Topic: Government vs Bitcoin ? - page 4. (Read 5971 times)

You're missing my point, I'm just saying it would be pretty easy to overpower the network as a whole, and even make money doing that.

And yes, maybe a couple of geeks will run to the store get a couple extra GPUs to get the fat transaction fees, but my opinion is that the network would be much safer with mandatory generation on the client with at least 10% CPU dedicated with low priority.

I don't know how you are missing it, but the flip side of "very expensive" transactions is "huge incentive to process transactions".

Maybe the government will torture you to death or rape your daughters, but they are not going to attack you by generating blocks that don't include your transactions.

I think generation should always remain on, the only thing that should be tweakable is the CPU usage.


People will do GPU mining until they realize that it isn't that profitable anymore with difficulty ramping up, electricity bills coming in, and an unexplainable urge to turn the loud fans onf their computers off.

I think that getting noticed enough, for a government to dedicate a 100k$, budget probably doesn't take as long as you'd imagine, and then I don't really see what the bigger problems would be.



If the difficulty ramps up a lot, and the attacker stops generating suddenly, having to wait hours between each block might be a problem. Transactions will be slowed down a lot and might get very expensive.




You're making two assumptions :
 - In the future you won't be able to generate without the complete block chain
 - In the future every transaction will hit the bitcoin network

I think both are wrong :
 - There seem to be lots of solutions around that address the disk space problem
 - In the future, most transactions will go through service providers, like when bitcoins are bought or sold on mt gox, no transaction happens, happens only at withdrawal/funding time.



My point is that, it is, and will certainly remain dangerously cheap to do so. Much cheaper than what seems to be thought around here.

People should not focus that much on mining anyway.  Mining is just a marginal way to get bitcoins.   As it has been said many times here, it's the the same as for gold :  yes gold mines exist, and they allow some people to make a lot of money just by digging ground.  But the mined amount of gold in a year will always be ultra small compared to the overall existing amount of gold in circulation.


Personnaly I don't care if some people generate a lot of bitcoins.  I don't care at all.  I actually consider that those people are working for me, since I will buy their generated bitcoins.

Interesting. This seems to be a weakness of the protocol.
So after bitcoin crosses let's say 500.000 transactions per minute barrier, generating coins will be only avaiable to rich bastards with 100mbit symmetrical connections ? This is actually not so good.

Also, somebody with lot of CPU/GPU power, money & bandwidth will be able to easily paralyze the network.

This would never work in the long-run. In a few years, being a generator will require amounts of disk space and bandwidth that are unreasonable for most users.

PayPal does 382,000 transactions per minute. If we want Bitcoin to do 100,000 per minute, every generator would need at least a 5.76 megabit (upload and download) connection.

If some irrational and wealthy organization (such as a government) wants to take Bitcoin offline, there's nothing that can be done to stop them. It will be very expensive for them to maintain this, though.

There is a problem with that. Once BTC goes mainstream, this will happen:
- 75% of people won't even notice such notice
- 20% of people will, but still won't give a fuck about helping the network OR won't understand what it is about
- 2% will read the notice and turn generating on, but then turn it off later and forget about it.
- Remaining 3% will be either the people wanting to help the network OR miners.

So IMHO it is very important to do it by default. The 75% casual computer users won't mind it. Things work this way everywhere.

At least it should be said somewhere how important it is to mine, not just to get some bitcoins, but above all to contribute to network security.

With more people, myself included, doing dedicated mining on GPUs, this will become more difficult, now that an OpenCL miner has been made public.

Also, if we get to the point where we've got that much notice from the government, we'll have bigger problems.

I like this idea.

Perhaps the client should generate khashes by default, using 25% of computer's cores (or 25% power of GFX cards) ?
This could strenghten the network a lot.

So everybody that downloads and starts bitcoin would automatically strenghten the network. Of course generation could be easily turned off, but a warning popup saying "are you absolutely sure to do that" should show up.

Also if the generation is OFF, a popup asking if You want to turn the generation on (because it strenghtens the network and is generaly advisablew) at 25% of PC's power should show every time the client is started.

Maybe this is something that has been discussed before, but, what if a government, any government really, for any reason, decided to take down the bitcoin network or simply DOS the hell out of it ?

My calculation might be incredibly naive, but if I take the figures from bitcoinwatch[1], and fiddle a bit with the bitcoin calculator[2] :
 - Right now (block 88894), 180 blocks generated during last 24h
 - that's a block every 8 minutes on average
 - average of 8 minutes for block generation would require 25 ghashes/s

So if my logic isn't flawed, the network as a whole crunches at approximately 25,000 mhashes/s

So, that's 42 Radeon 5970 graphic cards if i take the advertised figures here[3].

So anyone with a little spare money (let's say 100k$) can successfully :

1. generate at full speed with tweaked client,
2. stop right after difficulty increase, significantly slowing down the block generation and transaction handling
3. repeat after difficulty decrease,
4. sell generated coins,
5. increase crunching power
6. finish by undermining trust in bitcoins, (advertise your attack, refuse to include transaction in generated blocks etc.)

I don't think there's much incentive for regular people to donate CPU time which would make such an attack really hard :
 - On regular computers, with most widespread OS, generating gets the fan to be really noisy (might seem like nothing, but I personnally hate loud computers)
 - Generation rate is really slow unless you know how to get your GPU to do the work

I think bitcoin security could come from millions of people donating a few khashes/s and not a few people giving a bunch of mhashes/s. My point is that I don't really see an incentive for regular people to generate.

Is my logic completely flawed or should I just dump my wallet on mtgox and run ? =)