Topic: A consensus network, or how to stop a big lose (fork it!) - page 3. (Read 4566 times)

Well that is an unproven assumption.  MtGox has provided no clarity.  We have no idea how many coins were stolen.  MtGox has never explicitly articulated how many coins were stolen, by how many people and over how long of a time period.

As for "controlling" the exchange rate.  So they dump it, ok now they don't have the coins anymore and the exchange rate will recover.   Bitcoin rewards the "smart" thing to do.  If an attacker had 800K BTC they could sell it off slowly and be rich for the rest of their lives, or they could dump it all, very likely never be able to cash it out due to AML/KYC type requirements, and cause a short term drop in the exchange rate.  Are you always afraid of every shadow?  There is no evidence that a single attacker has all the coins, and if they do there is no evidence they would be downright idoitic with them.  

I mean do you really believe that Bitcoin can be completely annihilated by a single entity acquiring 800,000 BTC and selling them?  If so why are you here?  If Bitcoin can be destroyed by one person selling too many of them too quickly then it was worthless from the first day.  Even if no thief current has that many, at current exchange rates buying a million coins wouldn't be beyond the abilities of a well funded malicious entity.  It would be a tiny fraction of the cost of a 51% attack and your claim is that short of a network killing fork there is nothing that can stop them from destroying Bitcoin by just clicking the sell button.

Some of us believe Bitcoin will do just fine, and the biggest risk is rushing to implementing some dubious "fixes" based on little more than "we have to do something".

Do you seriously think MtGox has all user fiat ballances on bank account and just missing Bitcoins ? I doubt, and Im not sure who is bigger thief, if MtGox or the transaction maleability exploiter.

I said that Mt.Gox should pay for that.

IIRC last year the Foundation rewarded those affected by the hard-fork.

NO. Absolutely not.

What would happen if I legitimately bought £10,000 worth of coins 2500 blocks ago? According to you it would be okay for the transaction to be rolled back. Now I don't have my coins or the money!

Maybe you say that because you think that 850,000btc is not so relevant. What would you say if BitStamp, BTC-E, Coinbase, and Huobi get hacked or "gaged"?

Let's say that now 40% of all coins are owned by one single hacker, would you fork?

Bitcoin. Bailout free since 2009.

It isn't a "fear" (your proposal was DOA before you wrote it) but you are talking about wilfully double spending wealth (let me use simpler words STEALING) from existing users in order to "undo" a mistake which has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself and everything to do with the actions of a private party and the people who mistakenly trusted them.

That is your solution?  The solution is a thousand times worse than the problem and the problem has nothing to do with Bitcoin and everything to do with a private party that people voluntarily chose to use.

Saying the network has been forked before that is a strawman.  Orphans are short lived and are known in advance to miners as a cost of mining.   Patches to the network normally do not produce long running forks and have been used to CORRECT FLAWS IN THE NETWORK NOT COMPENSATE THE LOSS OF A NEGLIGENT OR CORRUPT PRIVATE PARTY (i.e. NOT A BAILOUT).   The one notable exception was the berkeley db bug which caused a long run split in the network.   Miners did decide to switch to the shorter fork however it is important to note that the abandoned fork was only 78 blocks long which means the coins were immature and couldn't be spent.  No user could have received coins from miners and then had those coins erased by the miners as a result.   Making the fork before block 100 was a big factor in the decision to move when quickly.  If the major fork had gone longer than 100 blocks it is very likely the other (older) fork would have been abandoned instead.

You are talking about STEALING FUNDS from innocent third parties by undoing 3000+ blocks of transaction data.  "Fixing" the losses from MtGox, by cluster fucking the entire network.  Merchants, users, and exchanges who did nothing wrong and had no connection to MtGox would suddenly see coins vanish and you think that will be ok?   You think that will make people trust Bitcoin?   You think that anyone would use a currency where a user can do everything right, wait 3,000 confirmations and still have wealth erased by a third party through no fault of their own?  Are you insane?  Would you use that system? Would anyone who is informed of the risks?

No fork and no Bitcoin Code Authority please !

Bitcoin is Bitcoin not Gox-coin !

You are all missing that we ALREADY had hard-forks, do you know that right?

And also if you think that a fork is an alt-coin you are ignorant: as I already said every day we have several small forks (ie orphan blocks).


I understand your fear DeathAndTaxes, but the reality is that Bitcoin is already fucked: it's not distributed anymore, it's just decentralized. We have big mining pools with huge percentage of hashing power, we have few exchanges saving hundred of thousands of bitcoins, we have web services with virtual wallets getting hacked every month...
But Bitcoin could still be used as a currency if we stop being so archaic. Sometimes you need to fork core devs + mining pools already did that.


I have a question for all you: would you use a pre-mined cryptocurrency? because right now we have practically the same shit.

I am not so sure.  If there is anything there then some of it may be returned to the verified account holders, but I would not hold my breath.

On April 15th of 2011 the poker site I was using, Full Tilt Poker, was taken over by the government.

Today I just got notice that the government will be returning the full value of my account.

It took a while for the case to grind through the justa-system but I am very happy with the outcome in the case!

So, you never know.

These blockchain 'rollback' threads keep popping up clearly illustrate the lack of understanding why bitcoin has any value in the first place.

I think we went almost a week between threads suggesting we fork the block chain for someone pet complaint or another.  A new record.

I agree with the above - every single one of the hundreds of threads suggesting a fork for one reason or another should be burried in the alt section of the forum.


You many not know it but you are talking about an alt coin by definition.  You could try to call it Bitcoin but that would be a lie.

I don't know that, it's just my guess. Another thread around here was speculating the theory, sounded good to me.
I've been suspicious of Gox for a while, too many red flags, something didn't add up, hence my post last year:


I would take anything Karpels says with a large pinch of salt.


Anyway, it doesn't really matter what theory is correct. The end result will be the same.
Any coins left on Gox won't be returned to their owners. That you can be quite sure of.

Desperate goxcoin holders want a fork to get their coins back, and what they will get back are worthless coins.

You do understand you will never convince miners to erase 3,000 blocks of the blockchain however if you did, then Bitcoin is done.  Remember over those 3,000 blocks, newly mined coins have been involved in transactions and this action would double spend all of those.  The coins originally minted would never exist and thus the coins spent wouldn't.  Merchants, other users, exchanges would all see the downstream transactions (which have 6 ro 3,000+ confirmations) suddenly go unconfirmed and invalid.

While this in theory could be done at any time it is generally accepted to be impossible.  If miners by decree can double spend transaction not 1 or 2 confirmations into the blockchain but 3,000 blocks deep then no receiver can ever be sure that the transaction is irreversible.  There is a certain level of faith in all currencies that create the perception of value, and Bitcoin is no exception.  Among those faiths, Bitcoin users believe that while it is possible in theory to 51% the network and undo transactions thousands of blocks deep, that it would have such an economic cost that it infeasible.  All users accept this faith or they wouldn't be using bitcoin (or would require 10,000+ confirmations before concluding the transaction).  Your proposed action (although I think it has no chance) if successful would break that faith.  Without faith in the irreversibility of transactions, there is no value or utility to Bitcoin.  Bitcoin would be dead.  I am not talking the exchange rate goes down a bit and recovers, I mean completely abandoned as a worthless experiment and development moves on to future systems which don't have the vulnerability (likely some floating checkpoint system which acts as a check to the proof of work).

How do you use a currency that at any time could simply be "undone" and erased from your wallet by the actions of a third party?  Would you use that currency?  I know I wouldn't.  I genuinely feel sorry for those who lost significant amounts of money by misplacing their trust in MtGox but this is a situation where the cure is worse than the disease.

No, this is essentially an alt-coin called goxcoin. The real Bitcoin will go on and no one will ever mine or accept such a stupid coin. Well, maybe you can try to trade it on bitcoinbuilder

How do you know that? I based my thesis on what they said in their last press conference.