The answer to centralized manipulation with resources is NOT centralized manipulation WITHOUT resources.
This is not something I would like to do. But it might become the only way to save yacoin if situation gets worse.
I literally just finalized an offer to sell a house so that I can expand my mining operation to stabilize the network--I'm not joking. I expect to have 30 khash/s worth of hashing power in the next month or two, which still won't be enough.
I told that to my woman, so she will go easier on me now.
What we have is an arms race where one entity has a nuclear bomb while the rest of us have rocks and sticks. We need more rocks and sticks! ...
Current chain "caretaker" mines approximately million YAC every ten 10 days. If he doesn't sell, he might gather enough funds in next couple of months to compete with higher (pure) PoW hashrate by later also minting PoS blocks and consequently raising his chain's trust.
Once we have taken back the network, it seems we can fix the issue of PoS being ignored? (I thought that was a 'chaintrust' issue, but I guess not--confused). But a fix is meaningless if 'we' don't control the network, right?
Correct - by all means honest branch should have more trust with PoS blocks included already.
But if an attacker can generate longer PoW-only chain, that one wins.
Chaintrust fix in development will mostly address issue Balthazar exposed. But fix for ignoring PoS blocks issue will make it harder/impossible for attacker to create longer PoW-only chain.
I have a pretty good feeling about what is happening now:
We build PoW+PoS+PoW chain with a trust of 10+11+20=41 for example.
Minutes later attacker broadcasts PoW+PoW+PoW+PoW+PoW (10+10+10+10+10=50) and kicks our blocks out.
But the real problem is that PoW difficulty in our branch get's adjusted towards 2 minute spacing when PoS block arives. On the other hand, attacker's blocks are stil one minute apart, so he is mining on lower difficulty, has more time and is able to overtake us eventually (before our POW difficulty readjusts back). It might be that in addition to having more hashing power.
Just one more thing to consider while refactoring GetBlockTrust method.
This is crazy talk. Even someone with over 50% can't generate bogus transactions. But he can reverse them for a short period of time. A SHORT period of time. ...
It's not about creating bogus transactions. Whoever mines all blocks can opt to exclude all transactions (except coinbase/coinstake). He has the power to stop people transacting.
What? How? If that were true, I'm pretty sure Cryptsy wouldn't have their YAC wallet up and running. If it is true, I'm not so sure that is completely a bad thing anyway. Perhaps the whole purpose is for this guy to scam bter.com and sell coins that don't actually stay in the blockchain. I'm on his side at that point.
BTER.com STOLE $5000 worth of coins from me. Real life.Every transaction sent must be eventually included in a block by a miner (PoS or PoW miner).
If there is only one miner, he decides which transactions land in the chain. Small change in code and any or all optional (not coinbase or coinstake) transactions can be left out.
This is extremely ungrateful situation, but if everything mined now get's directed towards exchanges, he, she or they must let transactions through (not all though).
If for some reason this would stop, we can conclude there is malevolence behind and attacker does not really care for any loss incured due transaction system "halt".
In that case we should temporary shutdown and possibly restart from past point to alleviate attacker's influence over large currency supply portion later.
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I think we need at least 100 kH/s combined power just to try to take back the network.
And with 150-200 kH/s we can definitely win!
I think we need some kind of crazy new hardware. Crossbar tech or memristor for example.
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We need to fix yacoin. If that goes well, we will get more attention and miners.