Topic: Possible covert mining attack (in progress???) - page 2. (Read 549 times)

Or the hashrate generation for others is simply more fluid and more adaptive.
You make 2$ a day you think about shutting down, you check it up you see you make 5$ maybe I will put those back in use!

With sha256 miners is quite simple, you see the profits you don't have the gear you close the page, especially with this chip drought, with videocards is another story. I've watched those charts in profitability and seems always all other coins are having a spike in profits once the price goes up just as bitcoin does but this is subdued far faster. The profit for MH/s for Eth is already at December levels, for bitcoin is still twice despite actually ETh gaining on BTC in this interval.

Probably China didn't have that much other hashrate in the first place.


Far easier is to put BSV out of its misery, and despite the fear factor that will be triggered I think everyone would be happy with the outcome.

Eth did not tank much in the difficulty.  Likley due to more out of china one or two card rigs.

Ltc / doge with a L7 miner is really good money maker.

3300 watts gets you over 180 usd worth of coins

While the s19 makes 33 usd with the same power use.

My guess is anyone with both L7 and s19 gear is going to turn on all his L7 gear on and leave the s19 off.

As to a stealth attack the op is tripping on acid.

The BCH chain would be attacked not the Btc chain. It is 70x easier to do.

I would argue that it would be done as it would scare the shit out of all pow mining  and the hash power offline is big enough to roll the chain back for over a few years. In a month they could have done this and we wake up in the morning knowing the chain was killed.

China would then announce they are forcing all Chinese builders to build asics just for them and that they are killing off ltc/doge next.

If that happened btc would die without a direct attack.

It really looks like miners for other algos are coming online before SHA ones. Kind of what a lot of people expected with a massive hardware move.
After some very large drops in Scrypt difficulty it has had +14.91% then +3.65% a small drop 0.46% an now it looks like +5% or tomorrow.
ETH is climbing slowly as far as I can tell.
Might just be they are building different / larger facilities for SHA and the other miners which at the moment are more profitable in terms of power vs. revenue are being powered up 1st.

-Dave

Why? Buying and hoarding that much ASICs without using them would be ridiculously expensive and you'll have to outpace the entire network (given stagnant hashrate) as well. It'll make far more sense to control the current 51% of the network and suddenly switch to their own rogue chain. It is far cheaper, or seizing them would be the cheapest. It is far more scary for a sudden percentage of the hashrate to go offline for an extended period of time.

Besides, after that, every SHA256D coins are either worthless or would just fork to something else.

A country the size of China outlawing a market should produce price changes obvious to the most casual observer in markets outside of that country.

Only plausible if coordinated by the CCP as a military takedown of proof of work if not cryptocurrency in general.

Here's the best case for this scenario:

• The CCP already demonstrated they're hostile to cryptocurrency.  
• The timing of Musk's announcement about bitcoin must be considered in light of the difficulties Tesla was having with the CCP prior to that announcement, and their resolution subsequent to that announcement.
• There has been a lot of noise in the financial press about "GPU dumping" from China.  But has anyone noticed the kind of drop in the price of high performance ASIC miners one would expect if Chinese miners were closing up shop?  I have looked and haven't noticed any.

We're still not in "probable" territory though.  Such a coordinated attack by the CCP requires preventing information leaks out of China and there are just too many miners in China and too many ways for information to leak while protecting identities.

That is an interesting theory, however, I would be more worried if hashrate stopped growing as opposed to dropping, imagine the devil or CCP or anyone for that matter was buying all the new gears and most of the used ones that are for sale without making any noise, wouldn't that be scary? but as it stands right now, we know for certain that those gears are not mining on a separate chain.

The proof is simple - if you have enough money to buy the gears that went offline, you can load them on the back of the ship in a few weeks, they are still there, a ton of them is for sale, I can personally arrange an order of a few EH worth of gears if someone is willing to buy  , this isn't a sort of a secret tiny object that someone can hide and work with, you are talking about a few hundred thousands of mining gears, this could be hard to digest if you are not watching the Chinese market closely, but as someone who does this on daily bases ( alongside with a few other members here), we know for certain that what you think is happening is not the case whatsoever.

With that being said, the 51% attack theory is still interesting, do I know for sure that it won't ever happen? nop, is it happening right now using the gears that went offline? most certainly not.

well it could easily be used to kill

BCH
BSV
Xec

or any sha 256 alt.

it is not easy to do for btc.

and op is fantasying to think it would be.  But with good old free speech he is allowed his idea.

Actually the real damage is not what he is saying but that hash was dropped 1/2 by shutting down cloud mining due to most cloud contracts have the we can fuck you when we want to clause.  It has clearly shown that a large builder/ miner/cloud company can 1/2 the hash rate when it wants to. and that it can make sure they have a running farm now earning 2x the coins it did when the diff was 25.04t

To me this has shaken a bit of faith in all coins as it was also done to LTC/DOGE. so the 3 largest asic backed coins BTC LTC/DOGE were played and played hard.

Everything here is confirmable except for the size of Bitmain's farms not in China.
This clearly shows a weakness in the asics due to the amount of control bitmain can do over the hash rate.

Lots of chips flood the market with gear.= yes been done more than once.
no chips = shut the hash off yes been done right now.

Yepp. Serious problem indeed I didn't think about. I always thought there is a reason why there is no rollback protection (which looks easy), but as usual "looks easy" is actually pretty hard/impossible.

I only raised this as a real issue this specific time because of the huge hashing capacity which was provenly freed up recently.

I would 100% agree - usually/anytime else. My theory started that IF (big IF) this one time the CCP colludes with the miners each having their side of the deal. Miners withdraw as much FIAT as they can (with CCP blessing) and CCP can seriously hurt the best/only real blockchain. CCP also likes to be seen omnipotent I think at almost any cost which this attack would definitely enforce.
They can also put the gun to the miners head which makes the deal even sweeter/harder to resists.

And let's stop there.
Because the moment you do this the value of those coins will drop if not to zero pretty closeby it, imagine 4 weeks of transactions getting rolled over, who the hell do you think will use this coin, all aspects of security are destroyed, once this attack happens is clear another one is possible so everyone will simply dump.
So you will end up with the coins/fiat that you exchanged first, worthless coins after the attacks and worthless mining gear as the reward will plummet too in $ terms.
At this point, you're at a loss.

Financial attacks make no sense at this level, the way you picture it this would be an attack to kill the coin and that's it, after such a thing the is no way out of it, who do you think will deal with it anymore? You buy coins at an ATM and 3 weeks later you have no coins? You sold 100k$ worth of stuff and suddenly you have nothing? You traded some shitcoins for BTC and you end up with zero? What about all the miners who have mined at zero income for a month?

Do you really think there will be something after all this chaos?

Yes. That is a typical double spending attack in theory.

As I've said, the cost of such an attack, or at least the opportunity costs is in the neighbourhood of a few million dollars. Whether the exchange is willing or is able to process such a big transaction without at least some precautions in place isn't guaranteed.

The thread is a covert mining attack with the state adversary against Bitcoin. There is no reason why the state would be remotely interested in the profits; as said, the costs of an extended attack is huge with their attacking chain becoming either abandoned or at least largely unpopular with the community. If you're in it for the profit or attempting to recoup any significant part of it, the fiat exchanged must be at least 400 million dollars, given two weeks and even more because your ASICs are now worthless. China isn't interested in doing that, their GDP is 14 trillion USD, and you don't gain enough from an attack like this. An attack from China cannot possibly be profit motivated. If you're not looking to profit from it, mining alongside the chain for extended periods of time only serves to make the attack much more expensive.

Chinese miners are also not interested in that. They've made tremendous investments in mining, they are going to profit more by being honest.

I think there is a security issue right here. If some of the nodes aren't online at a specific time, then they won't know if the blocks were reorg-ed before. Sybil attacks are also a problem in this case. The potential for a network split in this case is far greater.

The main difference that you can gain much much more than just the block reward with the long term attack. Imagine if you hidden mine your longer chain for two weeks. Under that two weeks you can send your real bitcoin to an exchange and withdraw the FIAT or exchange bitcoin for USDC, Monero, etc. That's all on the public chain.

On your hidden chain you send the bitcoin back to yourself to spend the input TXU. So when you publish your longer chain you get your coins back and also can (most likely, depends on jurisdiction, etc.) keep the FIAT and other coins you exchanged. On the other side someone bought bitcoin and it will go back to it's original owner

This is why I think that some rollback limit would be useful. There would be at least a point in time when you can be sure it won't be rolled back. Like an 6 or 12 blocks. Also limit the rollback to once only until you don't reach the roll-back limit (number of blocks) again to prevent rolling back X blocks at a time.

Oh okay, then it's not fabricating transactions.

It doesn't matter except that it slows the propagation of your blocks down by a lot. End result is still the same, fork with a different algorithm and chain. Extended re-orgs are not very common without malicious intent so it wouldn't be difficult to differentiate. If the end result; forcing Bitcoin to change the algorithm and instill fear in the people is the same, whether you just start attacking in real time or release your own alternate chain, then I fail to see what is the difference except the latter is far, far more costly. It's mostly a difference between a few million dollars and a few hundred million dollars, assuming that they don't have to care about the cost of the ASICs nor the space.

There isn't any rules about that, nor would it be implemented realistically. We wouldn't bother to implement any consensus change that doesn't deal with the root of the problem; rather, I believe that invalidating that chain and changing to an algorithm would be the most obvious and direct way to deal with it.

It is an attack that threatens Bitcoin, that is correct. Whether it is viable to do so, is a whole other question.

Of course I can. I can have 1 Bitcoin and I definitely have unlimited addresses. I can send this any time to any addresses in any amount, hence I am able to create an unlimited number of valid transactions. The only thing I lose is the transaction fee. But in the current "attacking longer chain" case it wouldn't matter as I am the miner too who is receiving that fee. So the attacking blocks would be full if I want them to be (canceling any consensus change requiring non empty blocks). I can also include any number of chosen (by me) real transactions from the public blockchain as long as it's valid on my partial chain (eg. coming from an unspent UTXO).

I think this kind of possible attack fits the current consensus hence it's not "forbidden". I think it's still an attack judging by the roots of Bitcoin, but technically (by the current consensus) you are not forced (or even rewarded!) to publish the mined blocks as long as you have the longest accumulated PoW and you sure of it.

You can't fabricate transactions.

Truth is, the economic majority probably wouldn't want to continue using a chain which was manipulated by an external party. The only rational way out is to rollback the chain to before the 51% attack and continue mining with a different algorithm. It would be as if the attack has never happened. Announcing prior to the attack would just result in majority of the exchanges halting deposits and I would be surprised if there isn't any mechanism to monitor for extended re-orgs on exchanges, considering how many altcoins are already susceptible to these attacks.

They have no choice. As long as someone else has the capability to build a longer chain with a greater accumulated PoW, everyone will re-org to that chain. If we do discover some malicious intent, then I don't believe it would be a huge issue to just abandon that malicious chain in favour of the honest one.

underrated point. people think that if you get 51% of the hashrate its game over. in reality, there are still 49% of people out there mining, competing against you. they've already mined a crap ton and do NOT want the chain they've been mining to be the invalid one.

meanwhile the stealth attack chain started that's had several weeks of mining is already falling behind cause it started with only 15% of the hash rate and waited many weeks to add more hash rate. the gap would be too large since the drop in difficulty took several adjustment periods.

It is close, but the attacker could also get more hashrate with new machines (I mean now we are talking about single digit %). So the already disappeared hashrate maybe less than the current (possible) attacking hash rate. Hope not though  

I think if you wanna do one time max damage this is the way. Overwrite a month of bitcoin's history with empty blocks (or blocks with made up transactions) and that could be a close to be kill shot. Not to mention if you leak the date a few hours in advance and all the people who sent bitcoin anywhere in that months send it back to themselves... on  the new longer chain before the original transaction could be re-broadcasted.

Thanks for all the inputs guys, I hope we are all right and this is not an attack. I am more relaxed for sure seeing that no one is worried (am I? ). Let's prepare for the cheap miners for sale;)

Well reasoned and common sense post.

AT op it is not over night it is over a long period of time.
https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/difficulty-chart

diff of 25.0465 from 14 to may 29
diff of 21.0477 from may 30 to june 13
diff of 19.9328 from june 14 to July 3
diff of 14.3630 from July 3 to now

and maybe a drop to 12.8-13.1 July 20

So yeah even if we go to 12.8 that is 48.89 % drop.

In order for 50% drop to be true we need to drop to a diff of  12.2 around July 22

but the op has also failed to realize that BCH is way way way way more likely to be getting stealth attacked.

Since the amount of hash off line is huge as compared to BCH or BHA or XEC or BSV

in fact maybe this is being done to all of those coins and not BTC at all.