives) get corrupted and simply stop working. This seems to happen with heavy use, but it also happens just sitting in a drawer untouched - for quite a bit of time. I'm not trust these suckers as the sole repository of things as valuable as my pictures, much less cash.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#155

Post by StavrosK »

dnautics wrote: post #136
waterlesscloud wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A true story- My grand-uncle, who had lived through the Great Depression, never trusted banks. So he buried a considerable amount of cash in the forest behind his house in mason jars (seriously!). When he died, my grand-aunt, who always thought he was being silly, went out in the woods and retrieved all the jars. The cash had rotted and deteriorated to the point that it was unspendable. However, she was able to work…

this is why we buy gold and silver.

Isn't the commission too expensive?

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#156

Post by MartinCron »

maaku wrote: post #150
ayanb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know that it was up above 800 before this started on last Friday, right?

Given all of the historic volatility, a drop from 800 to 600 must not feel abnormal to bitcoin investors. It could have been much, much worse, I guess?

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#157

Post by StavrosK »

lukifer wrote: post #55
brian_cloutier wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately in that respect Bitcoin is a bit of a one-trick pony. It relies on the honesty of a plurality of the network hash-strength. Systems which use the bitcoin mechanic need a lot of adoption before they become trustworthy.

In theory, applications can be built on top of the existing BitCoin blockchain, which is now well-guarded by many vested interests; some projects like MasterCoin [1] and Colored Coins [2] are attempting to do just this. But ultimately, you are correct: bootstrapping a new blockchain-based service requires assembling a community with enough hashing power to fend off 51% attackers. Time will tell how the experiment wil…

Does anybody know how on earth Bitcoin is supposed to scale in X years, when everyone needs to have every transaction ever made stored on their computer?

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#158

Post by maaku »

MartinCron wrote: post #156
maaku wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that it was up above 800 before this started on last Friday, right?

Given all of the historic volatility, a drop from 800 to 600 must not feel abnormal to bitcoin investors. It could have been much, much worse, I guess?

By my rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, something like $50 million dollars changed hands on Monday based on unsubstantiated fear, uncertainty, doubt, and outright lies. Volatility is one thing, market manipulation is another.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#159

Post by yetfeo »

maaku wrote: post #153
yetfeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a non-issue in so far as it does not prevent bitcoin from working as it should if you do implement things as the original client does it This is not correct. The original client gets one edge case wrong and it is this that is causing the issue with most of the exchanges that use it: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xm49o/due_to_activ...

Yes, but the bitcoind reference client fails safely: the child transactions are orphaned and no funds are lost. It's behavior alone is not exploitable.

Unfortunately it does not fail completely safely. The change transaction seems to still be available for coin selection and causes sends to fail. The getbalance command shows an incorrect balance due to counting the change address twice - once in the double spend and once in the accepted. The accounts system also has balances messed up which some merchant sites rely on.

It is not "lose money" exploitable (unless combined with social engineering) but is definitely "lose time, lose effort" exploitable.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#160

Post by Sheepshow »

pjc50 wrote: post #134
hangonhn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on. Isn't that just a matter of someone setting up a market and contracts for it? What you mean is that no one has setup bitcoins margins market yet right? Or am I misunderstanding something fundamental about BTC that prevents margins?

Transaction irreversability makes it a lot riskier, combined with the lack of support from the legal system. If you lend bitcoins to someone, and they run off with them, how do you recover your loss? Conversely, unlike stocks, you don't need a broker, so there's nobody who would take on that dealer role. Nobody has setup a "buy bitcoin on margin" service yet, and the first person to do so will lose a fortune to nonpa…

Hang on I almost read that as meaning bitcoin has less financial capability as fiat currency, which we all know is patently false because the premise of bitcoin is centered around an increased flexibility compared with fiat currency.
Post reply on HN