And...it happened.
Surprised? I wasn't.
Topic: The Bitcoin Conference and the (small) success of Terracoin (Read 2017 times)
When TRC was released one of the first things I said back then (november or october) was that once someone gets an ASIC they will point it to TRC and fuck the chain over.
And...it happened.
Surprised? I wasn't.
And...it happened.
Surprised? I wasn't.
Moderator: Morgan Massens, Panelists: Chris Larsen (Ripple), Mark Friedenbach (Freicoin), Charles Lee (Litecoin), Dennison Bertram (Terracoin)
discuss alt-chains at the Bitcoin 2013 Conference in San Jose, California, May 19, 2013, hosted by the Bitcoin Foundation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iir3_dYmK8
Oh thats a bit difficult to watch... discuss alt-chains at the Bitcoin 2013 Conference in San Jose, California, May 19, 2013, hosted by the Bitcoin Foundation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iir3_dYmK8
I'm looking forward to seeing the video when it comes out, do you know when and where that will be?
Video of the panel? I believe it will eventually be posted at http://www.bitcoin2013.com/. No idea when.
Difficulty adjustments are one area that no one can deny alt-coins have innovative, out of shear necessity of course. So far we have seen several solutions, the per block PPC adjustment, the TRC time live readjustment and the FRC (just about to be forked too) carefully tuned parameters. We now have a broad array of solutions that range from very aggressive (TRC radically different in that in can change live next block difficulty) too very conservative (FRC which preserves the mechanics of BTC difficulty but just tunes the formula), PPC looks to be in the middle on the spectrum.
I'm looking forward to seeing the video when it comes out, do you know when and where that will be?
I'm looking forward to seeing the video when it comes out, do you know when and where that will be?
I'm a big proponent of Terracoin, and am currently developing services for it.
Any government bureaucracy can't move fast enough tool that kind of power, much less understand what Bitcoin is till its too late. Bitcoin has been around for years before the decided to actually pay some sort of attention now. Do you really expect them to be able to tool up millions of dollars worth of ASICs if they are still using internet explorer 6?
I was the one who asked the question about the difficulty attack. I'll recap what it looks like here:
A nation state "wakes up" to bitcoin one day, and decides they don't like it. Let's use China as the example, because they have capital controls thus there's a reasonable argument for why they might want bitcoin to go away, and they the resources to perform this kind of attack.
First the attackers try firewalling bitcoin, only to discover that it keeps popping back up as users figure out how to circumvent their censors digitally through technologies like tor, or even physically by trading physical bitcoins.
So then they ask their scientists if there's another way to destroy it, and the scientists do their homework and devise the following plan:
1. Print a massive quantity of asic chips. They're probably mostly going to be manufactured there anyway.
2. Start hashing, driving the difficulty up, say, by a factor of 10000
3. Wait until just after a difficulty adjustment, then
4. Stop hashing all at once
At this point, the bitcoin network fails. It can no longer process transactions because none of the miners can find a single block, therefore no transactions are verified. Furthermore, the downward difficulty adjustment which usually takes about 2 weeks now takes about 20000 weeks, or some 370 years.
Confidence in bitcoin is shaken.
So now what? Undoubtedly the community comes together to try and fix this. (In the case of Terracoin, perhaps this didn't happen simply because there wasn't enough at stake.) The miners, developers, and merchants get together and hard fork the chain in order to manually reset the difficulty. Bitcoin is revived! Briefly.
A few days later, China performs the same attack again, forcing another hard fork. The cat-and-mouse continues. Mainstream users begin walking away from the currency in droves. Price plummets. Eventually, though, Bitcoin's hashing algorithm is changed, rendering the Chinese hardware useless.
The next attack comes weeks or months later, after the Chinese have had time to build the new ASIC (or GPUs for scrypt mining, whatever).
In the meantime, every time the attack happens, transactions are reversed (for those that are unlucky enough to have been relying on the wrong chain), merchants are unable to use bitcoin for periods lasting hours and possibly days after each attack. The devs start seriously considering a whitelist for miners so only known "nice guys" can play, and the days of a truly decentralized currency are numbered. By this time, bitcoins are trading for 10 cents a piece, and even the true believer types have mostly switched to an alt coin, which can survive only by virtue of being too small for China to care..
There, that grim enough for ya? :-D
Your doomsday prediction is a little iffy. This is why we have altcoins. If a coin fails, then another one will take its place. In economics 101 they tell you to diversify(ie don't put 100% in bitcoin). A nation state "wakes up" to bitcoin one day, and decides they don't like it. Let's use China as the example, because they have capital controls thus there's a reasonable argument for why they might want bitcoin to go away, and they the resources to perform this kind of attack.
First the attackers try firewalling bitcoin, only to discover that it keeps popping back up as users figure out how to circumvent their censors digitally through technologies like tor, or even physically by trading physical bitcoins.
So then they ask their scientists if there's another way to destroy it, and the scientists do their homework and devise the following plan:
1. Print a massive quantity of asic chips. They're probably mostly going to be manufactured there anyway.
2. Start hashing, driving the difficulty up, say, by a factor of 10000
3. Wait until just after a difficulty adjustment, then
4. Stop hashing all at once
At this point, the bitcoin network fails. It can no longer process transactions because none of the miners can find a single block, therefore no transactions are verified. Furthermore, the downward difficulty adjustment which usually takes about 2 weeks now takes about 20000 weeks, or some 370 years.
Confidence in bitcoin is shaken.
So now what? Undoubtedly the community comes together to try and fix this. (In the case of Terracoin, perhaps this didn't happen simply because there wasn't enough at stake.) The miners, developers, and merchants get together and hard fork the chain in order to manually reset the difficulty. Bitcoin is revived! Briefly.
A few days later, China performs the same attack again, forcing another hard fork. The cat-and-mouse continues. Mainstream users begin walking away from the currency in droves. Price plummets. Eventually, though, Bitcoin's hashing algorithm is changed, rendering the Chinese hardware useless.
The next attack comes weeks or months later, after the Chinese have had time to build the new ASIC (or GPUs for scrypt mining, whatever).
In the meantime, every time the attack happens, transactions are reversed (for those that are unlucky enough to have been relying on the wrong chain), merchants are unable to use bitcoin for periods lasting hours and possibly days after each attack. The devs start seriously considering a whitelist for miners so only known "nice guys" can play, and the days of a truly decentralized currency are numbered. By this time, bitcoins are trading for 10 cents a piece, and even the true believer types have mostly switched to an alt coin, which can survive only by virtue of being too small for China to care..
There, that grim enough for ya? :-D
Any government bureaucracy can't move fast enough tool that kind of power, much less understand what Bitcoin is till its too late. Bitcoin has been around for years before the decided to actually pay some sort of attention now. Do you really expect them to be able to tool up millions of dollars worth of ASICs if they are still using internet explorer 6?
Don't a lot of the newer coins like PPC and Novacoin retarget the difficulty dynamically? I suspect one serious difficulty attack and bitcoin would be re-released to do the same.
I was the one who asked the question about the difficulty attack. I'll recap what it looks like here:
A nation state "wakes up" to bitcoin one day, and decides they don't like it. Let's use China as the example, because they have capital controls thus there's a reasonable argument for why they might want bitcoin to go away, and they the resources to perform this kind of attack.
First the attackers try firewalling bitcoin, only to discover that it keeps popping back up as users figure out how to circumvent their censors digitally through technologies like tor, or even physically by trading physical bitcoins.
So then they ask their scientists if there's another way to destroy it, and the scientists do their homework and devise the following plan:
1. Print a massive quantity of asic chips. They're probably mostly going to be manufactured there anyway.
2. Start hashing, driving the difficulty up, say, by a factor of 10000
3. Wait until just after a difficulty adjustment, then
4. Stop hashing all at once
At this point, the bitcoin network fails. It can no longer process transactions because none of the miners can find a single block, therefore no transactions are verified. Furthermore, the downward difficulty adjustment which usually takes about 2 weeks now takes about 20000 weeks, or some 370 years.
Confidence in bitcoin is shaken.
So now what? Undoubtedly the community comes together to try and fix this. (In the case of Terracoin, perhaps this didn't happen simply because there wasn't enough at stake.) The miners, developers, and merchants get together and hard fork the chain in order to manually reset the difficulty. Bitcoin is revived! Briefly.
A few days later, China performs the same attack again, forcing another hard fork. The cat-and-mouse continues. Mainstream users begin walking away from the currency in droves. Price plummets. Eventually, though, Bitcoin's hashing algorithm is changed, rendering the Chinese hardware useless.
The next attack comes weeks or months later, after the Chinese have had time to build the new ASIC (or GPUs for scrypt mining, whatever).
In the meantime, every time the attack happens, transactions are reversed (for those that are unlucky enough to have been relying on the wrong chain), merchants are unable to use bitcoin for periods lasting hours and possibly days after each attack. The devs start seriously considering a whitelist for miners so only known "nice guys" can play, and the days of a truly decentralized currency are numbered. By this time, bitcoins are trading for 10 cents a piece, and even the true believer types have mostly switched to an alt coin, which can survive only by virtue of being too small for China to care..
There, that grim enough for ya? :-D
A nation state "wakes up" to bitcoin one day, and decides they don't like it. Let's use China as the example, because they have capital controls thus there's a reasonable argument for why they might want bitcoin to go away, and they the resources to perform this kind of attack.
First the attackers try firewalling bitcoin, only to discover that it keeps popping back up as users figure out how to circumvent their censors digitally through technologies like tor, or even physically by trading physical bitcoins.
So then they ask their scientists if there's another way to destroy it, and the scientists do their homework and devise the following plan:
1. Print a massive quantity of asic chips. They're probably mostly going to be manufactured there anyway.
2. Start hashing, driving the difficulty up, say, by a factor of 10000
3. Wait until just after a difficulty adjustment, then
4. Stop hashing all at once
At this point, the bitcoin network fails. It can no longer process transactions because none of the miners can find a single block, therefore no transactions are verified. Furthermore, the downward difficulty adjustment which usually takes about 2 weeks now takes about 20000 weeks, or some 370 years.
Confidence in bitcoin is shaken.
So now what? Undoubtedly the community comes together to try and fix this. (In the case of Terracoin, perhaps this didn't happen simply because there wasn't enough at stake.) The miners, developers, and merchants get together and hard fork the chain in order to manually reset the difficulty. Bitcoin is revived! Briefly.
A few days later, China performs the same attack again, forcing another hard fork. The cat-and-mouse continues. Mainstream users begin walking away from the currency in droves. Price plummets. Eventually, though, Bitcoin's hashing algorithm is changed, rendering the Chinese hardware useless.
The next attack comes weeks or months later, after the Chinese have had time to build the new ASIC (or GPUs for scrypt mining, whatever).
In the meantime, every time the attack happens, transactions are reversed (for those that are unlucky enough to have been relying on the wrong chain), merchants are unable to use bitcoin for periods lasting hours and possibly days after each attack. The devs start seriously considering a whitelist for miners so only known "nice guys" can play, and the days of a truly decentralized currency are numbered. By this time, bitcoins are trading for 10 cents a piece, and even the true believer types have mostly switched to an alt coin, which can survive only by virtue of being too small for China to care..
There, that grim enough for ya? :-D
I don't follow any of the alt coins but I sat in the audience during the panel you're referring to and I agree. If nothing else, the (serious) alt coins help us understand and anticipate potential weaknesses in Bitcoin.
I'm sure the "difficulty attack" has been discussed elsewhere but maybe this might be a good place to recap what happened for those of us who weren't directly affected and so might not have paid attention to it.
I'm sure the "difficulty attack" has been discussed elsewhere but maybe this might be a good place to recap what happened for those of us who weren't directly affected and so might not have paid attention to it.
I had a chance to talk at the conference about Terracoin a bit on the alt-coin panel, and the troubles it has faced along the way. The questionable future of Terracoin aside, it was satisfying to see a general acknowledgement that the problems Terracoin faced regarding the difficulty attacks with ASICS is a real concern that Bitcoin should keep in mind. Even Avalon noted in their talk that the danger from large has power on bitcoin network could come in the form of a difficulty attack rather then a 51%.
So, Terracoin isn't the future. But there is real satisfaction knowing that Terracoin as an alt-coin really did live up to the idea of what an alt-coin should be. A place to experiment with the mechanics of Bitcoin on not just a protocol level but on a wider social and economic level as well. I think that by seeing what happened to Terracoin and our experiments with Terracoin, we have not only learned something ourselves as the people involved with Terracoin itself, but the wider bitcoin community has benefited as well.
Congrats Terracoin!
So, Terracoin isn't the future. But there is real satisfaction knowing that Terracoin as an alt-coin really did live up to the idea of what an alt-coin should be. A place to experiment with the mechanics of Bitcoin on not just a protocol level but on a wider social and economic level as well. I think that by seeing what happened to Terracoin and our experiments with Terracoin, we have not only learned something ourselves as the people involved with Terracoin itself, but the wider bitcoin community has benefited as well.
Congrats Terracoin!
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