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Topic: [ANN][XRB]Cryptocurrency's killer app: RaiBlocks micropayments - page 164. (Read 775150 times)

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ZetoChain - ACCELERATING BLOCKCHAIN FOR THE SUPPLY
any news on bigger exchanges? what about the voting contest on binance?
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Wow looks like RaiBlocks have large list of problems

People are just trading it (in flawed exchange at most), nobody is really using it (7000 tx/day!). As for IOTA when a decent amount of people started to use it problems came.
hero member
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Wow looks like RaiBlocks have large list of problems
member
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The raiblock win64 version 9 wallet does not work at all. Sync hangs since 3 days. Same situation on a second computer. A small transaction vom bitgrail hangs. They offer a snapshoot, but only vor version 8 not version 9.

I think nobody made a test not even a quick test on this. Raiblocks is broken.
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- https://raiblocks.net/page/representatives.php (the Official Representatives control 56% of the representation of all RaiBlocks)
Encourage users to make your account representative. Sometimes one pool had more than 50% of hashrate in Bitcoin network = Bitcoin is centralized

Please read the whole post to understand the flaw
Quote
Why RaiBlocks is not secure.

In this article I will try to explain why RaiBlocks is not secure and why its technology is any better neither comparable than the Bitcoin technology.

1. Decentralized payments
Decentralized payment networks are, in opposite of centralized payment network like banks, a way to secure your money without having the risk that a central authority could steal your money or manipulate the money in the market. Decentralized payment networks use asymmetric cryptography to ensure that you are the only one who can spend your money.
When you create a cryptocurrency wallet you are given a public key and a private key. The public key allows other people to send you money, while the private key allows you to spend them.  

But how other users know how many money do you have?
To accomplish this, every user of a decentralized payment network must download the entire transaction database which is replicated on the entire network. When you send a payment over the network, it is received by all the users connected on the network allowing them to know your updated wallet balance and allowing them to discard that payment if you don’t own enough funds.

2. Double Spending
The main problem that afflicts decentralized payment networks is double spending: the ability of an user to spend his money multiple times. In the real world, when you pay someone you give him the real cash. In a centralized payment network, like VISA, the central database is updated every time you make a payment, and they will not allow you to spend more money than your balance.
In a decentralized payment network what happens if you send the same amount of money on two users of the network in the same time? Since their database takes time to update for a small amount of time they both will receive the payment and accept it. In a later moment, when the network tells them that you double spent your money, they will cancel the payment, this is possible because every payment is broadcasted to the entire network, not only the receiver.
Without any other security layer, if a malicious user double spends his money and succeeds to block a payment receiver to know that he sent the same money to someone else (or even better, to another wallet of his own), the payment receiver will accept the payment and ship the good. This is so bad, since even a network connection problem could temporarily lead a payment receiver to undetect double spendings.

3. The Bitcoin Solution
To solve this problem, Bitcoin relays on the fact that after you receive a payment you need to wait a confirmation block, the confirmation block tells you that the payment you have received has been accepted by the entire network and you are allowed to spend it. To create a confirmation block, the miners create a list of all the pending unconfirmed transactions and solve a very difficult mathematical puzzle. The miner who solves the puzzle first, sends the block he found with all the list of confirmed transaction and the solved puzzle to the network, the users of the network will check if the puzzle solution is valid and then reward him with some free coins plus the sum of all the payment fees of each transaction in the block. The miners must create a valid list of payments to be accepted by the network, so double spend attempts are just discarded.

In Bitcoin an attacker,  to make a succesful double spending, should not just stop you from receiving a double spend attempt message, but he should also solve the puzzle to create a confirmation block in a reasonable time frame. Currently solving that puzzle with a single computer would take years; at writing time to solve that puzzle a network of thousands dedicated hardware is used, an attacker would require a billionaire investment to replicate that network. Moreover, it would not only need to create one confirmation block but six of them (6 confirmation blocks are required in the Bitcoin network to trust a payment).

Critics of Bitcoin say that all the computation power used to make the Bitcoin network secure is just a waste of energy because there are other reliable and better technologies. Is that true?

4. What is RaiBlocks?
RaiBlocks is a crypto currency that advertises itself as a fast, fee-less and secure currency, unlikely Bitcoin which is currently slow and high-fee (usually requires 1 hour to a full payment confirmation).
But the key point is that Bitcoin has been made that way to guarantee his users a certain amount of security to prevent double spendings.
 
RaiBlocks completely ignores the Bitcoin technology and relies on a special version of the Proof Of Stake concept.
When you receive a payment in the RaiBlocks network you have to wait a certain amount of time to be sure that a double spending has not been attempted (and remember the first problem, if an attacker stops you from receiving the double spend you would never know!)
When a double spent is detected, the RaiBlocks network starts a vote. Every peer connected to the network vote to accept the payment A or payment B; every user vote is weighted with the amount of his balance. Usually each peer votes for the first transaction he receives. The transaction which the sum of votes reaches the 51% of online amount of currency wins. The winning transaction is accepted by the network and the other one is discarded. (Reference https://github.com/clemahieu/RaiBlocks/wiki/Double-spending-and-confirmation)

The payment receiver, if his network has not been compromised, will then know if he can trust the payment or not, and will ship the good accordingly. This system leads to an unsolvable problem.

5. The Man in the Middle attack.

If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can just filter the double spending payment packets, and the merchant will never know that he is receiving a double spending. The Raiblocks network will discard that payment while the merchant will accept it.

https://s18.postimg.org/7pnm6yweh/doublespend.png

6. Solutions proposed by the RaiBlocks team

a) The merchant should ask a vote for each payment he receives and wait for the confirmation.
The problem is that the attacker could manipulate the vote by telling the merchant that only his peers are connected to the network thus he will win the vote by filtering only his votes. Plus, asking a vote for each payment would cause a huge increment of bandwidth usage that many peers could not handle.

b) The merchant should have a remote node verifying the payment.
The attacker could just attack that network too.

c) The merchant should ask the RaiBlocks.net website if the payment has been accepted.
The attacker can hack the RaiBlocks.net website. Also if you have to rely on a website you can no longer consider RaiBlocks a decentralized network.

Other solutions

1) A payment to be accepted should require a vote with a minimum weight quorum.
It's difficult to establish a correct quorum, and if that quorum is offline no payments will be processed.

2) A payment need to be accepted by some trusted representatives.
This will stop the network on being decentralized. Also, if those representatives are offline the payments are not processed.

7. Why Bitcoin is not vulnerable to this type of attack
Simply because an attacker, to be trusted by a merchant, would require to solve a very difficult puzzle for six times. An attacker cannot alter the difficulty of that puzzle.

8. Other observations

a) RaiBlocks is just Bitcoins without the Bitcoin securing algorithm. The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, describes the double spending problem in the original Bitcoin paper: https://Bitcoin.org/Bitcoin.pdf. The developer of RaiBlocks just thinks to solve the problem by ignoring the problem.

b) The official representatives of the RaiBlocks network own more than 52% of total voting weight, allowing the developer to manipulate every vote on his will.
Source: https://dev.RaiBlocks.net/page/representatives.php


9. References
https://RaiBlocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pdf
https://github.com/clemahieu/RaiBlocks/wiki/Double-spending-and-confirmation

I want to say that the core developers of RaiBlocks have admitted the problem in chat. If you want you can join the discussion on discord.
hero member
Activity: 630
Merit: 500
- https://raiblocks.net/page/representatives.php (the Official Representatives control 56% of the representation of all RaiBlocks)
Encourage users to make your account representative. Sometimes one pool had more than 50% of hashrate in Bitcoin network = Bitcoin is centralized
full member
Activity: 222
Merit: 102
newbie
Activity: 2
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Yeah, sure, we are all FUDders.

If you say that FAUCET distribution has been flawed and then stopped because of BOTs taking everything you are a FUDder:
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.8040 BOTs solving CAPTCHAs obtaining more than 200.000 XRB per day cheating for weeks\months, totally flawed distribution

If you say that it's a premined coin with most of it in the hands of creators you are a FUDder:
- https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php

If you say it's not on legit exchange yet and it's price is manipulated, driven by exchange bug you are a FUDder:
- they allowed the price to be bug-driven (noob exchange bug that let people match orders in stead of clearing order book), they even admitted it (after letting the price go to moon). But you are anyway a FUDder when you say Bitgrail is a noob exchange.

If you say that they have the noobest wallet around even seen you are a FUDder, then you start wallet and you are back in the 90s.

If you say that they never have proven either in testnet more than 10tx/s (they promise 7000tx/s) you are a FUDder, now they do 7000tx/day and almost everything from wallet to webwallet to explorer crash.

If you say that their coin is not used at all for microtransactions (except 2 pathetics shop without users) you are a FUDder, even if people care just about getting rich.

If you say Cryptopia delisted it because it made the exchange crash you are a FUDder even if it actually happened.

If you say it's centralized because you have to trust main holders (to validate transaction\representatives) you are a FUDder.

Comepared to being held hostage to miners, yes it's more decentralized. And they're already working on making it easier for people to contribute to network strength and decentralization.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ZackShapiro/status/947575861246603264

You're not even addressing people's arguments. You're repeating the same old ones knowingly.
full member
Activity: 222
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I have just discovered a curious thing, Bittrex listed and immediately removed XRB in past times:
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.2000

During Bittrex testing XRB chain went down 2 days. So the exchange decided to remove the coin immediately. Of course no dev even mentioned it.

OMG, great catch! Bittrex went through the trouble of adding XRB and then removed it 2 days later - it must be a scam. EXIT NOW EVERYONE, THE SKY IS FALLING - SELL SELL SELL. IT IS A SCAM! XRB DEV IS SMART BUT NOT SMART ENOUGH TO CHEAT FRACAS!!!


As I said before, you are a complete imbecile.
full member
Activity: 392
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Multiversum
I have just discovered a curious thing, Bittrex listed and immediately removed XRB in past times:
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.2000

During Bittrex testing XRB chain went down 2 days. So the exchange decided to remove the coin immediately. Of course no dev even mentioned it.
full member
Activity: 392
Merit: 100
Multiversum
To all newcomers to Raiblocks

If you are new to Bitcointalk you may not realize how things work around here. Ask yourself this - why would someone who states that Raiblocks is crap/a pump and dump/full of flaws, etc. keep coming on here posting the same thing over and over again even though it has already been addressed numerous times before? Because they care about noobs and want to protect them from the big bad Raiblocks dev stealing their money? LOL, I think not.

There are 3 reasons for these FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) posts:

1) Usually the person posting the FUD is actually holding the coin they are bashing - they make negative posts in an attempt to drive down the price so they can buy more.

2) They may also be holding a competing coin (IOTA for example) and they are angry that another coin has taken the spotlight away from them. You can spot people in this group as they will often have a signature advertising another coin or they will shill it directly in their post.

3) Pure saltiness. This forum has really gone downhill over the years and it is now filled with desperate, salty children who are angry that they missed the boat.

The world is full of toxic people who cannot accomplish anything on their own so they try to make themselves feel better by attacking other people's accomplishments. Ignore them and DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

Blacklisted users that are here to spread FUD:

fracas: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/fracas-1018688
xibeijan: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/xibeijan-110938
djpitagora: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/djpitagora-1264506
cr1pton00b: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/cr1pton00b-1557981

read their past posts and decide for yourself.

Blacklisted by who? Who are you? Can't we say our opinion? This sounds really nazi. But what to expect... censor everyone tells anything different so people don't get the point.

Come on, tell me this is FUD too:
- http://boards.4chan.org/biz/thread/5647016/holy-shit-xrb-scam-detected

Ah ok, now I understand... you get your crypto advice from 4chan. That explains everything LMFAO

It's clear you haven't clicked because if you did you would have discovered one of the many proofs of flawed "official" XRB exchange with easy price manipulation.
full member
Activity: 222
Merit: 102
To all newcomers to Raiblocks

If you are new to Bitcointalk you may not realize how things work around here. Ask yourself this - why would someone who states that Raiblocks is crap/a pump and dump/full of flaws, etc. keep coming on here posting the same thing over and over again even though it has already been addressed numerous times before? Because they care about noobs and want to protect them from the big bad Raiblocks dev stealing their money? LOL, I think not.

There are 3 reasons for these FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) posts:

1) Usually the person posting the FUD is actually holding the coin they are bashing - they make negative posts in an attempt to drive down the price so they can buy more.

2) They may also be holding a competing coin (IOTA for example) and they are angry that another coin has taken the spotlight away from them. You can spot people in this group as they will often have a signature advertising another coin or they will shill it directly in their post.

3) Pure saltiness. This forum has really gone downhill over the years and it is now filled with desperate, salty children who are angry that they missed the boat.

The world is full of toxic people who cannot accomplish anything on their own so they try to make themselves feel better by attacking other people's accomplishments. Ignore them and DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

Blacklisted users that are here to spread FUD:

fracas: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/fracas-1018688
xibeijan: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/xibeijan-110938
djpitagora: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/djpitagora-1264506
cr1pton00b: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/cr1pton00b-1557981

read their past posts and decide for yourself.

Blacklisted by who? Who are you? Can't we say our opinion? This sounds really nazi. But what to expect... censor everyone tells anything different so people don't get the point.

Come on, tell me this is FUD too:
- http://boards.4chan.org/biz/thread/5647016/holy-shit-xrb-scam-detected

Ah ok, now I understand... you get your crypto advice from 4chan. That explains everything LMFAO
newbie
Activity: 12
Merit: 0
Why RaiBlocks is not secure.

[...]
5. The Man in the Middle attack.

If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can just filter the double spending payment packets, and the merchant will never know that he is receiving a double spending. The Raiblocks network will discard that payment while the merchant will accept it.

https://s18.postimg.org/7pnm6yweh/doublespend.png
[...]

This kind of FUD can be done to every cryptocurrency. So once and for all :
Every cryptocurrency, every online bank is vulnerable to Mitm attacks, if such attack successfully happens.
Example for bitcoin: If a hacker successfully performs a Mitm attack between a buyer and seller, he can just give to the buyer his own bitcoin address instead of the seller's. End of the story. And there are a myriad of more sophisticated attacks depending on whether you have a temporary or persistant Mitm attack.
Fortunately, Mitm attacks (over ssh) are rare, difficult and simply not accessible to the vast majority. They can still happen though and countermeasures (such as ssl pinning) are outside of the scope of crypto currencies underlying technology.
Basically if you are afraid of Mitm attacks, don't open a bank account, don't use any crypto currency, or better, don't use internet (or LANs) and make payments only in cash.

This is 100% correct. It is a common FUD technique to state extreme "edge cases" like they are common occurrences so you have posts like "this coin is not secure - all an attacker has to do is gain control of the majority of the voting delegates". LMFAO

If it is so easy, why hasn't it happened yet? It would be much easier for this kind of attack to occur early on in a coin's life before more nodes come online. Raiblocks has been running for over 2 years straight - why hasn't anyone exploited these "flaws" yet?

Because the time, money and resources required to do so make it impossible.

Imagine you are storing money in one of those Swiss vaults deep inside a mountain. The idiots on this thread trying to scare people with their FUD would make an argument such as:

"Your money is at great risk! All someone has to do is pay off every single guard inside the mountain, circumvent the alarm system and walk straight out the door with your funds". Their arguments are laughable. In fact, they aren't even arguments at all, they are just straight up talking out their asses  Grin




Indeed. He starts by saying "If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can ... ".
Well, I say : Hold your horses cow-boy, if you successfully performed a Mitm attack, then you have already won, no matter the crypto currency or bank. For example, you can just replace all bitcoin, xrb, eth, ... addresses where your victim wants to send funds by yours.
full member
Activity: 392
Merit: 100
Multiversum
To all newcomers to Raiblocks

If you are new to Bitcointalk you may not realize how things work around here. Ask yourself this - why would someone who states that Raiblocks is crap/a pump and dump/full of flaws, etc. keep coming on here posting the same thing over and over again even though it has already been addressed numerous times before? Because they care about noobs and want to protect them from the big bad Raiblocks dev stealing their money? LOL, I think not.

There are 3 reasons for these FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) posts:

1) Usually the person posting the FUD is actually holding the coin they are bashing - they make negative posts in an attempt to drive down the price so they can buy more.

2) They may also be holding a competing coin (IOTA for example) and they are angry that another coin has taken the spotlight away from them. You can spot people in this group as they will often have a signature advertising another coin or they will shill it directly in their post.

3) Pure saltiness. This forum has really gone downhill over the years and it is now filled with desperate, salty children who are angry that they missed the boat.

The world is full of toxic people who cannot accomplish anything on their own so they try to make themselves feel better by attacking other people's accomplishments. Ignore them and DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

Blacklisted users that are here to spread FUD:

fracas: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/fracas-1018688
xibeijan: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/xibeijan-110938
djpitagora: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/djpitagora-1264506
cr1pton00b: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/cr1pton00b-1557981

read their past posts and decide for yourself.

Blacklisted by who? Who are you? Can't we say our opinion? This sounds really nazi. But what to expect... censor everyone tells anything different so people don't get the point.

Come on, tell me this is FUD too:
- http://boards.4chan.org/biz/thread/5647016/holy-shit-xrb-scam-detected
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
5. The Man in the Middle attack.

If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can just filter the double spending payment packets, and the merchant will never know that he is receiving a double spending. The Raiblocks network will discard that payment while the merchant will accept it.

https://s18.postimg.org/7pnm6yweh/doublespend.png


Couldn't the same MitM attack be used in a bitcoin transaction? Connect to all the peers of a merchant and mine 6 blocks containing the double spend while filtering out all longer blocks so the merchant accepts the transaction as valid.

No, because if you MITM a bitcoin merchant, you still have to mine 6 blocks with the difficulty bit set by the real network. And the difficulty only decrease by 1/4 every 2015 blocks. It will be impossible for an attacker to have such power.

Of course an attacker can mine 6 blocks. It will take more than an hour but it doesn’t matter because all longer block chains are being filtered out. With 5% hashpower, an attacker could do it in a reasonable amount of time.

No. Try to solve a block by yourself with your PC. It will take years. You cannot change the difficulty of the blockchain even if you MITM

I understand that the difficulty is not changing.  An attacker can own more than one PC, for example if one of the top 10 mining pools in China decides to perform this attack, or gets compromised by a hacker.
member
Activity: 139
Merit: 10
To all newcomers to Raiblocks

If you are new to Bitcointalk you may not realize how things work around here. Ask yourself this - why would someone who states that Raiblocks is crap/a pump and dump/full of flaws, etc. keep coming on here posting the same thing over and over again even though it has already been addressed numerous times before? Because they care about noobs and want to protect them from the big bad Raiblocks dev stealing their money? LOL, I think not.

There are 3 reasons for these FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) posts:

1) Usually the person posting the FUD is actually holding the coin they are bashing - they make negative posts in an attempt to drive down the price so they can buy more.

2) They may also be holding a competing coin (IOTA for example) and they are angry that another coin has taken the spotlight away from them. You can spot people in this group as they will often have a signature advertising another coin or they will shill it directly in their post.

3) Pure saltiness. This forum has really gone downhill over the years and it is now filled with desperate, salty children who are angry that they missed the boat.

The world is full of toxic people who cannot accomplish anything on their own so they try to make themselves feel better by attacking other people's accomplishments. Ignore them and DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

Blacklisted users that are here to spread FUD:

fracas: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/fracas-1018688
xibeijan: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/xibeijan-110938
djpitagora: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/djpitagora-1264506
cr1pton00b: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/cr1pton00b-1557981

read their past posts and decide for yourself.
This is a coordinated attack against XRB and we need to stop this shit show.
newbie
Activity: 12
Merit: 0
5. The Man in the Middle attack.

If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can just filter the double spending payment packets, and the merchant will never know that he is receiving a double spending. The Raiblocks network will discard that payment while the merchant will accept it.

https://s18.postimg.org/7pnm6yweh/doublespend.png


Couldn't the same MitM attack be used in a bitcoin transaction? Connect to all the peers of a merchant and mine 6 blocks containing the double spend while filtering out all longer blocks so the merchant accepts the transaction as valid.

No, because if you MITM a bitcoin merchant, you still have to mine 6 blocks with the difficulty bit set by the real network. And the difficulty only decrease by 1/4 every 2015 blocks. It will be impossible for an attacker to have such power.

Of course an attacker can mine 6 blocks. It will take more than an hour but it doesn’t matter because all longer block chains are being filtered out. With 5% hashpower, an attacker could do it in a reasonable amount of time.

No. Try to solve a block by yourself with your PC. It will take years. You cannot change the difficulty of the blockchain even if you MITM
full member
Activity: 392
Merit: 100
Multiversum
From Whitepaper:
"RaiBlocks is a trustless..."

A lie after just three words:
- https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@coinfund/explaining-blockchain-how-proof-of-work-enables-trustless-consensus
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1799665.60
- https://www.bitcoinbeginner.com/blog/raiblocks-needs-proof-of-stake/
- https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/raiblocks-is-not-secure-2672512
- https://steemit.com/raiblocks/@selfdrivingsandp/security-thoughts-on-raiblocks
- https://raiblocks.net/page/representatives.php (the Official Representatives control 56% of the representation of all RaiBlocks)

IOTA coordinator = ByteBall trusted peers = RaiBlocks representatives = TOTAL CENTRALIZATION of consensus so of your coins.

Now tell me please, XRB works without having to trust representatives, right?

Game over.
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
5. The Man in the Middle attack.

If an attacker succeeds to put himself between a merchant and the RaiBlocks network he can just filter the double spending payment packets, and the merchant will never know that he is receiving a double spending. The Raiblocks network will discard that payment while the merchant will accept it.

https://s18.postimg.org/7pnm6yweh/doublespend.png


Couldn't the same MitM attack be used in a bitcoin transaction? Connect to all the peers of a merchant and mine 6 blocks containing the double spend while filtering out all longer blocks so the merchant accepts the transaction as valid.

No, because if you MITM a bitcoin merchant, you still have to mine 6 blocks with the difficulty bit set by the real network. And the difficulty only decrease by 1/4 every 2015 blocks. It will be impossible for an attacker to have such power.

Of course an attacker can mine 6 blocks. It will take more than an hour but it doesn’t matter because all longer block chains are being filtered out. With 5% hashpower, an attacker could do it in a reasonable amount of time.
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