Topic: Fairbrix fiasco - page 3. (Read 3669 times)

How do you plug the 51% vulnerability?

Maybe you should try to plug the 51% vulnerability first before releasing it again.

it was actually supposed to be called FailBrix but someone made a typo

This was supposed to be called FairBrix not UnfairBrix.

If you do reboot it, change the initial block so the old clients can't cause issues.

I wouldn't do that until you know what happened. I expect you'll find that it was a result of old & new clients working the same chain. If you reboot it yet again I doubt many will both with it.

michaelmclees, your chain is up and running fine now.
All you need is not a new "better" release, but more hashing power to protect the blockchain against attacks.
If you keep rebooting the coin and resetting the blockchain, people will just give up.

As those of you who keep an eye on this thread know, I recently led a Tenebrix spinoff, Fairbrix, project.  There is likely some confusion as to what happened.

First, I would like to make clear that I am not a programmer.  I don't understand much of what is involved in the creating of Bitcoin-style cryptocurrencies.  That said, there were a few people who helped me along the way, doing most of the work, if I'm honest.  As far as I'm concerned, none of them intentionally misprogrammed anything or attempted to attack Fairbrix after either release.

So do we think what happened?  The initial release was flawed, in that a programming error made every found block after 100 worthless.  Why was this not found earlier?  I was attempting to resolve the problem of premining.  Instead of mining lots of blocks myself or loading the genesis block with millions of coins, I tried to keep the promise I had made that as many people as possible could mine the initial coins before things got difficult.  In retrospect, this was a mistake, as mining the 150 blocks as I said I would, would have revealed the problem.

After the problem was discovered, we had a chat in IRC about it and decided to re-release Fairbrix, this time with the blocks after 100 properly generating coins.  Unfortunately, the release was not accompanied by a good (easy) Windows release.  Linux users and those familiar with Git (I am not) began to mine away, confirming that the new code was good.  Later, a successful Windows build was released.

By this time, many of the initial users were still working with the original release, and others, growing frustrated with the haphazard nature of the release, gave up altogether.  These things combined meant that an inadequate amount of hashing power was being devoted to the Fairbrix re-release.

At some point, someone with significant power attacked the chain, forking it, and invalidating everyone else's coins.  And here we are.

I expect a better release, under a new name to come.  It will be properly tested and released to thwart potential attackers.  Stay tuned.