Topic: 6 confirmations is not enough (Read 4317 times)

If BTC adopts multiple algorithms like Digibyte, will it become more secure?

Because a couple large players effectively strong-arming anyone else out of the mining business would effectively destroy the value of Bitcoin. This is not just a hypothetical attack, LukeJr did just such an attack on an alt coin by merge-mining it with Bitcoin but not including any other blocks and not including any transactions. It killed the target altcoin. The difference there was that there was effectively no cost to kill CLC, as it was possible to do so without expending any resources. Eligius mined only Bitcoin and Namecoin, and Luke was able to simply use the results of those hashes to attack CLC without causing any economic cost to the users of Eligius. He essentially had a free supermajority of the CLC hashing power.

To attack Bitcoin directly in that way, you would need to directly use the majority of Bitcoin hashing power, the difference that it has a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and no real use outside of performing Bitcoin-style double-SHA. If you did this you would effectively be betting that going from ~BTC1800/day to BTC3600/day by forcing out your rivals more than offsets the depreciation in your equipment and the decline in the value of each bitcoin you mine. The attacking group would effectively be making a hundred+ million dollar bet that no one cares they've taken exclusive control of Bitcoin transaction processing. To date, there hasn't been an entity that is both that rich and that stupid.

Most altcoins refuse to use SHA256 to be different, its a gimmick really, all these stupid different algos are just a fad.

I don't think anyone answered this

An alt coin? In my conspiracy theory there is a prepared plan to fork BTC to include some method for full nodes (or other miners) to veto some malicious mined blocks and possibly include a reward for running a full node somehow. After crashing BTC hard all holders will jump on board of a plan that may recover their loss.

BTC would recover, just like it (has not yet) recovered from mtgox. Because people are too invested to let it go.

If the alt coins were able to pick up the slack from all the asics and be profitable enough for miners to take the bribe on bitcoin, then yes, there is a problem there.

Bitcoins core security relies on the fact that mining hardware can pretty much only be used for bitcoin, if anyone can think of a good use for trillions of sha256 hashes, then bitcoins security would go down greatly.

Seems weird that bitcoins security relies on buying miners that only work for bitcoin, PoS just simplifies the process from a mining device investment to an investment in the currency itself, but that's a little off topic

We just need a few altcoins with SHA256 mining algo to solve this issue.

In the early days of bitcoin an attack like this would have been trivial. CPU and gpu miners have nothing to lose if bitcoin goes under so they would be happy to pick up a bribery.

Because of asics on the market, people now need special hardware in order to mine bitcoin. Because the have an investment directly to the success of bitcoin, (if transactions are double spent, bitcoin becomes less valuable and asic miners become junk) they will follow the honest road and not try to rewrite the history.

So bitcoins increasing centralization is a reason for safety in this situation, oops.

I think only 1 confirmation is enough, controling the mining is almost impossible

Depends how much you have for bribery I think.

How much for avoiding the double spend . Are 2 confirmations enough to  be certain about avoiding a double spend ?

1 is not enough because of Finney attack.

My god, 1 is enough!
Unless you are buying something like a car, you dont even need to be paranoid about confirmation times imo. its just bullshit. pay, look on the blockchain.info if the payment went through and as soon as 1 confirmation happens then you can be safe. Even with 0 confirmations i wouldn't care to leave a shop after paying. Or are we supossed to wait? this should be instant like cash and credit cards, otherwise no one will use it because its a waste of time having to wait for confirmations to happen in the middle of a shoop creating big ass waiting lines.

lmao

whether the magnitude of the confirmation number, depending on the magnitude of the number of shipment?

I expected that you won't reply...

No, you manipulate the conversation. You also over-use the tactic of trying to reverse everything said to you.

Haha, I just used the same trick as you had done.

It's a correct TL;DR.


I never said that, nor do I think that.

You slyly use the word "question" but I think you are not doing it for the best interests in bitcoin, but to try to find a weakness for your own personal gain, as stated in the logic of my previous post. If I thought you were trying to help strengthen bitcoin then I would not have even posted in this thread. At this point all you can do is deny my claims and all I can do is state what I believe are your motives. My job is done there, so carry on if you wish. I just wanted to share with others my reasoning behind the motives of your picking-apart techniques, because to me it seems alterior-motive driven, not anything helpful or constructive.



You are slipperly like an eel with your selective answers. You left out that I stated I also own NXT. And I did not obtain them from a faucet. I own much more than 1000 NXT (I won't say exactly how much however).

But remember the premise of the attack is that you need to be able to immediately convert the 1000BTC to other crypto (or some other store of value) that you can withdraw immediately, and then attempt the double spend. Unless the market cap of other crypto changes relative to Bitcoin in the near future, even converting 1000BTC to alts and withdrawing it with no delay is going to be a challenge. If you need to send a 5000BTC fee and use 10kBTC in your attack, you'd never be able to buy enough alts and get them off target exchange.


If you were actually to plan this, why would you try and send the 500BTC as a fee anyway? Even a (likely unsuccessful) attempt at something like this would require a lot of planning with the mining parties involved. Unless they were anticipating just such a scenario, no miner would have the custom software in place to scan for new possible double spends many blocks back and make a realtime determination on whether it should aide in the attack. It would be a lot easier to just double spend the 1000BTC to yourself and bribe the miners in a separate transaction.