Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 160. (Read 2032248 times)

The only way I see to win is to make such that TPTB must attack the majority in order to attack the smallest minority. Otherwise, we will always have the problem of an undersupplied public good.

So in one way of doing that everything can be unencrypted and the majority is grouped in with the minority.

And the other way is the majority uses (and thus demands) non-backdoored encryption.

We need to get rolling on both fronts. Nothing is doing that well now (afaik).

We need to act soon, because if the 5 Eyes has their way (and they are almost there) then the world will accept that HTTPS means encryption but in fact it does not. Then the NWO will say that any data that is encrypted (i.e. random) but not done with HTTPS is prohibited on the internet. The public is almost to the point of gleefully agreeing.

Its steganography to hide a bitcoin txn from a human inside a hidden channel.  But its so simple to hide from a packet inspection engine I wouldn't even call it steganography... for example the "image" downloaded could look like random bits to a person (obviously not a meaningful image) but the packet inspection engine would not be able to determine that.

Your mistake is you assume 21% is a constant, but as they drive up fees and giving 79% of the increase away, they drive up the relative resources of the other miners thus driving down their 21% in a spiral. Even if they increase their profitability, it isn't sustainable.

This delay is a form of propagation delay and thus drives up the orphan rate for miners with less resources. Afaik proportional increases in orphan rate are more costly than proportional decreases in hashrate, because the math is compounded (but diminishing) on each subsequent block of the orphaned chain. Thus this action doesn't appear to make economic sense unless it is explained as a lack of bandwidth and not a lack of desire to apply more of their resources to processing the txns than to hashrate. If it is bandwidth that is culprit, then it argues against larger block sizes.

No, spam fees are minimal or even 0. Regular users have to exceed those fees to fit into a limited 1MB block. F2pool wins blocks 21%of the time. Depending on how high they can drive up these fees compared to the minimal spam fees they lose 79% of the time, it could be profitable.

They would be giving their money away to other miners thus decreasing their relative hashrate in a downward toilet bowl spiral for themselves. Illogical.

Not sure i follow.

Right now we could be having a situation where f2pool is spamming the network with TX's paid to itself which raises everyone's fees of which they will mine 21%of the time in proportion to their current hashrate. Yes, they lose 79% of the fees used to do this but overall it might work out in their favor.

Yes, that's right.  Large miners always try for 0-tx freebie blocks while processing the pool, then switch to fee-grabbing mode when it's done.  The larger the block, the more (non-trivial) CPU time must be devoted to processing.  It's a linear relationship, so 20MB blocks take 20 times longer.  This is bad for an antifragile diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient system designed to remain functional thrive under load, but not under bloat.

How can it spam the network when the blocks it can create are capped to 1MB? It might as well charge 0 txn fees to itself. That wouldn't affect the fees of other regular users whose transactions can appear on blocks created by the other miners.

If you are arguing that centralization of mining can create a monopoly on fees, then yes I agree. But that is true regardless of block size.

It would help if you would at least think before posting. Most of what you post is incorrect.

You just described a version of the "denial of service" attack already mentioned.

The actual severity can be much greater. There can be a run on the coin affecting all HODLers.

You apparently fail to grasp the wealth effect (i.e. that the mcap != amount of capital invested) is mostly built on CONFIDENCE.


Again you fail to account for out-of-band entropy. The ability to censor key transactions (even if a minute, undetectable %) could lead to immense power-structures, i.e. you threaten to censor the wealth of someone you need to coerce on major political outcome, e.g. a speaker of the house.


Yes Sybil attacks are another vector and there are lot more cases of attacks that you have not enumerated.

F2pool is paying the spam to itself.

Sustainable for only until the cumulative the fees equals their net worth, i.e. unsustainable.

How about this one:

Current situation where blocks are getting full from artificial 1MB cap:
Attacker: large miners like f2pool
Attack: spam network from one of its wallets to another. Drive up overall fees of regular users.
Success: 100%

Here is the rebuttal in one image.


            /\  <------- privileged members of the TPTB that control the centralized public good
~~~~~~~~~~/    \~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~> water level globally
        /        \
      /            \             so much "spam" down here, choking off the entropy of miners
    /                \
  /       TPTB         \             everybody else down here transacting perhaps,
/                        \           but fully submerged in totalitarianism

In my experiments with steganography many years ago, I find it cuts down available bandwidth by orders of magnitude.  At that time it was unclear if it was even theoretically possible to hide things fully, although it was pretty clear that one could cause the waste of huge amounts of an attacker's CPU if you made him look.

The utility I used most was 'steghide'.  A while ago I looked it up again.  The source code was still available but it had not been changed in years.  In looking just now I notice that there is a French version of wikipedia which has an entry but I can find no English one and Google translate doesn't work on it.  Weird.  https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steghide

Actually, there is a point to be made that individual transactions could be hidden steganographically for spends no matter what the network transaction rate and it is kind of questionable whether the backbone itself could run fully steganographically hidden even with 1MB blocks under dedicated attack by funded and motivated attackers (who own the network.)

Ideally I'd like to see it practical for the backbone network to be operation fully on side-channels which make no use of the global internet at all.  In any real attack situation it is very unlikely that any infrastructure operator would enjoy the streaming class of network traffic that we know today.  That is another reason I would like to avoid developing a reliance on real-time behavior (or even ~10 min/conf expectations) or structured block formations and so on.  The Blockstream folks making mention of expectations in the days range gives me hope that they are designing for worst-case scenarios (which is exactly what I need to feel comfortable about storing significant value in Bitcoin.)

Edit:  BTW, I've got very little expectation that encrypted connections without government backdoors will survive indefinitely.  No design that I trust for longer duration work will make that expectation.

You apparently lack an economics education on the concept of an undersupplied public good, i.e. free-of-speech doesn't guarantee that participants will act unselfishly to avert catastrophic outcomes.

Here are some attacks which are affected by the number of nodes and/or miners and/or hashrate:

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Double spending. A miner can spend bitcoins on a product or service, then produce a block which invalidates the spend
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Denial of service. A miner can engage in selective censorship of transactions
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: % success rate of censor identifying transactions they wish to block * value of the blocked transactions

Attacker: Nodes
Attack: Double spending. An attacker can defraud a target who is using an SPV wallet by providing them with invalid block headers which allow the attacker to pay the target with a transaction which references non-existant inputs
Probability of success: 0% unless the attacker can prevent the target from communicating with any honest nodes
Severity:  Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

Sort of cute:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bpese/blocking_the_stream_the_blocksize_limit_debate_in/