Topic: SC2 Diff drop related to the recent attacks on Bitcoin pools? - page 2. (Read 3831 times)

You're right Clipse - centralization of any kind is a weakness in any p2p network.  Good thing Bitcoin users have the option of many, many pools and even the ddos-proof p2pPool.

What choice to SC users have to avoid centralization? Given your premise, "if you take down all the trusted nodes right now indefninitely, solidcoin will come to a halt forever".

Gee, what sounds worse

How.  The network continued to operate.  Hashing power didn't even decline that much.  Falling BTC prices resulted in more of a decline.  The 3 large pools make nice targets because they are so large.  To bring down a pool requires lots of bandwidth.  Conventional pool operators are vulnerable to botnets.  If anything I think this may be a good thing.  We have seen migration away from the large pools.  The 4 largest pools combined now have less hashing power as % of overall network than prior to the two attacks.  

That was just two attacks.  If the botnets kept it up and attack more often (say one attack every 3 days) more miners would get sick of pools that don't respond and either solo mine, join p2pool or join smaller conventional pools. All improve the security of the network.


There are over a hundred pools (likely more at wiki if often out of date) sustaining an attack against all of them would be difficult.  
Durring the attacks many people DID solomine so not sure why that is "not a chance".  p2pool is currently working now so that is already any option.  Pools are prefered because they reduce volatility but one actually makes slightly more solo mining (pool fees + stales due to server latency + losing transaction fees + potential share witholding attack against pool).  If I had no other choice I would solo mine, my cgminers are setup to auto failover across 3 pools and then go to solo mining..  Hell some crazy people solo mine right now despite having the option of using pools.

Not much.  Looks like around 800 computers.  The attack across major pools was magnitudes larger than that.  IF they are connected it means a botnet operator was just throwing a tiny fraction of their computing power towards SC2 possibly as a test.  When the attack started they stopped everything else to be able to put 100% of botnet power against the major pools.

Really? Please tell me how many cookies did the internetz steal from you, every post of yours contain some childish remarks.


And thats what I said, if you take down all the pools right now indefinitely, bitcoin will come to an halt until everyone either continue solomining(not a chance) or move to something like p2pool as mentioned earlier.

When did bitcoin break down?  When did the network stop running?  When did transactions stop getting confirmatons?

Some pool operators couldn't handle the botnet attack but there is no requirement to use a massive pool.  Hell there is a technology (p2pool) to make a pool completely distributed.  Not only would that make them hardened against botnets it would also mean a pool no longer represents a 51% risk.  A p2pool could have 100% of the network hashing power and would represent no risk to security of the network as each miner works independently.

Let me rephrase then. It just shows how vulnerable bitcoin is atm with the way users are utilising it via centralised pools.

The interesting problems you create when making your block chain "botnet friendly", and that botnet is tiny.  The SC hashing power indicates it has roughly 1600 quad core CPUs hashing.  For the botnet to have ~50% of hashing power it only took 800 average zombie computers (or was running more nodes at reduced load).  Some botnets have 250,000+ zombied computers.

The botnet that attack Bitcoin pools was much larger 800 computers.  Slush indicated his provider shut him off when inbound flood exceeded 5GB/s.  Likely if this 800 computer "dick" is the same botnet then the botnet operator is just using a tiny piece of the computing power to test out SolidCoin.

A 250,000 node botnet would have roughly 99.6% of network hashing power.  It would also eventually mine 1 million coins and become a trusted node and then have complete control of the network.  Of course there is no reason to have 99.6% of hashing power as 51% power = 100% power.  Once an attacker accumulates 1M coins (and thus has an "owned" trusted node to sign their attack blocks) it would only take a pathetic 800 bots to takeover the entire network.

I doubt that will happen because ScamCoin is worthless so nobody with that kind of computing power is going to waste it going after something without value but it means that ScamCoin is going nowhere.  If it remains small it avoids botnets.  If it becomes large it can be smashed by even the tiniest botnets.

I have a couple of questions to the OP:
Who decides to ban people from a network?  
Should anyone have that kind of power?  
Is the network really PEER to PEER (as in equals) if someone can ban someone else from the network?  Isn't that more like king-vassal network?

Only the centralized pools, not Bitcoin. If everyone used p2pool, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

 Bitcoin was in no way broken. The larger Pools were. Two completely different things. It shows the weakness of the mining aspect in too much centralization is all.



Very interesting. Are you able to say just how much hash power it was pointed at SC2 that was gone during BTC pool attacks?  I am not at all familiar with SC2 diff so can't do the math myself.....

Few things can not be manhandled by a pissed botnet of sufficient size.

It would be funny if its true, it just shows even more how vulnerable bitcoin is if it could get manhandled like this and actually broken down ?

And no motivation to ever harm SC2s since it already has more solidcoins than you could shake a stick at

Devious stuff (if true)

If the botnet is also a trusted node it would have even more motivation to attack bitcoin.

Other coins don't have a(n alleged ) buddy  botnet pwning those they consider competitors  

tl;dr, SolidCoin benefits from Bitcoin attack, but not the other alt coins because they are CPU based?

Been following a discussion on BTC-e's shoutbox that made me.. sceptical towards SC2.

I've been never a friend of such theories but this one strikes with logic and looks realistic. Here are some of the facts that seem prooven:

- Two days ago there was a massive strike on Bitcoin by DDossing the major pools. Deepbit, Slush and BTCGuild were taken down
- Two days ago SC2's hashrate came to a sudden downfall with a retarget almost 40% lower

It has been proven that there was a single "client" been mining more or less than 50% of the blocks being referenced to as the "dick" because his miner id on the block exporer was "8=====D".
This "dick" was not online during the attacks. (Would love to point at the Block Explorer but it seems to ignore it or not show its miner_id anymore...)



Sothe discussion on BTC-e was as follows:
Why did noone stop a botnet that has such a power on the network? Even with "cop"-nodes or trusted nodes or whatever theyre called. Consensus between many people here and in the discussionw was that it could be possible to ban a miner from the fork, i havent seen evidence for that and will just continue to move along this assumption for this discussion.

So, why did noone stop the dick from mining? Because a large scale botnet with that MH, should be at about 15 to 20mh, maybe more, must be composed of several thousand computers. Of course harnessing a largge potential for DDOSing.
As we know from Bitcoin ban of a botnet always leads to but one thing: a DDOS. So if such a large scale botnet would have been banned from SC2 the fork would have had to face a massive DDOS. It wouldnt be sufficient to take out the nodes, but imagine someone dossed all pools and all but one exchange just for a few days and dumps the amount of coins this botnet must have. Panic sell, end of the chain.

What is now striking is the coincidence of attacks on bitcoin pools while the botnet was evidently not mining on SC2. We have heard a lot about deals with botherders in the past few days - so has there been such a thing with SC2 investors (dont want to name RS since there is NO PROOF whatsoever for that..) to keep BTC low while SC2 is flourishing? When the diff on Sc2 is low many people can harness their BTC Hashing power to run SC2.. especially NOW that GPU mining is released as well (as i type this seems another strange coincident to me..).

I really dont think that this conspiricy could actually have hapened but as arthur c clarke once wrote about random incidents:

One time is an accident
Two times are coincident
Three times is a plan.

So summed up:
Botnet is allowed to mine a shitload of coins but doesnt dump them on the markets (the markets volumes are just not that high). The Botnet is down while Attacks on BTC Pools happen. Diff drops of course. When diff is low a GPU Miner is released to allow BTC miners to profitable swing to SC..

It all just fits nicely.