Topic: Transactions Withholding Attack (Read 27527 times)

Or it could simply be because your claims were flawed, I, knowing the ins and outs of bitcoin, understood that you're wrong, but every time I try to come up with examples to demonstrate why you are wrong, you shut them down with either claims that what I point out has already been discussed (it wasn't), links to other posts that repeat the same thing I'm claiming is wrong, or just outright adhominem attacks. And I'm not the only one, either.

A lot of people do that. None of their Ignore buttons are so dark. No, the reason for so much anger is because Anonymint rehashes the old stuff that was discussed, debated, and settles two+ years ago, then when people point out to him that this stuff is no longer an issue, or that he doesn't understand something and that his claims are false, he resorts to telling people how he is so very smart and that everyone should listen to him, and that anyone who points out the flaws in his claims is stupid. Then it just gets worse, when any new fault that people find in his claims are just replied to with links that don't really lead anywhere or say anything othen than the original claim being disputed.

In short, AnonyMint is an uninformed egotistical douchebag. That's why the hate.

And FYI,


The ONLY reason I even mentioned my IQ to begin with was because when AnonyMint first started posting, and then first started to get counterarguments explaining to him that he may be wrong, he was the one who brought up the whole "I am so smart, and I know people with high IQ, and I am so smart, and you are wrong" shtick. The first time I mentioned anything about IQ was in a reply to him, saying, "btw, you're not the only one with a high IQ here, *hint-hint*  "

I am glad you noticed he was delaying replies. That was also one of the factors I used to determine he was not likely one person.


Exactly the opposite. I make far fewer assumptions about the choices of nodes. See the Cracking the Code thread in the Bitcoin discussion subforum where they assume that 100% of the nodes will run a centralized designed client software. And where they assume that the convergence of nodes will be to the attacked chain. I make no assumptions. I call it a risk.

Since when did 100% become more likely than a range of possibilities? That defies a fundamental comprehension of entropy, chaos and nature.


Rather I assume that miners can't continue if their electricity costs more than the income they receive. That seems to be a basic accepted economic fact.

And he will again I am sure try to argue the same non-point he made upthread, which I refuted already upthread. Not every miner is running cheaper electricity (i.e. getting it for lower cost by extracting heat, etc), and those who aren't will be first to go bankrupt. Then later when only those with the cheapest electricity are still mining, then ditto them. Don't assume that Amazon can't run the same efficiencies. And then my point applies which is they drive the difficulty higher, but they parasite their % of the transactions.

MoonShadow continues to miss the point that if the cartel can withhold its share of the transactions for the mining, while factoring this into its profit on mining, then the rest of the miners have to compete with a higher difficulty yet they don't receive the extra income for doing so. Thus assuming Amazon can run their mining at the same efficiency as other miners, those other miners will be mining at a return-on-investment loss w.r.t. to their hardware and electricity costs. MoonShadow assumes that some miners can leverage clever means to obtain net lower cost energy that Amazon (the cartel) would not be able to. The only way this could be true is if that energy was obtained in low economy-of-scale that would be too small for Amazon to pursue, e.g. searching out small streams for micro-hydropower. So by definition, these small economies-of-scale wouldn't comprise most of the mining. If anything, ASICs are raising the economies-of-scale.

He still won't understand that basic math. So he will repeat his same non-point.


Noise sounds good. But is completely devoid of relevant information content. I will not explain.


If I am so out-of-my league then how come I keep dissecting the technical analysis within minutes of reading a white paper:

Here I identified the flaws in BitShares proof-of-stake proposal within 5 minutes:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3805394

Here I showed the P2Pool is vulnerable to a share withholding attack:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3715641

Here I solved the selfish-mining problem that has been plastered all over the news lately:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/#comment-1136318528

CoinCube my suggestion is shut up. Because if they can't turn you against me, I expect they will then try to discredit you.

The reason I don't repeat what is written already upthread is because fact is that most people can't process a complex model in their mind. So they try to section off parts of the model and address it piecemeal. This is what the continued postings have been about. And that is why they can't understand the model.

And it doesn't matter how much of my time they waste, they will never get the model until they are ready to.

I WILL NOT ALLOW THEM TO FILIBUSTER MY PROGRAMMING TIME ANY MORE.

THERE WILL BE NO MORE REPLIES FROM ME IN THIS THREAD.

It is time to kick ass. Enough talk.

---

Edit: anth0ny, is this you acting like an inane fool over at hackingdistributed?

http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/25/block-propagation-speeds/#comment-1140084768


And we will continue to have idiots who don't understand the profit model of a cartel, which was clearly explained in the thread.

AnonyMint is not out of his league in economics.  That is to say, that he is obviously capable of understanding, and seems to have some kind of professional education in the topic.  However, he spends a great deal of time restating commonly held economic myths in a somewhat novel way.  It seems to me that he is either self-taught and young, or his professional education in Economics is incomplete.  He understands it like a promising student. 

That said, I agree with Rassah on his overall assessment.  Even mastery of Economics (which AnonyMint has not acheived, imo) is not enough to understand Bitcoin.  It's not even close.  I had to learn a great deal about subjects that I was little better than a layman; including but not limited to, cryptography and other high math, psychology and programming.  I am far from a master of these topics even now, but I am far better than a layman in each; and at a minimum understand the roles they play in Bitcoin.  Also, I was here when Satoshi was still posting.  I know some other things that aren't even mentioned in the white paper regarding security, some that are already in the main client, others that are not; that complicate (although don't render impossible) the execution of several general methods of attacking the blockchain or the network.  I know, personally, that Satoshi foresaw much more than most of us understood.  Bitcoin's elegant design was not luck.  Personally, I came to the conclusion that the Satoshi on this forum was only a front man for a team of pros; because even thought a true polymath could do this, he often had some rather large delays between the asking of hard questions and their associated responses, implying to me that he was consulting someone out of view.  Redardless, Satoshi (& company) did not expect that mining nodes would remain fair and trustworthy with one another.  He/She/They fully expected that some major nodes would try to game the system to their own advantage, and that they can be expected some measure of success; but since these activities can be detected over time, that those nodes would be retaliated against in various ways.  This is one reason that I, personally, have real doubts that Proof of Stake has any real future in cryptocurrency, since staking by it's nature assumes that nodes with high stakes won't turn malicious, and thus there is some level of trust placed on those 'supernodes'.  Bitcoin does not have supernodes.

And it's in the retaliation aspect, not his analysis of (limited in scope) economic incentives that his attack vector collapses.  He makes too many assumptions about how other nodes will respond.  He assumes that all (non-negligible) nodes will react in what he considers to be the highest profit seeking manner; thus completely ignoring the fact that many nodes have economic incentives to resist the formation of a cartel, that many nodes have economic incentives to try to outcompete and otherwise undermine the primary cartel membership (in this case Amazon, and because Amazon has real competitors, just not direct ones) and that many nodes have no significant economic incentive in either case, but do have a vested interest in the network's 'status quo'.  While he can present his attack, he doesn't respond to objections to his attack with any arguments, only insults and implications that he has already addressed such objections earlier.  I've read the thread, he's done no such thing; at least not in a rational and non-hostile manner.  Many of us have grown tired of his childish trolling masked as a somewhat intellectual debate.

I expounded on this:

Indeed it is
I'm guessing you won't see the humour in that, though

Sorry for the delay in replying to this sincere post. I got inundated with noise as you can surely see above.


Nice try, but this is technically incorrect.

The orphan rate only affects a very tiny % of the blocks found by necessity otherwise the network would diverge into forks.

If you are arguing that Amazon doesn't have the connectivity to propagate its blocks to pools where the hash rate is concentrated, I think not many would agree with you.

Thus most of the time Amazon's (the cartel's) blocks will propagate.

If you said Bitcoin would alter the protocol to refuse to process Amazon's customers payments by refusing Amazon's blocks (any block where they hadn't seen already many or most of the transactions in the block), I think it would harm Bitcoin immensely. The crypto-currency needs to be all inclusive otherwise the potential for strong competitors and forking arise. The protection against this attack is simple! Zero transaction fees and perpetual coin rewards. So simple.

Who wouldn't love a zero transaction fee coin! The main use of Bitcoin other than speculation is money transfers.

The rest of what you wrote thus doesn't apply.

See this is yet another example of why people think I don't understand, when in fact their technical knowledge is too limited to realize that I understand and they have missed something that causes them to be overconfident in their analysis.

The proof in the real world will come soon. Enough of this talk!

Economics is inherently difficult to falsify thus contention can reign.


Economists can say what ever they want, because it is very difficult to prove them wrong in a way that shuts them up. They will always find believers for their snake oil.

Yet Bitcoin is different...


Two weeks? Six months at least.

And it doesn't matter what you think. The proof will be clear soon.

That's because my IQ is only a low 63.

Even that low I understand how the blockchain works. You don't.

The average IQ of blacks and American natives (other than those who migrated from Europe, e.g. the 5% Cherokee of which I am) is in fact lower than whites.

Also they commit more violence.

That is undeniable fact. It doesn't mean I agree with James' racism. Note the difference between discriminating illogically on race and forming logical decisions about race based in fact.

I would not assume every black man is not intelligent. I would look at each person individually. Yet it is a fact, that if you want to drive socialism, then filling up the country with lower IQ races is a reasonable strategy.

In fact, I grew up in inner-city Baton Rouge and New Orleans and was in schools where my sister and I were the only white kids, and my hair was always oily because every student wanted to feel my fine hair as they had never touched a white person before. I watched my cousin get her ear lopped off by a black attacker on the porch of my grandmother's house, and I couldn't get outside to help because I was looking through the bedroom window. So to accuse me of being rascist is ludicrous. I have had innumerable friends of all races.

So my view is much more nuanced than James' and is closer to Eric S Raymond's views on racism.

How you conflate my objectivism and not conflating issues that most people conflate, to eugenics is another example of dumb or insolent people conflating everything.

I wrote an email to the guy who claims to have the highest IQ ever measured and told him that sterilizing the low IQ as he was proposing would be a disaster, for numerous reasons including but not limited to:

1. knowledge is not exclusively generated by those who inherit from high IQ parents
2. IQ is not a sole determinant of how mankind remains resilient.
3. Knowledge anneals from accretive processes which are path dependent and chaotic, i.e. non-deterministic and serendipity
4. Lopping off the lower half of the IQ bell curve would create a new bell curve in the upper half and shift the same conceptual issues to it.
5. IQ is not the sole determinant of intelligence, which is a more diverse phenomenon than 'g'.
6. IQ is not the only way humans adapt to challenges.



It is difficult to discern from that short description your level of expertise. Please I don't want to turn this thread into a discussion that is way off-topic.


Of course there is so much material out there to learn, perhaps only a polymath can really consume any where close to a majority of it.


I still can't correlate your description of your abilities to your entire lack of comprehension of this thread.

However, there is a very plausible explanation. Your feeling of animosity towards me (or anyone who challenges Bitcoin your God) shut down your desire to read and consider it carefully. You were predisposed to flying off the handle and prejudging it, because you've encountered so many crackpots over the years in various forums, etc.

It could also my slacker style of communication where I don't carefully construct my prose and OP to make it more comprehensible in small morsels.

I wasn't boasting. You quoted me out-of-context. Rassah first boasted that he had 160 IQ and then that spawned a discussion about what 160 IQ would really entail.

The lack of reading comprehension here is stifling.

Even further upthread I corrected someone who said I claimed to have 160 IQ and said I never claimed that and that my IQ was probably some where between 125 and 150 and that IQ measurements don't capture all aspect of intelligence.

So you have just proven that either you didn't read the thread entirely or that you are not capable to always remember everything you read.

I would advise reading it again (the posts on economics) since we are talking about IQ in this thread I was a Mensa member for 3 years before letting my membership expire. Despite that I think I had to read them both four or five times. I absolutely agree that they are very Difficult to digest.

I think much of the anger directed at AnonyMint is because he is challenging something people cherish Bitcoin.
Honestly, however, nothing any of us say or do in this forum will change what happens with bitcoin. Bitcoin will succeed or fail based on its merits.

The only impact this forum has is to help us few individuals who bother to read it make wise choices.