Topic: [ANN] [MINT] Mintcoin (POS / 5%) [NO ICO] [Fair distro, community maintained] - page 185. (Read 1369778 times)

Apex is a part of BlockNet which is headed by Dan Metcalf.  You don't wanna get involved with anything related to Dan Metcalf.

[EDIT] This includes XCurrency, Fibre, Stealth, SonicScrewdriver, Utility, Swift, Librex, and more.

Now back to mintcoin...  

If something bad did happen we could just fork from before the issue and make some changes to increase the confirmations to increase the security . not that big of a threat... Its not like an attacker can steal your coins or anything. I wouldn't be too cincirned unless an issue arises we could always adjust mintcoin to make it more secure.

we all know our cell phones are pretty much hacked/bugged yet we still use them... lol people are even still trading apex as we speak

I think it's great that this discussion is happening and coins will get even stronger. but it's also good for people to know which coin parameters would make a coin an easier target than another for someone who wanted to waste time and money to "kill" someone else's coin. and which coin parameters would make it more difficult for them.

if short stake age and no max stake age makes it easier for it to happen then people should know that

Apexcoin was not a big thing, but it shows that it's possible to destroy nearly every POS coin.
If someone spends 10 or 20 BTC to destroy Mint, Zeit, Hobo or whatever. Do you have a good feeling with that knowing?
I'm not. POS is not safe enough and we must find a solution - together.

edite: that is an interesting idea (i'm not a coder either)

I also doubt very much that apexcoin has/had anywhere near the 83+ million network weight that mintcoin has or the wait times for min/max pos age... I think mint is much safer than a lot of coins

FLT has Flutterspeed, an option where a new wallet downloads the blockchain from their servers and not via the usual way.

indeed updating the downloadable blockchain once a month would be awesome for any newcomers to mintcoin or those of us who put it aside while we were constantly distracted (and let down) by coin after coin, only to realize that they already had a better coin

doge has a "light" wallet which they say downloads a lot faster cause it just skims the blockchain or something (not sure how it works)


PS I think VDO's dev has ditched or at least seems very lacking, I was going to put mint in my sig before I decided to support VDO because I think/thought it was an awesome idea. so now mint gets a home on my sig

Great news. POS coins will get even safer. On the other hand, only the "largest" POW coins are safe since it is easy enough to rent a lot of hashing power to attack the ones with few miners.

Someone pass this on to RoboGuy

This attack all stems from the 51% vulnerability for POS Coins, but turns out it is not 51% of the total # of coins needed, but only 51% of coins staking at a given time.

Think on this, and let me know what you think. Not a Programmer so bear with me.
What if there was a code added to the POS wallet , that if anyone staked at anytime with over 45% of the  ( total # of coins X current difficulty%), it either rejects that block or automatically causes that block to split without giving any interest back. (somehow blocking a 51% attack)
Therefore either the blocks are always rejected until the difficulty increase or the block strength is half and coin age starts over .

Basically we need some code that ends the danger of 51% attacks or we have to raise the difficulty above 51% and keep it there to be safe.

 

I wish that was what he was saying, but he meant staking percent , like Mint is currently 15% ,
basically the higher the staking % the less coins needed to make the attack, (if the difficulty is the same.)
Higher the difficulty the more coins that are needed, but if the difficulty was the same number, he would need 3 times as many mintcoins at 5% as what he would need at 15%.

Sad part the guy only used .07% to break apexcoin not even a ½ of 1%.
 Quote from other forum (the point is that I only use 0.07% of the available supply...)

 

Hi,

From what I understand an attack is about single individual controlling the block chain for a period of time. The goal is to control the block chain for a little more than the confirmation time of 4 blocks.

By controlling, I mean that according to the logic of the application, the attacker`s block will be chosen because his block waited more days and has more coins, etc.

When looking at the % of coins needed, you need to see the total amount of coins which spread over the 2 weeks because you can only use the coins for minting once per 2 weeks. If you have a single transaction of 1B coins which has minted 1 minute ago, it will not help to secure the network for the next 2 weeks.  Also, using 51% or 1% of coins is not the correct measurement, you need to use transactions.  You are minting transactions which has an age and coins to compute its weight. I feel that overweight transactions should be divided more than by half.

An attacker just need to look in the blockchain for the weakest moment withing 2 weeks and prepare his transaction to mint at that time (plus 2 weeks). By weakest moment, I mean consecutive minting blocks using low age and low coins. In fact, it appears that much less than 1% of coins would be needed because of overweight transactions, unevenly speared(over 2 weeks) transaction weight and because the attacker's target is only a few consecutive blocks ( out of the 40320 blocks - 2 weeks ).

P.S. This is my first post.

Regards,
Veg

Couldn't he be just be referring to a 1% total stake in the coin, meaning controlling 1% of the entire money supply? That's what it means to me when I read it. I think he is saying it's nearly impossible to attack a PoS coin by owning only 1% of it. You need to own much more than that.

The more difficulty the better for security. Agreed

As far as the interest rate goes, this was said in the other forum
the authors found "it's nearly impossible to attack a proof-of-stake currency with '1% stake even' as stated by Buterin".
To me this implies the lower the interest rate the more secure a coin from this type of attack.
Maybe others see it differently. But that's why I suggested the early change to 5%.
It will be interesting to see what other options come up.

 

Correct. The interest rate does not affect difficulty, so that does not matter, what does matter is the participation rate of the majority. The security is reliant upon the difficulty, which increases as more people are trying to mint, but are not minting right away. The more difficulty the better for security. But on the flip side of that, the more difficulty, the harder it is to successfully stake a block. A high difficulty means there are a lot of people with coins that are mature, but a higher % of people are still not minting yet; waiting in a long line to get a block. The time it takes from when your coins become mature, to when they actually mint is what I'm talking about. If it is too difficult, then the only ones that will ever mint any coins ever would be only the super rich: (for example, changing parameters of Mintcoin to make it more difficult right now, might possibly create a situation that makes it so you would need over a million coins in order to successfully make a minting; anything below that amount of coins would not ever have enough weight to achieve staking a block). So there is a fine line between making a PoS coin "fair" for as many people as possible to be able to mint, or making it more "unfair" so that only the top holders mint and the rest never will. As for Blackcoin, I'm not sure their difficulty number is calculated the same way, so it is hard to look at them side by side like this and really compare them. I believe Mintcoin's difficulty is calculation in a similar way to the way Peercoin's difficulty is calculated. Blackcoin's difficulty just seems absurdly high to me, especially since the only motivation to stake with Blackcoin is to secure the network. With Mintcoin, we currently have a reward as a bonus to encourage network connectivity, so I would assume Mintcoin's "real" difficulty to be higher.

Anyway, here are the two most viable options I suggest of what we could do to increase the security of the coin: It all has to do with speed decrease in exchange for security increase.
1.  Increase the # of normal confirmations needed from 4 to say 24. (This would make it much harder to attack as it is much harder to plan to gain consecutive 24 mintings in a row. (However, this would give Mintcoin 12 minute fully confirmed transaction times rather than 2 mintues. (24 times 30 seconds).
2. Increase the # of confirmations needed from the time when you stake a block to when those coins are ready to be used in your wallet. Increasing it to say 300. (This give the network more time to make it harder to attack as well, but would make it take longer to initially use minted coins after staking them from 25 minutes currently to 2.5 hours).

So this would depend on what the community finds as an acceptable transaction time. Right now we are at about 2 minutes for fully confirmed transactions. We could make Mintcoin "orders of magnitude" more secure by increasing the confirmations required to say... 24.

Another thing we should also consider doing is removing the coin cap, and replacing it with a fixed amount of say 1 million coins per year indefinitely, this would prevent the coin from getting stale and always provide an incentive to stay connected to the network. Adding 1 million coins per year after 70 billion already exist will not be inflationary in anyway to worry about, because if it gets to a point where there are no more coins being added, eventually, coins are lost etc,  it could reach a situation where it becomes too expensive and nobody will be able to use them for transactions, and then the value could suddenly drop out from the bottom of it and plummet, as a coin is only valuable as long as it is useful. (Obviously this is a long way down the road, but it is good to think ahead, and if we do decide to change anything, get everything in the coin just right, just the way we want it so that it will be established for the long-term.)

Honestly, I'm all for adopting these parameters to make the coin more secure and lasting, because it is better safe than sorry, and will greatly decrease any risk. It would make Mintcoin a slightly slower but greatly more secure and long-term viable coin. A safe coin that can be depended upon long-term is going to be valuable.

How is getting an android wallet for Mintcoin coming along? It would be nice to move some coin around this way, and make it a lot easier to share with people.

I will loop roboguy in on this conversation during Monday's hangout.

That's a great idea, there are too many POS coins whose networks freeze because nobody is staking.

First thing you should do:
lower the nMaxClockDrift to 10 or 5 minutes.

It's not the final solution, but it's a beginning.

If anyone is in touch with roboguy: [email protected]
Together we will find a solution - I'm sure.

Cheers,
Ray

Edit: kiklo wants to help you. What's the problem?

I don't think the % interest rate has anything to do with it just network weight, how many coins are in wallets trying to stake, difficulty, and coin age for staking/minting prob has a bunch to do with it, the % pos seems to be arbitrary to me... I could be wrong tho

I will admit , I don't have all of the answers, but from what I pieced together it has something to do with the difficulty to stake blocks. In their forum , I received the impression that lower the % rate the harder it is to make the attack attempt.
The higher the difficulty the more secure your coin.
Since you mentioned black coin here is the comparison.

Crypto-currency    Block Height    Difficulty    
BlackCoin             535507              740.5 k
Mintcoin             1141336            0.32305372

Sources:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/blk/
http://www.multifaucet.tk/index.php?blockexplorer=MINT

Just thought you guys would like to be made aware of this.
If you believe it won't be an issue for you , ignore it.