Topic: Is 51% attack a double-spending threat to bitcoin? - page 3. (Read 976 times)

He's trolling. Allow him. It helps open the newbies eyes to the truth.


I never said that they were not a threat. I said, the entities that actually secure Bitcoin are the full nodes.

In your imagined Bitcoin ecosystem, the full nodes are centralized towards the miners? They can change the rules without community consensus?

@Khaos77
I'm not used to saying this but @Doomad is right (exceptionally tho  ) ...
Centralization of mining is a nightmare but not an existential threat for bitcoin: neither short-range nor long-range attacks are feasible in bitcoin because of the game-theoretic force behind the scenes.

The problem with @Doomad and guys like him (including @Wind_FURY) is their paradoxical positions:

Firstly they incorrectly believe that it is because of decent full nodes and not the game theory that mining centralization is not a serious threat to bitcoin. It is a totally wrong assumption and is nothing more than blindly repeating baseless rumors and slogans. For instance, I could imagine a bitcoin ecosystem solely consisted of SPV wallets and yet immune to such attacks in the real world. Any dishonest move from miners would trigger panic and drop the price drastically and ruin the mining business in the first place, wouldn't it?

Secondly, they follow the same miner-phobic discourse when it comes to advanced scaling proposals that need a bit more reliance on PoW and miners at the same time that they say there is no practical threat because of the centralized situation with miners!

Thirdly, they don't feel any obligation to engage in any project or support it by any means or at least remaining neutral about any proposal that involves changing the situation with mining and pools in bitcoin, instead, these guys are among the firsts to show up trying to shut down any serious idea by accusing it of being disruptive, out of the holly road map, requiring hard-fork, blah, blah, ...

Such a complex type of people our friends are  

Have you forgotten how Bitcoin works yet again?  

I know you spend a lot of time playing with that staking rubbish, but that's not really a legitimate excuse for being woefully ill-informed.  But since you clearly need it explained to you like you were still a newbie, I'll happily oblige:

Miners would be jeopardising their income (not to mention their entire business model) if they tried to enforce higher fees.  Users include a fee to effectively bid for priority inclusion in a block.  The miners will naturally select the highest bids first, but it's not practical for them to attempt to force people to bid larger sums.  That's just something people choose to do when the network is congested.  When fees rise, that's the result of users trying to out-bid each other.  It's not the miners causing it.

If miners began en-masse to reject transactions based on lower fees, they're effectively just "leaving money on the table".  It's basic supply and demand.  

Plus,

3 - What Andreas Antonopoulos said, https://twitter.com/bitcoinmagazine/status/1197161029832265729

Thanks to the full nodes validating everything for themselves, and securing the network as an after-effect. I am very confident that that prevents the miners to become dishonest.

@Stedsm, @BrewMaster
Centralization of mining is a bad thing, no doubts, and a real threat since 2011, undisputable and it is really a hell of a problem to solve considering the sophisticated situation we are dealing with: so many strong and divergent stakeholders and groups present in bitcoin scene nowadays. But ] got two points to mention here:

1- It is hard but not impossible to mitigate, we need to get rid of centralized pools.

2- It is not an existential threat to bitcoin as a whole because it is irrational to leverage huge mining resources for long-range attacks against bitcoin as @BrewMaster correctly mentioned above.

What if such pools start giving higher rewards per each miner (obviously after dividing their distributed amount of hash power) just to grab a big number (or almost all the miners in the market switch to them due to their competitive business and some contests)? Why won't the miners join them and start gaining even a few bits more than what they get from their ongoing mining group?

that is simply not possible without having 90% of the hashrate and the cost of such gigantic hashpower is ridiculously high even if divided among a small group of mining farms. besides even if one pool had that much hasr power it still wouldn't force the 10% to leave because that 10% can still mine 10% of the blocks no matter what. unless that 90% starts performing 51% attacks in which case we will switch to another mining algorithm to brick their billion dollar investment.

the thing about pools is that you may not notice it but their seemingly big hashrate comes from a very large number of miners connecting to them. which means if a pool starts being a little shady, they will all leave.

I believe that 51% (or more) is more of a centralization situation rather than being called as an attack for the purpose of double-spending. I've got many reasons to say this, one of which is the fact that at some time when we just began with crypto a decade ago, BTC mining had been both, easier and controllable due to least hash and many companies even tried and did rule the crypto mining industry, and trust me that there will be group of miners who, once all gather at one place (pool) some day, we'll definitely be noticing a drop in number of other mining groups as this single group will be ruling it up to the mark by getting almost all the blocks on its name and others will stop by seeing them gaining everything.

I don't care that you don't care, BUT without it, and without full nodes, INDEPENDENT of the miners, Bitcoin would be a slow, boring, centralized ledger. Or the Federal Reserve all over again. Bitcoin would be pointless.

Hello, thank you for reading my comments, appreciate it.

About coding, it is complicated, some ideas have been coded for experimental purposes and approval of consistency because nothing is consistent if you just can't translate it to code elegantly but there is no public domain code release for the time being.

To be honest, I'm a bit short of budget right now to do anything more than part-time research and it has been a while since I've exhausted almost all my resources digging literature, writing, ... I'm not a fan of ICO and crowdfunding campaigns myself so it is gonna take a bit more for me to pull more resources together for supporting more serious projects.

There is good news though, as much as jumping to the coding phase is delayed the idea is growing stronger and stronger and I'm absolutely satisfied with the situation right now, no rush.
Who says?
...

Actually, I don't care.

BUT, it isn't wrong. Full nodes do secure the network FROM bad-actors. Including if the bad-actor is a miner.


The entities who want to co-opt Bitcoin are fed up, not the community. "Don't trust, verify" is, and SHOULD always be part of Bitcoin's ethos.

Hello aliashraf. I have seen you be a long time proponent of scaling ideas on bitcoin. I read a lot of your posts about proposing a rigorous solution and the code for some of your ideas but I don't know if you are actively pursuing them in terms of code. Point me in a direction if you are. I don't think there is any anti-PoW/ anti-miner propaganda in this community. Everyone loves PoW. The concern about miner centralization is only related to the fact that you cannot let a specialized group of people be the sole controlling-stakeholders in a decentralized system that we all hope will continue and flourish long after we have gone. Don't you feel it is a genuine and valid concern considering the vision and magnitude of such a system.

That is why Bitcoin community insist on the throughput constraints for full nodes when business interests are going wild with their 128 MB and 1 GB blocks. The concept that base layer with billions of dollar of value should continue in its robust, widely-accessible form is a worthy goal. What is wrong if real scaling solutions that can enable day-to-day payments come as Layer-2 solutions like LN? Bitcoin has a robust roadmap, in as much as a decentralized roadmap can be. The insistence on scaling the base network by crowding out full nodes and using the "Nodes don't matter" argument does not hold much water. There are more than one way to do a thing right.

What exact scaling solutions do you think the community is not thinking of? We had segwit. Then there is Schnorr and Taproot which bring more functionality and a bit of scaling. I think the community is doing great. Your thoughts and comments on the thread i linked would be welcome.

Yea, but that double-spending problem can solve with bitcoin supporting payment cards or applications on phone.
 

I quoted the white paper to highlight what Satoshi has opened his paper with: A solution to the double-spending problem. Nobody would ever bother reading his paper if he was starting by saying: "hey, I got an idea about how to resist against double-spending!"
Money, digital or conventional, is not about just resisting such a huge problem:  being potentially re-producible by spending ever and ever! Satoshi needed to show-up with a solution and it was what he did. The fact that he was somehow confused about the role of PoW, doesn't change anything.

It is not a fear of doubles-pending, take care of the terminology, the sole presence of any kind of fear about double-spending would make bitcoin void. It is just about how a short fraudulent re-org attack can disturb people and this fear has a mitigation measure: wait for more confirmations for more valuable transactions. That simple.

Actually I didn't focused on what Satoshi said of Bitcoin's whitepaper, I merely just touched your argument about it which is clearly stated before you quoted Bitcoin's whitepaper. My answer/post basically was just touching all the arguments you have laid on how Bitcoin is the "solution" for double-spending just because Bitcoin's whitepaper has said it so. So I'm sorry if I got off-topic with your new topic, I was basing it in your OP.


One having fear/worry on something they believe in won't really go away. The presence of just a possibility of a 51% attack happening alone just put some fear in a lot of people, seeing that there is a possible flaw on how Bitcoin transactions work and how they can be erased, reversed, and be double-spended is something that can cause fear in both the consumer and the producer side of things. Not until we reach a certain level of miners really dominating the network I guess this fear from a 51% attack won't just disappear instantly. 

One doesn't need to scroll down to the conclusion part of the white paper to understand how confused was Satoshi about his work, he made the same mistake in the first paragraph of the abstract section I quoted above thread, as well . Satoshi was a terrible technical writer, brilliant software designer but not much of a writer. I mean look at the white paper as a whole for the starter.

It looks to be my fault starting this thread by quoting from Satoshi and the white paper but it was the right decision because it doesn't matter how Satoshi presented his work, it matters how he had to present it: as a solution to the double-spending problem!

If bitcoin was not such a solution it wouldn't get any attention, leave alone surviving for more than a decade and surpassing a whopping 120+ billion dollars market cap now in its worst days. We have pooling pressure flaw in bitcoin PoW since the first few months after the Genesis and we have pools and all this 51% threat around since late 2010. Bitcoin didn't survive because polls didn't practically do anything bad as the result of some fragile game theoric analysis. People don't trust a system that is half an inch away from a total failure.

The way Satoshi implemented PoW for bitcoin is flawed inherently it is based on a naive winner-take-all approach deemed as being vulnerable to pooling presuure, still we are fine, bitcoin is working, why? Because bitcoin is not about making 51% collision hard to achieve and irrational to carry on, it is about keeping the pace of inflation regulated.
As far as there is no way to print bitcoins out of thin air for miners (collided or not) the double-spending problem is solved, once forever by a genius named Satoshi Nakamoto who was not able to present his brilliant work thoroughly.

Now, and please stay focused, if the double-spend is solved in the first place regardless of what is happening in the mining scene, what's actually driving the anti-PoW/anti-miner propaganda/instincts in this community? I'm asking about the rationale behind this phobia and the way it is blocking so many scaling ideas and proposals? If double-spending is not going to happen and bitcoin supply won't ever exceed the cap, what else is at stake that makes people nervous about trusting in PoW?  

Are people concerned about pools to collide and defraud few Satoshis from reckless users who release their assets with one or two confirmations? Please! Just give me a break.

You forgot the "Conclusion" part of Bitcoin's whitepaper, Bitcoin only has a "proposed solution" for double-spending but was never guaranteed by Saotoshi himself aside from that Satoshi is also aware that a 51% attack is possible that is why he is talking about PoW on transactions on how should it be "computationally impractical" so that it would be "impractical" for an attacker to infiltrate the network. But Satoshi didn't even dived in to the possibility of a 51% attack from happening in Bitcoin's network, I know it would require a lot of resources for an individual or a group to pull through and control 51% of the hash rate but if we are only talking about the chances of this happening I know we all know that a 51% attack has a chance to happen.

@AbernathyFray, welcome to bitcointalk the original bitcoin forum founded by Satoshi Nakamoto,

Defrauding people is always a threat in any financial transaction and cryptocurrency is no exception. For short-range 51% re-org attacks it is always users' responsibility to stay safe by waiting for enough confirmations depending on the volume of the transaction at stake.

Interesting read.  I see it as a term which has become adulterated.  I can't speak of a specific double-spend, but there have been plenty of 51% attacks, especially with alt coins, having low hash rates on their networks. Bad guys were successful in controlling the network and adding a longer chain with fraudulent transactions.  Exchanges were victimized with this as BTC-alt transactions cleared, the BTC was withdrawn and when the breach was discovered, the exchanges lost BOTH coins!

Well, you are right and I did it above thread and by striking through the wrong perception and bolding the correct one in your comment.

As I've mentioned in my latest reply to @odolvobo, it is very critical to distinguish between the two nowadays because the ambiguity leads to unjust assessment of most improvement proposals.