131–140 of 154 posts
FYI, GHash.io is a Ukrainian company. As you know, the country is a mess now and there's an ongoing civil war. Just sayin'! (See, I didn't even mention that most black hat hackers come from that part of World.)
The idea that most black hat hackers come from that part of the world is quite interesting. Would you expand on it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your track record of alarmism and disrespect to non-academics is relevant, but even if you classify it 'ad hominem', you've earned it with your own prolific slurs of critics. I've addressed your continued "no-you-dint" willful-blindness about earlier analysis elsewhere... including on your own blog at ( http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/14/response-to-feedbac... ). You failed to discover (and thus footnot…
To the contrary, we've been far more respectful and accommodating to the Bitcoin fringe than merited, and certainly far more than the other way around. After all, we took a fair amount of abuse for simply pointing out an objective weakness that is part of the protocol. This, despite the fact that we proposed a fix for it. Perhaps you've not read our final paper. It doesn't just footnote, but actually cites the prior…
Every key aspect of selfish strategy is described there, from manipulating 'gamma' via network-tricks, to releasing the minimum number of 'secret' blocks, after each external-block, to maximize the cartel's expected return. ByteCoin's simulations show advantages, and breakeven thresholds with regard to 'override success' ('gamma'), very similar to your paper's calculations. That's why I credit your paper for rigorously describing the situation, under your specific assumptions, but not with the discovery of a previously-unknown less-than-51% attack.
Also, your final paper is simply lying when it says the thread "does not suggest a solution to the problem". It's almost as if your disdain of these 'fringe' Bitcoin fanatics has blinded you to the actual words of the thread.
Two commenters in the December 2010 thread (btchris and RHorning) suggest that preferencing accurate-seeming timestamps can disadvantage cartel-delayed blocks. That countermeasure is likely stronger than your paper's proposed random-choice-between-ties. (Randomization, by pushing gamma to 1/2, could make things worse if, on the real network, the effective gamma for late-releasers was already closer to 0. Preferring realistic timestamps, meanwhile, almost always helps 'honest' blocks, which don't have to guess a future time when they'll be released.)
Note that the last bullet of supposed novelty in your paper – "defending against the attacker requires at least 2/3rds of the network to be honest" – is the exact same best-case threshold as reported by ByteCoin in thread message #36, 2010-12-14. He states: "a cartel with no preferential network access can be profitable with 33% of the generating power"[5]. Same result, 3 years earlier. How can you allege ByteCoin was simulating some other strategy? Wouldn't the slightest difference in block-release-rules result in a different best-case threshold?
Finally, the Bitcoin Talk forums hadn't "CONCLUDED" anything. They're not a deliberative body. Some people were convinced, others weren't. The relevant actors – mining insiders – knew what they needed to know, to either try the attack, or detect it in orphan rates and weird timestamps... and to try countermeasures based on disadvantaging cartel blocks if ever necessary. Meni Rosenfeld also referred back to the matter as a known concern, in an answer on the Bitcoin StackExchange, in October 2011 [6]. So he knew it was an issue, and lots of people trust him about mining matters.
There's no "brigade" out to trash you led by some "failed academic" "Singaporean" "ringleader". Your critics are not the heads of some unified hydra, that you can disregard altogether as the "Bitcoin lunatic fringe" based on a few quotes from particular yahoos. You've made specific claims of novelty, or doom, that were either never true, or disproven by later events. These will be pointed out when you claim to enjoy a "we told you so" record of authoritative insights.
[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v5.pdf
[2] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcArXiv.pd...
[3] http://fc14.ifca.ai/papers/fc14_submission_82.pdf
[4] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2227.0;all
[5] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2227.msg30138#msg301...
[6] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1475/can-someone-...
Also it's too bad that BTC is blinding everyone to a variety of other crypto-currencies that have improved features.
Is a "hard fork" really necessary? BTC miners can all just adopt a new version. What's concerning is that the 51% attack has been known since the beginning and the community never addressed it and seemed to irrationally dismiss it. The current response is that GHash is removing processing power, but how is that a good long-term solution? The BTC community should be demanding and supporting technical fixes. Also it's…
There will not be a way of "patching" the issue. The only thing that can be done is to set up a proper emergency handling procedure in the event a 51% attack is conducted, which involves directing as many clients as possible to work on a new fork.
And down it goes again: https://bitcoinity.org/markets In the previous crisis it was all based on trust ("it was just a bad player, trust will return to the market"). Now we've a doomsday scenario and what seems a serious flaw in Bitcoin. Feels like a chapter out of The Foundation books.
or it's because the silk road bitcoins being auctioned
Relatively speaking, this is a pretty small dip, though.
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You can ignore what I wrote or prove me wrong by providing links. I honestly have better things to do on Friday night.
... What? How did me being curious lead to that?
As someone who works in the information security industry, I can confirm from personal experience that a very disproportionate amount of organized and semi-organized cybercrime comes from Ukraine, Russia, and neighboring countries. I, however, do not have any sources for you at thistime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
... What? How did me being curious lead to that?
He probably took it as you questioning his claim as he provided no real evidence. As someone who works in the information security industry, I can confirm from personal experience that a very disproportionate amount of organized and semi-organized cybercrime comes from Ukraine, Russia, and neighboring countries. I, however, do not have any sources for you at thistime.