Topic: ���������� (Read 3672 times)

Any system that Bitcoin disrupts. Central banks. Governments that run off of central banks. Any kind of government that doesn't want people easily transferring money across borders. And the list can go on for days.

I'm not talking about people who profit from Bitcoin. I'm talking about people who stand to lose profit because of Bitcoin. And I'm talking about them taking control, by force, of the person who has >50%.

Yes, I understand. Who would want to disrupt and damage the network? People who stand to lose money because of Bitcoin. I.e. people that benefit from other systems.

I keep citing Governments and Bankers as a corrupting influence. Except Governments and Bankers would never compromise the security of the network. Only they will profit from it. Err.. wait.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=14786.0

And it might even work with just 1%. I'm not worried about an attack that happens with only a few blocks. It's the sustained attack that I'm worried about, and the longer that goes, the more likely that the portion of blocks created by the pool will approach their percent of the network. Someone with over 50% of the hashing power WILL eventually be able to overtake the network. The same isn't guaranteed for amounts under 50%.

I agree with you 100%.

the problem is not with deepbit, it is with all the pools as I see it.
we dont have a real p2p decentralized network even if it is made up out of even 5 pools that have 20% each. it would still be way too easy for somebody to bring most of it under his control.

pools have to change how they work.
I think in the end the only solution will be to adapt to somthing like what they discuss here
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9137.0;all

I dont think everyone is fully informed of the risk of centralizing, and I dont think that for everyone it is a situation of "made up my mind, im staying". Half the time it is most likely because they found deepbit first, it was easy to connect, and had command line help right there. I used it first,it was and is a good service. I dont
bitch about fees and stuff because it isnt the only option, but it was quick and easy.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely"

"All it takes for the triumph of bad men is for good men to do nothing" .

We must be active, in the future of bitcoin. If we are passive and have a laid back attitude we could risk ruining this great thing we have going as opposed to hitting bumps along the way and developing as we go.

I am all for no regulation...in theory... but bitcoin is highly regulated and that is what makes it so great. It is an automated regulation but it is regulated in a lot of ways.
Difficulty~Hash Rate
Cant print at will
capped at 21mil
deflationary spiral regulates fluctuations
I dont know, but I think what we are used too when it comes to legal regulation is not the same as the mathematical regulation of >50% HASH
It is humans letting you know you shouldnt do this, but its just because the program cant tell you itself, not because of a human influenced regulation.
Bottom line is it is always bad to have all your eggs in one basket.
Also  Tycho has a point that you can try to send bad data with even 1% but it is extremely unlikely it will take but the point is you dont need the magic number 50% or anything to attempt it and succeed.
This will take some speculation, but I think the community needs to address security threats to an extent and not ignore them.
It is not a civilization where ignoring all regulations and anarchy and all that will lead back to tribal and etc. (but we are still around to live)
If we Screw this up it is over (or our money is "dead" for above analogy).
We have to start over from scratch most likely with a different thing all together, not just mend and continue. At least that is my perception of it, correct me if im wrong please as I am still learning too.
It is our job to nurse this thing until it is too big to feasibly control a large portion of it, IMO.

You may need to read more about this kind of attack.

There is no such defined threshold as 50.000% that you may cross for a few hours or days. It may work even if you have only 30% of the network power, but with lower chance, or may fail at 70% too. It's just more probable to sustain longer when over the half, but not strictly "impossible if less" or "possible when more".

See, most of us DO trust [Tycho], so we have nothing to fear if he controls bitcoin for a few hours, as he has. However, once you start talking longer than a day, it's no longer [Tycho] that we have to worry about. At that point I would be starting a bounty thread, if there wasn't one already, to DDoS deepbit. And I know that I'm not alone.

I hope to god that we never have to do it, though.

It is not deepbit or Tycho fault that his pool is so successful. But in the long term it is in the best interest of Tycho and the community to not congregate 50% of the Bitcoin mining power into one central hub. It leaves the system vulnerable. Some people aren't aware of the weakness and some people don't feel like switching because they only believe in hindsight.

Example:

If deepbit ends up with 50%+ of all hashing power and suppose he gets shut down or the server crashes or something happens. Although people can move to other pools if ONE pool gets big enough and other pools potentially can't handle the diaspora of such a large number of people influxing in. There becomes a great likelihood of a economic crash. So while it hasn't happened now it if it continues to grow it might be in Tycho favor to limit the size of his pool so that the potential risk he himself and everyone else is taking on doesn't outweighs the money he makes.

Awesome. The best way to legitimize bitcoin is to give them away. I'd say its worth a 5% tithe -> to charity!

Help strengthen network security, give Bitcoin a better name, AND save the planet by joining the pool in my sig

You're only going to lose the $ for power bills and capital you spent on your rigs. Right now the margins are (ridiculously, unsustainably) high ($30USD/btc vs 567k difficulty @ 6.3TH/s market today), that capital and power is a minor investment. Once it starts being a 30% margin business, it'll matter alot more what's 'losable'. Losing something you never had is losing the psychological game. Losing something you really paid money for is losing the financial game.

There's no real worry. Bitcoin is a pretty liquid market, with good information flows.

Someone with alot of bitcoins is going to spend some of them to analyse the risk. If its truly a risk, he'll spend some more and hire some blackhats to DOS deepbit to ensure his investment is protected. The fact that it hasn't happened yet indicates that those with the most to lose (those doing those top 100 xfers of 200,000 BTCs' at once, not you guys and your original + extra GPU you're using to steal power from your parents with) havent seen it as a major risk.

Or only stupid people mine and hold bitcoin.

It's one or the other.

Tycho and his unknown business partner(s) are in Russia, AFAIK.

The government is even more, um, aggressive there.

It doesn't matter how nice a guy Tyco is, what matters is what is he gonna do when his lawyer turns to him and says, "You better do what the FBI/SS is asking and not let any of your Bitcoin friends know about it or you're going to jail for a very long time."

If you guys think that governments have to "play nice" and warn us what they are doing when their currency is being threatened you're insane. They're going to run their own mining pool without letting us know, they are going to call in Japanese parliamentary favors to get MtGox raided and cut off payments to Dwolla. You're going to lose a LOT of money if you've continued irrational accumulation, just deal with it.

I think we've been pretty clear about asking miners to balance the network. That said, a pool operator could voluntarily limit their size. Both have their parts to play in centralizing the network.

What point is there in getting mad at the pool operators? They don't control anything their miners do. If you should be upset about anyone it would be the miners that participate in said pool.

There doesn't need to be a motive. Even an honest node can send money to an invalid address in the event of a hardware failure. Are the DeepBit servers using more expensive ECC memory to guard against such corruption? Is the DeepBit server a mainframe that does every calculation twice; checking for errors?

The decentralized design means that honest nodes check each other's numbers. This can not happen if more than half the hashing power is turned over to a single entity, honest or not.