Topic: Pool Ops are now the Alt Currency Police - page 3. (Read 13960 times)

gonna have to vote for that... in end is up to ppl picking a pool & poolop they feel good about

and everyone haveing a go at one, thats to easy this is a p2p experiment and what failed ?... how many of you have tried contacting btc pools and get them to adapt clc as alt chain to improve its hashrate and thereby makeing the attack impossible ?... bit late now i guess since he prob holds quite a bit but option been there but ppl are busy hunting luke-jr facebook profile

my own opion is as said on btc-e chat ealier, theres no need for more gpu coins as it is now i think the efforts would be better spent improveing upon bitcoin, wich code spreads to rest of the altchains and if need shuld arise for alternative gpu later on it gotta be started in coop with other chains to secure a just decent hashrate from start to avoid early apdoption & 51% issues, major job and only worth if brings enough experimental features

dosnt excuse playing police but just keep in mind this is p2p and only have power relative to what you take & give

Like the fact that #SolidCoin operators (in this case, yourself) kickban people for no reason whatsoever?

And what do you base this claim on? I can do the same thing, Bitcoin is controlled by one person. Does it make it true? Usually you need to give the evidence for such bold claims.

SolidCoin's trust nodes aren't operated only by me, others have wallets now that cannot be taken away from them. They are forever out there to be used to sign blocks.

On top of that we have multiple pools creating half the blocks. So if we do the maths :-

SolidCoin . Upto 10 trust nodes can currently operate and create half the blocks (which contain no SC). The other half of the blocks are solved by everyone, and the current breakdown you'd say about 4 big pools or solo operators are there. That's 14 "nodes" solving the majority of SolidCoin blocks.

Bitcoin. Upto 3 nodes creating 90% of the blocks. Everyone else fights over 10% scraps. Since bitcoin security revolves around at least 51% of the power being in "good hands" and 3 people have 90% of the power it puts bitcoins security in a precarious position. Only 2 people in Bitcoin need to decide or have it decided for them (hacked) and bitcoins security is no more.

Bitcoin is so much more centralized than SolidCoin it isn't funny. You have some incorrect belief there is only one person mining or that has control of SolidCoin. Hopefully this shows it's more than one, and less centralization than Bitcoin. Finally there are now 4 developers working on the source code and able to work on it without needing "permission". Everyone else is able to submit pull requests.

https://github.com/solidcoin/solidcoin

If you want to have an opinion on SolidCoin at least make sure it's based in reality and factual eh.

http://eligius.st/~artefact2/

Doesn't seem like this has affected his hashrate at all. 

Actually, I've read his Family Blog and everything points to him being as broke as a joke......quite pathetic actually, so I can see his concerns with maintaining BTC's value, as he must use it to feed his family. It was some of most entertaining 'Coupon Clipping' and Religion garbage that I had ever come across.
I downloaded full mirrors of all of his online personal websites, for future reference.

Unfortunately, everything now seems to be removed from the net, as too many people were given the opportunity to get a glimpse inside the life of such a self-righteous Bible thumper.
He seems to be living on love, prayers and donations from the rest of his family (although with a boycott list, as to which products he will not accept as gifts).
That's right - a real man who let's the rest of his friends & family pay to raise his kids.....CLASSIC. 80 ghash, did you say ?

Again, why would users whine, complain or squirm? A few need only change the ordering of URLs so the largest pool is no longer their primary. The solution is so simple, and has already been effected in a continuous fashion by many individuals to prevent Deepbit from "controlling" Bitcoin. Not that I have anything against Deepbit, they simply offer an excellent service and are the easy choice for first time miners.

However, apparently slush showed support for Luke-jr's actions also ...

... and go back a page and you will find even theymos supporting it:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.678275

might i suggest the title be changed to
Rouge Pool Ops are now the Alt Currency Police

This has all been brought about by one poolop, please do not tar us all with the same brush
thanks
Graet

Untrue. Users have left pools that provided shoddy or unreliable service. Those pools have withered and died. Just skim through the pool sub-forum of the mining section and you will find a few.

There are certainly improvements that can be made to the pool system in bitcoin, of that there is no doubt. But they are improvements in human behavior, not in computing protocols. For instance, pools that grow large enough to reach 25% of total hash power could close their pools to more work.

You don't need to be an engineer to realize that Solidcoin2 is controlled by a single individual. There is nothing a user of Solidcoin2 can do about this.

Nor do you need to be an engineer to realize that Bitcoin pools are comprised of many individuals. Those individuals can leave those pools at any time and the pool owners will be rendered powerless. Could the pool owners act in concert to disrupt the protocol? Yes. Does all the power in Bitcoin still lie with the users of Bitcoin? Yes.

In theory, all bitcoin users can act in concert to change the blockchain any time they see fit.
Users of Solidcoin2 exist at the whim of 1 man.

P.S. You guessed wrong.

No they wouldn't to the user running the legacy client they would see hashing rate falling 51% but still get blocks and confirmations by the remaining 49%.  Miners who refused to switch would still sign blocks for the "old bitcoin" network, clients would see those blocks as valid and the network would continue on as "normal".

It would be those who made a breaking change which were on their own alt-Bitcoin network.  It would be no different than if today you updated miner code to produce a block w/ 100K BTC coinbase reward.

What's your point?! The blocks are of the users of the pools.
You're nonsense.

One of the proposed criteria for deciding on the value of blocks is to favor blocks that have been seen by major stakeholders.  That would include exchanges, known pools, operators of known services, who would sign and somehow distribute messages simply acknowledging having seen a block with hash X and that it is the first block it has seen at that height.  (Such messages of course would have to be out-of-band of the p2p network as we know it.)

An attack chain prepared in secret would never be able to get signed endorsements like this no matter how it was introduced into the network.

"Coiled Coin" could try this out, with its creator adding a feature to the P2P protocol that passes around an "I saw this block" message if it's signed by a trusted person, and adding an option where trusted keys can be added.  A threshold would be defined, where a block not seen by a percentage of trusted people cannot reorg and replace blocks seen by a percentage who have.

Luke can still drive the difficulty of "Coiled Coin" to the moon with empty blocks, but won't be able to replace legitimate blocks mined by others that contain transactions.

You need 51% of the hashing power, not 51% of the users.
If you get that 51% from the pools, users that have not switched will see only "invalid" blocks and will soon switch to the new client.

Since you're not a programmer or network engineer you probably don't realize a few things.

If you think SolidCoin is centralized then Bitcoin is even more centralized. Bitcoin has 3 pools which create 90+% of the blocks. SolidCoin has nowhere near this distribution of block creation being centralized.

Game, set, match. I guess.

because everyone knows your centralized architecture is much better, right?
Hey, it worked for the Fed. 

Your users must enjoy the lottery you built in to your shitcoin.  I also heard that they're stealing money from the CPF.  But whatever, it's not much worse than the Fed, right? 

The sad thing is , the bitcoin proponents act like this exact thing can't happen to Bitcoin. It is simply a matter of scale. Someone hacks deepbit, someone gets upset at Gavin doing some changes (Luke already has threatened along these lines in developer chats) and expect your Bitcoins to be heading towards $0 USD.

Bitcoin is inherently insecure, all these altcoins (including SolidCoin) have pinpointed most of the flaws. Only one chain (SolidCoin 2) has done anything to address the most serious security issues and that is why we are the only alt chain which hasn't had a major attack on it. Luke and co continue to attempt to lie and attack SolidCoin and get nowhere. It's pretty funny all the fail.

No major investmest is going to happen in Bitcoin because it's inherently insecure. It's like a bank telling it's customers that their money is safe purely because they have 49 guards with guns. Then 51 criminals with guns get together and steals the money. With no other security in place it is just a matter of time before it is attacked. Anyone telling you otherwise is merely trying to scam you by selling security snake oil. The biggest scammers are the people like Luke-Jr and gmaxwell who imply this cannot happen in Bitcoin.

Well no you would need to convince 51% of users to update their clients.  They would see the altered reward blocks as invalid and reject them and continue to look for valid blocks.  You are talking about a breaking fork in the Bitcoin network.  Those remaining on old clients would only see "old style" blocks as valid.  Thus some miners would remain to continue that chain, support those users, and collect those rewards.  The miners and users who switch would be on a seperate incompatible network than Bitcoin.

You will never see breaking changes like that.

Think what you wish of Luke-jr's actions, but we did learn something from the coiledcoin fiasco:
You can no longer rely on free hashing power from merged mining to instantly make a new alt/scam coin resilient right from launch.

Going forward, new alt-coins will have to use incompatible mining schemes, and maybe, just maybe, we'll start seeing some real innovation in alt-coins.

BTW one thing that I have been wondering about for a long time is why has none of the alt-coins addressed the issue of the sudden halving of the mining reward after a year or two?
Do they not expect their alt-coin to survive long enough to even reach the halving point? (I.e. they are intended as ponzi scams right from the start.)
Just do a progressive diminution of reward at every difficulty adjustment, it's not that hard.
Then we'll see what effect on mining the reduction of the reward might have.

I would even argue that we should try to change bitcoin itself to start using a progressive reduction of the mining reward to avoid the looming discontinuity.
We only need to convince the pool operators to switch, they collectively control more than half the hashing power.

Please stop saying that he's rolling back blocks.

He has not reversed any confirmed transactions or performed any double spends. He's just continually producing a longer chain that includes only his own blocks (and doesn't process transactions).   You can't use a checkpoint to cut him out because he'll just mine from the top of whatever chain is new can out pace that one too.. not unless you plan on distributing a checkpoint for every block, which makes the system not decentralized at all.


DeathAndTaxes is right about the automatic locking— but it's not just one block thats a problem. Say you lock after six.  Say I'm mr. mischievous and your network locks the chain after 6 blocks.  I get (beg, borrow, steal, build) a bunch of hash power and I mine 12 block— six forking left from some point, six forking right.  then I pick a node in Denver and one in Sydney, and I give each one of the forks... what was one currency is now two, as the two halves (closer to denver nodes vs closer to sydney nodes) will never come to agreement— and any coins that existed before can be independently spent on each half.  I can even target this attack to isolate single nodes or groups of nodes... and I can repeat it to fragment into ever smaller groups.

Locking at one would just make it trivially easy to pull off, but there is no automatic locking height which is technically safe.  You can invent fancier schemes, but they all fall to similar race attacks and allow devastating network partitioning.