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The Verge Hack, Explained

blog.theabacus.io

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Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#31

Post by TheDong »

danielvf wrote: post #13

"Exactly how the largest protocol-level hack of a cryptocurrency in recent memory could preceed said cryptocurrency increasing in price and then announcing a partnership with the most trafficked porn-site on the internet is a question I’m forced to leave open-ended; my personal pet-theory is that it has something to do with the fact that the world makes no sense and human beings are all completely out of their goddam…

Please don't quote portions of the article with no added commentary or insight.

We're all capable of reading and recognizing well-written portions of the posted content.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#32

Post by pitaj »

EGreg wrote: post #5
twog wrote: post #2

PoW coins outside Bitcoin will never work. This will continue to happen over & over again to every smaller PoW chain

PoW is leader based consensus. It’s slow and can’t handle millions of simultaneous payments. Why do new distributed ledger technologies still prefer to use it, when there are other, far faster consensus algorithms out there?

BCH at 32 MB blocks can handle 108 Tx/s. It would only need to grow to 6 GB blocks to handle the 20k Tx/s that VISA claims they can handle. It would only need to grow to 600 MB blocks to handle the 2k Tx/s that VISA handles on average.

600MB every 10 minutes is no sweat for even modest internet connections nowadays.

With technology like weak blocks and the lighting network and other side-chains the network can handle it no problem.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#33

Post by EGreg »

danbruc wrote: post #19
EGreg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Relativity is actually a special case if this general principle. For a large and complex network, events A and B which are very far apart cannot be compared in any canonical way. The larger the network the less they can be compared. However, A can come before B relative to some reference point C. That’s enough to achieve most things. The point is that you shouldn’t have a global and continuous sense of time in di…

You are mixing two things up - figuring out the time an event happened and trusting a timestamp that someone attached to an event. Within a single inertial reference frame there is a canonical way to order events, namely by the time coordinate in that reference frame which is the same everywhere. And for all practical purposes of building a distributed system on Earth, Earth is an internal reference frame. Ensuring t…

You didn’t explain how a distributed byzantine system can synchronize a global time that’s continuous.

I am saying that you won’t be able to — local time is continuous and you should use that for comparisons.

It’s nowhere near as straightforward as you think to make global time work. You will find that “making sure nobody can or will cheat” will require exactly the kind of effort that will make the concept of a global timestamp meaningless. Also, why do you need a global timestamp in the first place? Upon further reflection you will probably realize that all your concepts of time actually require exactly what I said: two paths to the same local reference point, where a comparison is made.

Your ideas about global time are an illusion based on simplifying assumptions that are not true.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#35

Post by onion-soup »

EGreg wrote: post #5
twog wrote: post #2

PoW coins outside Bitcoin will never work. This will continue to happen over & over again to every smaller PoW chain

PoW is leader based consensus. It’s slow and can’t handle millions of simultaneous payments. Why do new distributed ledger technologies still prefer to use it, when there are other, far faster consensus algorithms out there?

What is Nano?

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#37

Post by mido22 »

lawn wrote: post #16
nextstep wrote: post #6

>>>In both cases, this hack presents a strong argument for tending towards sticking to things proven to work and to be wary of overcomplicating things and thereby introducing unnecessary risks when people’s financial assets are involved. Which, I suppose, means two points for team Bitcoin. What? The same bitcoin that is betting everything on an untested and incredibly complex second-layer protocol called "lightning n…

It's indeed delusional to claim that Bitcoin developers have peoples' financial assets in mind when they celebrate fees of $50 and produce nothing else than "wait for second layer solutions they will magically solve everything".

fee for my last transaction was $0.30.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#38

Post by pitaj »

osteele wrote: post #21
nextstep wrote: post #6

>>>In both cases, this hack presents a strong argument for tending towards sticking to things proven to work and to be wary of overcomplicating things and thereby introducing unnecessary risks when people’s financial assets are involved. Which, I suppose, means two points for team Bitcoin. What? The same bitcoin that is betting everything on an untested and incredibly complex second-layer protocol called "lightning n…

> instead of just scaling with larger blocks Blocks will need to be ~5TB to match Visa transaction volume. Some lightning network advocates are concerned about the effect that a size increase necessary to support even a fraction of this volume would have on mining centralization. Other concerns are listed here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy and here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability_FAQ#…

> Blocks will need to be ~5TB to match Visa transaction volume.

No, it's on the order of 3 gigabytes. Visa claims they can handle up to 25k Tx/s.

226 B / Tx. 600 sec (10 min) per block.

(25000 Tx / s)(226 B / Tx)(600 s / block) = 3.39 • 10^9 B / block

Visa normally handled around 2k Tx/s, which would only require a few hundred megabytes per block.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#39

Post by w0mbat »

The gate metaphors in the article are so messed up they distracted me from the actual story.

  >> Gates Only Work When They’re Raised
Well normally gates swing open and shut, maybe you mean some kind of portcullis, like in a castle? You have to raise those to open them.

  >>  a gate that’s far too strong to break 
  >>  through and too high to climb over — 
  >> this hack gets past it by finding a way 
  >> to lower it so close to the ground that 
  >> it can be stepped over
So now gates rise out of the ground? I don't think the author has seen an actual gate.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#40

Post by ikeboy »

tromp wrote: post #17

This hack results from a basic design error: for difficulty adjustment to work properly, the window of recent blocks it considers must be relatively immune to time stamp manipulation. In other words, the allowed timestamp drift must be much smaller than the adjustment time window. Bitcoin allows a 2 hour drift, but has an adjustment window of 2 weeks. In verge's case, both are identical, at 2 hours. This is an open i…

Vitalik has laid out a method for doing the same thing in Bitcoin.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/428tjl/softforking_the...

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