Topic: Community Blacklisting -- Establishing the Infection to Govern Bitcoin (Read 6877 times)

Satoshi can only pay 150% PPS if he's earning enough via extortions, or if he draws down on his investors's funds.

Assume the federal reserve isn't printing new dollars at will specifically for Satoshi to provide him with an infinite BTC spigot.

This means his scheme must remain profitable via extorting more income from businesses than he needs to pay out the pools, or else he'll eventually run out of investor money to make his payouts.

His payouts to pools have to be high enough that they compensate for the lost revenue the pools will be experience by processing fewer transactions.

This scheme would drastically reduce the number of transactions that are allowed to happen, so Satoshi better have really deep pockets.

All it takes is one competitor willing to operate at lower margins (i.e, pay out 151% PPS while charging merchants slightly less) to break Satoshi. Likewise, the same thing can happen to new-Satoshi.

On the other hand, if an attacker with an infinite amount of money is willing to fund an attack on Bitcoin, could we really do anything about it anyway regardless of what method they use?

Interesting. The feather fork works both ways, though it'd probably still be very, very expensive to try competing. I mean - once you establish 90%+ of total hashrate and are paying, say, 150% PPS and still making a profit, I'm not sure there's any way to compete other than by trying to appeal to users' sense of morality (in which case, they'd just use p2pool - though by force-orphaning their blocks, I don't think there'd be many willing to send that much BTC into a black hole). If Satosh mining falls below a certain threshold (maybe 80% of total hashrate), the whole thing starts falling apart, unless Satosh makes PPS payments to pools to maintain their support and has reserve funds to boost incentive.

Actually... that'd be interesting... meta-pools. So as far as ranks go... miners=barons, pool ops = dukes, meta-pool ops = kings. Then you just need an emperor. Peasants would be all users without "land" (hashpower), who aren't entitled to vote.

I wonder if there's a parallel universe where governments run pools (private pools would be criminalized), and collect taxes in the form of mining fees. When they go to war, an equivalent to the US Army's Cyber Command removes foreign citizens, governments, and corporations from the USG's whitelist. If BTC were the global currency, this would near-immediately isolate the country economically, on top of whatever "terrorists" the world governments already prevent from using BTC.

The IMF would set global inflation rates by forking BTC. Since they have all "legal" users' compliance, they could increase or decrease supply at will. Maybe a true world government isn't far off. Ooo - my imagination's going, I think I'm ready to start outlining that dystopian book series, now.

The attack only works if the attacker has access to an infinite supply of bitcoins (or perhaps an infinite supply of dollars to buy bitcoins).

If the attacker has finite funding, they won't be able to stop investors from funding competing cartels which undercut their prices.

Yes, it started decreasing in rates toward the end, IIRC - it did sometimes touch 150% PPS, but it varied based on how much hashpower was being leased by others and at what rate (assuming all this leasing stuff actually happened and Pirate wasn't laundering, or just being a weirdo cokehead).

" Community Blacklisting -- Establishing the Infection to Govern Bitcoin "

this will destroy bitcoin eventually , you don't need to be a genius to understand it.

And 115% PPS! Did that really happen? I wasn't around then. Given that history your story is even more plausible.

In the general case, your story is about the take over by a small group of larger revolutionary movements. There are many historical examples: jacobins during the French Revolution , Lenin's Vanguardism during the Russian Revolution.
Maybe your example could be structured more as a leveraged buy out, (or a leveraged 'opt-in')

I agree with you about the Foundation, especially in the context your "takeover from within" thought experiment. The Foundation plays to the outside powers that be as The Adults In The Room.

The fork relied on miners (really, pool ops). It's kind of a cool thought experiment, I think. Take mining subsidies, or ignore them? Will the ASIC mining corporations really ignore the money being waved in their faces if it's sold as protecting the network from "harmful" elements?

The Foundation, I don't think has much more influence than those individuals would have in the IRC rooms where the fork was negotiated. There's only a handful of people controlling the majority of hashpower, whether they're corporate miners or pool ops. p2pool helps fight this, but not if those miners decide to switch to mining pools which pay out "115% PPS" like we had back in the Pirate days. I mean - if you didn't mine on GPUMax back then, it was assumed you were either too poor to have the required hashpower for acceptance, too un-connected to get a pass-through account, or just stupid.

The Foundation's board, 4 or 5 core developers, 3 or 4 key exchanges, 6 to 8 big mining pools. 20 people, give or take, have massive influence over this 1.6 Billion $ ship.

Look how quickly consensus was reached on the hard fork. It was over in a few hours. Of course that was a good thing. My point is that there are points of control and it is possible for the network to change drastically and quickly. Even before techniques like feather forking.

My God will someday we be having to advocate for 'network neutrality' on the blockchain?
"Well, yes." will say our political adversaries, "All transactions are equal. But some are more equal than others. It's really all about efficiencies and scale. The white lists are there to help us."

Feather-forking - Satosh much cheaper to inject than previously thought. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/feather-forks-enforcing-a-blacklist-with-sub-50-hash-power-312668

Big Money James could inject the Satosh today. 

there could be more than one community blacklist so that the ...'there can be only one' HIGHLANDER" theme does not take hold... think moodys .s&p ,fitch and how little trouble they brought to the global scene -sarcasm intended- competition is good ) but not always, maybe these are the sadists you refer to... not sure where I stand on this issue 

So now the community polices each other? Politics can seriously screw this up. Right before the troll breakout, just think of this. I could petition to have every Bitcoin address known to be used by Theymos, but not tell people that was who we were blacklisting. Have support of 100000 people through funding or benefit and get him blacklisted from using his coins, which also means that those coins are now destroyed. No, no, no.

Big BUMP, We need this.

Bitcoin is neither necessarily a force of good nor a force of evil. Individuals choose what to do with it. It's a tool. It'd probably be almost impossible to pull of a Satosh type thing (Satosh could effectively become Father State in a "perfect" execution), but I pulled the idea out of my ass while writing up a more serious (and much more boring) response... I'm sure there are plenty of scheming individuals with free time coming up with better ideas. And with that said, I can't think of any reason why "Satosh" necessarily could not work. It seems ridiculously unfeasible, but while Bitcoin's young, it's vulnerable and open to much more threatening exploits than just the unforeseen technical kind. Bitcoin is also particularly vulnerable with the specialization of hardware we're seeing, where the number of individuals mining will plummet as barrier to entry is high enough to not just be a hobby - and that's not to say it even matters given how popular a handful of pools are. In a "Satosh attack," Satosh never needs to actually "own" any of the hashing power, just get miners (or their effective representatives, the pools) to accept a set of rules on which transactions are allowed to be included in the blockchain.

Miners and merchants do, and will continue to control the future of Bitcoin. They don't need to be malicious hackers to cause massive damage... any sociopath would do.

Yes, the scenario is a perfect, logical, COMPLETELY UNREFUTABLE example of why the free market will never work and will always result in us destroying ourselves, therefore we will always need Father State to watch over us.

I'd think the analogy (with SD tx ban patches in mind) would be more like "should private road owners prevent 80k individuals insisting on walking in the middle of owners' individual roads from creating a traffic-jam for the 20k cars also using the network of roads?" Even that analogy sucks, though.

Now - if you read past the first sentence of OP... this entire thread is about a potential volunteer organization to get past the problem of having SDice just change their betting addresses. 

I doubt it, and Satosh increases demand for hashpower - but only within pools agreeing to host the Satosh virus. If 50% of pools offer "130% PPS," there should be a 30% increase in hashpower, assuming no dip in price, and those pools offering the Satosh-subsidized "bonus" will also very likely swell in proportional size.

A new miner would have LESS incentive to join outside the Satosh pools, because he's not only spending more per hash due to increase in overall hashpower, but not earning as much as he could be in a Satosh-infected pool. That's not what you're really going at, but it is essential in understanding just how rapidly Satosh becomes established... The idea that swooping in and overtaking an established authority is trivial, I don't think would pan out. It'd be like one of those AltCoins. Relative to Bitcoin, they're miniscule, and unless they're massive (in the Satosh scenario), they have no authority. As Satosh grows, dethroning them goes from difficult, to extremely difficult, to virtually impossible.

Similar to the USG, it'd be virtually impossible for someone to just come in and say - Hey, my government I just made up ought to rule over you, instead, and I'll give all policemen and soldiers a 10% raise over what they currently make should you defect! Starting an army (hashing farm) able to rival Satosh would become exponentially more difficult with time, and the time-span we're looking at is very short. Once Satosh reveals how deadly are, things will happen fast. You should just be happy if Satosh permits elections of pre-determined freely-nominated candidates.

(Incidentally, this might be the one time an entity really has feasible ability to start something able to effectively replace the USG, among other governments, assuming Bitcoin becomes a "success" in the most idealistic of visions.)

I would think some are jealous of their earnings as well - but fact is that the network has to support a lot of transactions in the future, so why not let SatoshiDice be a test of this ? If they're somehow blocked, there's nothing preventing them from changing their betting adresses, and we're back to square one.

In a real life analogy, should cities close their roads for biker gangs ? I'm sure many don't like them, but they still have the right to travel on the road. (That was an odd comparison - but you get the point).


Like tainted coins, I think barring someone from the network is not the best thing to do.

The scenario in the story is highly unlikely to happen because it's trivial for a new miner to come online and undercut the Satosh out of business.

I have meditated on it, and I'm pretty sure Roger Ver is not the anti-christ.

I have arrived at this conclusion, because when I say "Emperor Ver" aloud - and I don't know if you're familiar with a MidWest US accent - but I sound like I'm fucking wasted. Empur'r'vrrrr....

So, it's probably one of those other try-anything-once fellows with ambition. Maybe ambition is the anti-christ? Perhaps Our Lord and Savior (I'm not sure why we use both titles, because it seems ambiguous to me -- we could be referring to multiple people - a sin We killed many, many people over at some time, I'm sure) interprets ambition as brat-like rebellion. Brats (unlike wieners) who don't know their place are smited by God. Oddly enough, it's almost always our elders who tell us this, often followed by "That nigger in office wants to take 'r guns away!!" -- Then, a pause... "What do you think about that?" the Inquisition inquires. Anyway, I need a previous quip stricken... God does indeed smite wieners in the wrong place (even if you only THINK it's in the wrong place, because God does indeed punish intent). ♪Smite that, smite that garden hose. Put it in the correc' hole.♪ -Unnamed Negro spiritual.

No, I don't think Ambition is the anti-Christ, because then "We" are the anti-christ, and Time Magazine already tried that.

Okay... I think Kafka & Kurt are out of my system, now. Need books for the next couple weeks.