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Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

coindesk.com

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Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#191

Post by oscilloscope »

vidarh wrote: post #149
steveklabnik wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5th largest cryptocurrency with more transations/day than every other one put together isn't exactly small...

More like 4th, given that Ripples can't be mined, is controlled by a single entity, most of the existing coins are not freely circulating, and the transaction volume is consistently so tiny that it looks very much like the price is intentionally manipulated to make the coin look desirable.

More like 3rd. In the 8 hours since vidarh posted this, Dogecoin surpassed the Peercoin market cap. The 24h trading volume of Dogecoin is also nearly 6x that of Peercoin right now.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#192

Post by patio11 »

ck2 wrote: post #121

Massive attack requires massive resources. Maybe foreign government? Heck, domestic government?

Massive attack requires massive resources.

Not, in general, true. You could rent thousands of botted-up consumer-grade PCs located in the United States to run your custom bitcoin client for hundreds of dollars. This particular attack doesn't require any detailed computation -- all you have to do is observe a transaction broadcast from Legitimate Node N1, perform nanoseconds of computation on it, and broadcast the resulting transaction from your Conspiring Nodes N2...N1000 faster than N1 does. Assuming you do, your altered transaction will be the one adopted by the consensus, not the original one.

The technical complexity of this attack is substantially below several levels of e.g. the Stripe CTF event, which were designed to be implemented by intermediate programmers in a few hours of play.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#193

Post by _pmf_ »

MartinCron wrote: post #114
smrtinsert wrote: post #102

Someone should pen the next James Bond story around Digital currency manipulation. What a fascinating world.

That's probably the easiest way to make a James Bond story that feels out-of-touch now and out-of-date tomorrow.

> That's probably the easiest way to make a James Bond story that feels out-of-touch now and out-of-date tomorrow.

I think it would be the first JB movie that has a chance of not being out-of-date tomorrow.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#194

Post by VMG »

lmm wrote: post #142
VMG wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A valid digital signature gives a recipient reason to believe that the message was created by a known sender, such that the sender cannot deny having sent the message (authentication and non-repudiation) and that the message was not altered in transit (integrity). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature The purpose of the blockchain is to establish an ordered sequence of transactions.

Sure, but no-one calculates digital signatures in their head. Your bitcoins are worthless without computer systems, and those computer systems are the subject of attack by thieves.

Sure, but this attack is not about that.

This is a DDOS attack on the integrity on the distributed database, which is very bad, but not able to spend Bitcoin that isn't yours.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#195

Post by dnautics »

mpyne wrote: post #184
dnautics wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The U.S. domestic economy unlinked in 1933, permanently. Only international trade continued to use gold-backed currency, and it is that aspect which was finally eliminated in 1973. If the iternational market for dollars is still linked, in spite of domestic unlinkage, there is still some level of grounding, because of the possibility of commodity arbitrage (both directly and indirectly). Certainly there was inflati…

> No, price controls are setting the price relative to a standard that's backed up by guns (guns = "control", as in, if you don't do what I say I can shoot you, or point a gun at you and take you to jail). Dollars are already backed up by guns, so the notion of 'price controlling' dollars makes no sense. On the contrary, with a fixed-ratio gold standard currency it is still the state who said that a dollar was by def…

Not entirely true. Gold is a good choice because it's chemical properties make it fungible, durable, and easily verified (using low tech touchstones). These properties reflect themselves in bitcoin. As for why it's more responsible to have a commodity backed currency, it's because the exchange rate is set by statute and any legislator that messes with it is potentially accountable to the downstream effects.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#196

Post by k-mcgrady »

bduerst wrote: post #58
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.

Not only that, but the bitcoins themselves need solid liquidity before becoming a feasible currency. That's impossible with the impending cap. Right now, bitcoins are treated like digital gold. People hoard them and treat them like investment assets. And for the same reason the world's major currencies unlinked from gold, bitcoins also exhibits recessionary behavior. (bad news for a currency)

>> "Not only that, but the bitcoins themselves need solid liquidity before becoming a feasible currency. That's impossible with the impending cap."

How does that make you feel about dogecoin's decision to allow 5% inflation per year? It's currently the third largest crypto currency (behind Bitcoin and Litecoin) and I think most highly traded coin. Does the inflation make it more viable in the longterm as a currency people will actually use and not just hoard as an investment?

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#197

Post by Fuxy »

praptak wrote: post #86
eterm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the article now, but there have been several good articles explaining the lack of gravity on bitcoin in general. Basically, the price goes up quickly when new people are attracted to bitcoin and rush to buy. When the price dips however, because so much is bought for long term speculation, the price doesn't really dip much, as no one is incentivised to sell and hold out for when it gets better. At some po…

This sounds like a general analysis of most bubbles in history - nothing very specific to BTC.

Well I have bitcoin and I'm in no hurry to sell. I bought them at the tip of the previous bubble when they were £150 and was kinda disappointed when it dropped.

Was hoping to have a large amount in bitcoin so i can buy online services relatively anonymously.

Since then I more then recovered my loss even at the price it has now.

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#198

Post by Anderkent »

watty wrote: post #38
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.

It seems the general consensus believes it was MtGox's fault that they didn't handle the protocol correctly. The only way to spin this on MtGox is to blame their protocol problems on BitCoin itself.

Right, the main argument for that was 'look, no other exchange is having problems!'. Then someone actually started using the bug against other exchanges, and suddenly other exchanges are having problems. But that's mtgox's fault too!

Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’

#200

Post by erichocean »

efuquen wrote: post #90
zacinbusiness wrote: post #7

I've not bought in to Bitcoin yet. It just seems like a massive, world-wide scam to me. I'm not saying that it is a scam, I'm just saying that Bitcoin is something that I don't really understand, and so I don't entirely trust it. That said, this event is extremely encouraging. Not only is the security and the viability of the currency being tested. But more importantly, the communication and cooperation between the m…

>That said, this event is extremely encouraging. Not only is the security and the viability of the currency being tested. But more importantly, the communication and cooperation between the major players in the Bitcoin ecosystem is being tested. And so far, the community is kicking ass. If this was two major banks and they said they had to stop withdrawals for 1-3 days to fix a software bug that's been exposed throug…

If this was two major banks

You can stop right there, as Bitcoin is nowhere near the place where it is equivalent in any way, shape, or form to "two major banks". If it was, your critique would be valid. Since, instead, it's more like a bank startup, these kinds of disruptions are expected and encouraging, because it allows third-parties to see how difficulties are resolved, and how robust Bitcoin is or is becoming.

P.s. I have never owned, mined, or otherwise installed or used any software related to Bitcoins. I have no horse in this race whatsoever.

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