Topic: [DEAD] Coiledcoin - yet another cryptocurrency, but with OP_EVAL! - page 7. (Read 68090 times)

It's not quite the same because miner incentives are different. Bitcoin miners have an incentive to kill rivals, but double-spending would damage the value of their investments.

Some restrictions are implicit. The typical example is that of the boat ride. If a friend of yours offers you a boat ride, and you agree, it is implicit that he must bring you back to land. He cannot demand you to leave his property on the middle of the ocean.

Miners on eligius have, for sure, agreed to mine BTC on the pool in return for the payments they receive. It is not clear at all that they have agreed on using their mining power to attack innocent projects. And even if they had, that would only make them accomplices of Luke-Jr unfair act.


So allowing merged mining is the "deep flaw" to you? Really?

Such a feature would only be considered a flaw if you assume that

• There are rogue, ill-intended big pool operators out there.
• The miners of such rogue pool operator would support an attack on an infant technology that has done no harm.

Honestly, I wouldn't call that a "deep flaw" since, before this shameful event, I would not take such hypothesis as something to worry about, particular the second one. I guess I still had more faith in mankind than I should have, it seems.

Even worse than Luke-Jr promoting such attack is the fact that he's apparently, so far, "getting away with murderer". Depressive. It's as if lots of miners would collude with deepbit to reach >50% and start double-spending to their profit.

Of course I remember about the scandal, but I don't live in the USA, so I didn't get particularly interested in digging up the news to know the details. All I remember is that they went broke on a quite noisy scandal involving politicians.

1. Social security is a scam only because  it decreases the number of people helping each other outside the system.
2. Amway got caught in an odd scam if I remember.
3. I can forgive not knowing about Worldcom, but Enron ended up in dead bodies. How do you not know of that one?
4. I think kitten stampedes are a disgusting way to manipulate people, but not unethical.

Name them. Most of the claims on this board involve supposedly new and improved crypto currencies. Many of these are neither new, nor are they improved. They also involve a submission of a proof of work in return for new allocations of currency. They do not involve a percentage of this new allocation given to earlier blocks. They are pump and dump schemes, not pyramid schemes.


If he did the cooking and you did not restrict the use of the knife to only cooking, no fraud occurred and there is no broken contract. Lets say after he is done cooking, a home invasion occurs and he successfully defends his family with your knife. Again, as long as he did what he said he was going to do with the knife (say to cook some food for you) and delivered both food and knife to you as agreed, there is no violation of contract. If you want to make sure that the only thing he uses the knife for is the cooking, you had better spell that out (for instance, kosher rules governing what the knife touches).


The coin was released with merged mining and the largest pool doing merged mining was not acting to appreciate the currencies value. That is a structural flaw in the launch of the coin. The fact that it was not foreseen by the founders is irrelevant. Bitcoin could not have received such an attack as there was no such thing as merged mining when it started, also there is no crypto currency with orders of magnitude more hashing power than BTC that is required for such a scenario to play out today.


It was the centralization of CLC in Eligius that created the conditions where a 51% attack can succeed. You cannot eliminate the potential for the attack, you can only minimize it by distributing the resources among many nodes. Since the ultimate control of the currency is in the hands of the users, they could all band together and decide to modify it in any way they see fit. That is technically a 51% attack, since the majority of the miners decide to change the protocol. The implementation of OP_EVAL in BTC by the developers will technically be a 51% attack on the original protocol. Ideally, no losses of BTC will occur.

Not necessarily. There were several pyramid schemes started here on this forum which were quite open from the beginning: you pay X to enter, you receive a certain percentage of what people after you pay etc. No fraud involved.


I understand how merged mining works and that it costs nothing extra to miners. But it doesn't matter, I don't believe you can say that miners are giving "full authorization" to pool operators to do whatever they want with their calculations. It's as if your neighbor borrow you a knife for some cooking he's intending to do, and ends up also using this knife to harm someone. Or even to do something not criminal but that you personally don't agree with and that was not clear from the start, like, I don't know, torturing/killing his own dog or something. The fact that he returns the knife intact to you (no lost) doesn't change the fact that he betrayed the implicit agreement.


What deep structural flaw? I mean, bitcoin itself could receive such attack, by someone with much more processing power. This new coin was on infant stage and obviously could not counter Eligius attack, as there's no other big pool honestly mining it AFAIK.



The only known way so far to resist a >50% attack is by centralizing the network.

This is exactly on topic. You make assertions about what is or isn't ethical, but don't have the underlying information to make an informed opinion.
Pyramid schemes necessarily involve fraud, particularly assertions about a products quality, or market penetration, or underlying value. That is why new investors are needed, without them the scheme cannot survive. Now who would invest in a dying enterprise? Someone who was lied to about it's prospects of course.

Luke-jr used the result of peoples computing power, not the power itself. Why is this distinction important and is it actually a distinction? People who signed up with Eligius did so in order to mine Bitcoins. Merged mining involves no additional work in order to function, it uses the results of other proofs of work in order to build its own blockchain. Luke used the results of the BTC mining to attack CLC. Eligius users would earned the exact same number of BTC had Luke-jr not attacked CLC. Since nothing was taken from Eligius users, no economic damage occurred. Eligius users did no extra work to take part in the attack on CLC.

These are the facts as I understand them (I might be wrong):
CLC was basically an unreleased version of BTC with first day merged mining and exchange support.
Luke-jr demonstrated how an unreliable pool operator can destroy such an entity.
Luke-jr did so without incurring any economic harm to or requiring any extra work from his users.
Luke-jr did not double spend CLC, only demonstrated that he could have by creating a separate but longer CLC blockchain.

 Whether he should or should not have attacked CLC is a different question from whether he harmed his users while doing so. Of course, Eligius users who don't like Luke can always switch their operations to a different pool.

Should CLC have been attacked? Should a crypto coin with such a deep structural flaw deserve to survive? Both are interesting questions with deep ethical implications.

The entire premise of cryptocoins is that they are immune or at least very resistant to such manipulations as occurred with CLC. It appears that CLC was not resistant to, and in fact was highly susceptible to such manipulations. So, should we encourage people to place their faith (and cold hard cash) into such a crypto coin? Should we discourage people from doing so? If people are allowed to market fatally flawed products, should not people also be allowed to take steps preventing those products from gaining market traction?

I dunno, mostly because football is on TV right now 

My personal understanding of "pyramid scheme" is something that demands you to pay something to enter, and what you pay go to those that were there before you. For the scheme to keep financially healthy, the number of people entering must never decrease. It's what Social Security would be if it was voluntary (as it's not, it's much worse, it crosses the line of "ethically ok" to "ethically wrong")


I don't know what these companies did. Wasn't fraud involved? That's ethically wrong, similar to when Luke-Jr used people's computing power in a way that was not agreed upon.
If there was no fraud or violation of people's right than no ethical problem indeed.


Of course something may be disgusting and ethically ok at the same time. Being disgusting is a subjective opinion.

Anyways, we're getting off-topic. Let's try to remain on what happened here, please.

I think you need to read up on what a pyramid scheme is. You seem to have to serious misconceptions about it. You also conflate the misrepresentation of facts with "peoples ignorance". According to that logic, Worldcom and Enron were not criminal, they just exploited the stock market's ignorance about the true state of their finances. No ethical problem at all right?

You also manage to say something is ethically ok and disgusting at the same time. This is convenient in that you may point to either to deflect criticism from any side.

Amway is not a pyramid scheme because if nobody else enters the system, it will not collapse. Pyramid schemes are non-sustainable business models that require new investors in order to fund payouts to existing ones.

Thanks for making it clearer.


+1

Luke-Jr used his mining pool Eligius to >50% attack this infant currency, preventing people from transacting on it. He confessed a few pages behind.

Did you read what I wrote entirely, or you stopped on your highlights? Right after, I call them "disgusting" (I highlighted up there). That pretty much means that I don't "endorse" it. They are just not criminal if everything is done consensually, if every party agrees.

Now, using somebody's resources in way that was not previously agreed upon, and plus, in an attack against someone that has done no harm, that's criminal, and way worse than pyramid schemes or religions.

Why is it dead?  It can't be mined anymore or nobody wants to mine it anymore?

A block chain can't simply be killed.  The title should be changed to (LOST SUPPORT OF COMMUNITY) if you want to be accurate.

To OP: I suggest you change the tag on the topic name from [DEAD] to [KILLED BY Eligius pool], to better reflect what actually happened. Eventually Eligius miners who aren't yet aware of how their computing power's being used may see this thread.

By endorsing pyramid schemes, you have lost all ethical credibility.

You're a disgusting criminal.

No alt chain can be a pyramid scheme anymore than bitcoin itself is. And by the way, if done honestly, there's nothing ethically wrong with authentic pyramid schemes either. They are just a form of abuse of people's ignorance to get their money with their consent, pretty much like religion. Disgusting, but not criminal at all.

You, on the other hand, attacked an innocent project that had done no harm to anyone. If bitcoin is discredited by alt chains - what is obviously false, but anyway - that's bitcoin's problem. That gives you no right to go own attacking people's projects just because you don't like them.

They just deleted Luke-Jr's post proving he did use the pool to attack CLC. Pure censorship on http://bitcointalk.org.

Sorry, but:


Enabling merged mining on an altchain is essentially granting trust to pool operators.

That said, I shed no tears over yet another dead scamchain.

While I don't agree with these non-improvement coins, I must say what Luke did was WRONG.

And the fact that he thinks Mako is a "scammer" is laughable. The dude has been a contributer here for months...

Half right, half interesting. Heart in the right place and all that.

But seriously, any would-be cryptocurrency that can't survive a DOS attack by a few interested parties can be strangled in the cradle for all I care. If it can't survive that, it can't possibly survive the real world.

Oh, and fuck the so-called "law". With all due respect, you're way behind the curve here if you think that existing money/data/comm "law" has anything to do with what's being built.