Topic: Transactions Withholding Attack - page 9. (Read 27579 times)
Please address the question of whether you are being paid to spread fear re. bitcoin in order to influence the price.
Nope. This is where your theory falls apart. Out-of-band transactions exist, and they exist because fee-less transactions are permitted.
Offchain activity is irrelevant to my attack. You can't predict the future. If offchain becomes the dominant mode of commerce, then my attack will be less useful. But it doesn't make my attack not exist for as long as onchain activity is the norm. You can speculate all you want about the future being not on the blockchain, but I deal with the reality as it stands today. Please don't argue this point further because I will ignore it as it is not relevant. It is a strawman.
[/quote]
You can speculate as much as you like as well. Once again, I don't need to disprove your theory. You need to disprove my objections. Thus far, you have failed to disprove any of them. Not one, and I have provided at least 6 market forces that undermine your theory. I have not even touched upon the technical/protocol reasons your theory is flawed.
The cartel can't grow, because it needs to have a dominate position among miners to start with. It can't happen. Currently, the bitcoin network is more than a 1000 times faster than the fastest unclassified supercomputer on Earth. It would take nation-state level resources for Amazon to even match one of the top 10 mining pools, and they would have to commit those resources to this end for an indefinate period of time.
Nonsense. Amazon controls more servers than the largest mining pools today.
What part is nonsense? First, show me that Amazon has control of 58,000 petaflops of computational power. Then show me how they would be able to commit same to such a project without completely starving their existing businesses for resources. I know that you can't show either, because while Amazon certainly has quite a network, they are actually using it for a great many other business functions.
Furthermore, the 33 petaflop supercomputer sits on more than 40 acres. Amazon doesn't possess 40,000 acres of server farms.
You refuted nothing of the sort. What you are describing is an intentional network split, although asyncronous. The small side of the split always loses, there is no exceptions. No cartel would be willing to commit the resources to acheive this end, because it would be a money pit until they hit 51% of the hashing. Over 58,000 Petaflops. The fastest supercomputer on Earth is 33 Petaflops. And that is now, what will it be in 20 years?
Incorrect. I will let you figure out why that is nonsense.
Prove it.
Quote
The cartel can give 0-confirmation transactions to its customers, because these are going to be repeat customers because the cartel covers so much commerce.
Everyone can give 0-confirm transactions to their customers. That's a question of business risk, not capacity. It happens now. Please search for the fast-transaction problem and/or the vending machine problem.
Don't play dumb just to obfuscate the point.
The point is the cartel doesn't have delay transactions for its customers when it withholds them from the other miners.
YES IT DOES! The nature of the protocol requires that the cartel delay transaction processing for it's customers because it withholds them from other miners. There is no way to avoid it! That's what you can't wrap your head around!
The argument just seems so inane and theoretical and devoid of behavioral analysis and common sense.
That is not an argument. It is 0 specific information content.
I already refuted your specifics.
I need to go eat guys. Be back later.
The government (elite) power comes from control over fiat and you assume they will outlaw the way to take over Bitcoin and capture it?
Sorry you speak nonsense to me.
Fail.
[/quote]
Anyone with a college degree or even self taught student of history ought to know that any elite is not homogenous. There are always divergences of opinion and action within the elite. Some of the elite will seek to protect bitcoin's authenticity, others won't. This is already happening. Again, you miss the most basic, rudimentary understanding of human behavior.
Sidenote: Are you being paid by a hedge fund or other entity that wants to accumulate more bitcoin for cheap? Your overly technical arguments and choice use of jargon seem like they're intended to mislead newbies. Or maybe you are just upset you didn't buy when the price was right. Or maybe you really believe your theoretical nonsense. In any case, you leave yourself enormous wiggle room by saying bitcoin will reach a trillion dollars before going to 0. Gee, thanks for the deep insight, like most human endeavors things will ebb and flow. Aside from self-agrandizing theoreticizing, I don't see much in your posts.
It would take nation-state level resources for Amazon to even match one of the top 10 mining pools, and they would have to commit those resources to this end for an indefinate period of time. Even the NSA couldn't pull this one off, and they tried it more than a year ago.
They did? Do you have a link? (Not because I don't believe you, but because I'd like to read more about it.)
Search this forum for the elusive "mystery miner" of yesteryear.
My post was directed at AnthontMint. Sorry for confusion.
The argument just seems so inane and theoretical and devoid of behavioral analysis and common sense.
The argument just seems so inane and theoretical and devoid of behavioral analysis and common sense.
Now you raised the level of your dialogue and logic to something worth discussing. Thanks.
History has shown this. Yet you are correct I can not prove that cartels will or won't continue to occur as they have throughout history.
My point is that you have to actually show how a rise of a single cartel can happen in the first place. You have not shown this.
History has shown this. Yet you are correct I can not prove that cartels will or won't continue to occur as they have throughout history.
Historicly, cartels rise as a form of regulatory capture. Said another way, cartels form functional monopolies in a regulated industry, within a country, because governments exist. What influence any particular govenrment, or all of them together (unlikley), can have upon the bitcoin economy remains to be seen. However, it cannot rationally be assumed that cartels will rise in an unregulated environment. They never have before today.
Incorrect. You will find that for example in the case of Standard Oil that the initial stage of the cartel was to be more efficient. The regulatory capture came later once it was such a huge operation that they could do regulatory capture and then later to protect against smaller paradigm shifts. So by the end, Rockefeller was a liar about efficiency. But in the start, he was more efficient for example by moving rails closer to farms (the cost from the farm to the rail was often higher than the long-distance rail shipping rate) and consolidating inefficient managements, etc..
You have just verified my point. Standard Oil wasn't a cartel/monopoly to start with, they were the market dominator due to efficiency. So they were the market dominator before they changed their methods to dirty tricks, in order to maintain an untenuable market position. The regulatory capture was critical to maintaining that position. Regulatory capture is (probably) impossible within bitcoin, since bitcoin is, itself, resistant to regulation.
And before you start spouting about Railroad Robber Barons or Standard Oil; the railroads were a government project from the start and Standard Oil was no more of a monopoly than Microsoft was during the 1990's. They were simply market dominators who had not yet been out innovated by new competitors.
hahaha you argue Microsoft didn't have a monopoly with Windows for decades.
They didn't. They had a dominate market position, as I stated. During the 90's they used copyright law and dirty tricks of their own to maintain that market position, but in hindsight, we know that it was already be eroded by GNU/Linux. You're using linux right now, and you do it everytime you do just about anything on the Internet. More than half of all servers are some flavor of unix successor, that was already true when the US Department of Justice was sueing Microsoft for anti-trust (monopoly) violations. It just took a while for the rest of the market to notice the quiet changes underway.
If you disagree, make an argument; rather than just a childish remark.
Normally the market will take advantage of any profit opportunity if it is overall more efficient. So your job if you want to prove it won't happen, is to prove it won't be overall more efficient. This is probably impossible to prove one way or the other since there are too many potential exogenous factors.
You just talked yourself into a circle. I can easily prove that a mining cartel cannot be the most efficient. I can prove it with existing examples, and have literally done this more than once over the past three years with nearly identical claims of cartel/monopoly based theories. The key you're missing is that the protocol doesn't require that miners be paid within the system itself, or even at all. Fee less transactions exist, and they can be paid for out-of-network. Beyond that, off-network transactions are not only possible, they already occur quite regularly; even if they remain a small minority of the total economy. On-network transactions are the high-mark of trustless security, but Satoshi undrstood that not everyone would really require such a high degree of security, nor trustless interactions. In fact, he was counting on parrallel networks (such as Stratum) to develop without his own help that would handle less perfect transactions among parties that trust one another well enough, and thus remove a significant amount of network traffic from the main bitcoin network. By the time your attack could even be tested, the majority of transactions wouldn't even be using the bitcoin network at all, and the main network would be more akin to the ATM network banks use today. More of a backbone of the most risky or sensitive international transactions than what Joe Six Pack uses to order an ebook for his kindle.
Moving most transactions off the blockchain would indeed be a possible fix to my attack. It doesn't however make my attack wrong, because that is not the case today and no one can guarantee it will be so.
Again, I don't need to disprove your theory. I only need to point out objections. If you can't defend your theory, then you don't have one. I can prove that off-network transactions exist today, if I desire. I can tell you how to do some with a MtGox account, and I've done it many times before the Silk Road was brought down. Coin-mixers do them as a matter of their primary function. All that is required for them to grow in scope is for a market force to require them. Something as simple as a percentage rise in the transaction fee would be enough. A government crackdown would certainly do it.
I have history of my side as to the real risk of this attack. I also know the government and banks feel threatened by bitcoin (or at least feign concern, if they realize they can take it over). So there is a lot of motivation to make a cartel.
Motivation alone is not enough. There also must be a credible regulatory path. I don't see one. If there is one, than government regulation is a greater risk than the rise of a single mining cartel.
You haven't see the new laws that you can't root your cell phone in the USA?
I have seen that news. Strangely, my phone is still rooted. If the simple fact that a law against it existed really worked, then the US doesn't have a drug war going on anymore either.
As I have already pointed out, the rise of competing cartels was expected, and planned for, from the early days.
Not my attack. It was never discussed. I've read everything from the early days with Satoshi. They assumed the corporations would be benign.
Dude, that's not even possible. Reading all of that, I mean.
I do my research. And no better place to start, than at the beginning.
You still haven't read all there is to read on this topic. You probably haven't even read all that I've personally written on this topic. I wouldn't want to read all that myself.
Simply saying that Amazon can control the transactions within it's own payment system is one thing, but saying that they can progressively take over all mining by this does not follow. There are simply too many counter incentives to presume this.
Sorry but the logic is clear. If they can withhold a percentage of funding from the network, they gain a parasitic and spiraling advantage over the network hashrate power.
I might be clear to you, but you don't understand the system yet. Amazon can't withhold funding from the network. They can only delay processing of their own transactions.
I have refuted this same point 2X already upthread. See my latest reply to anth0ny.
Just because you say it, does not make it so.
The only way to argue against this is to explain how someone can afford to lose money on mining. Two or more competing cartels? Still not a good outcome.
I've already explained two conditions wherein miners can literally "afford" to lose money on mining. You didn't even bother to respond to them.
Sorry I must have missed that. You can reiterate.
One. Mining as a secondary effect to electro-resistive heating. I.e. you can't undercut the miner who's rig heats his flat. There is also whole threads regarding using asics embeddeding into heat cable to warm pipes.
Two. The Wal-mart|McDonalds|Sears alliance versus the Target|BurgerKind|JCPenny union. Competing cartels can mine at a negative profit, because they're primary business is selling retail products, not mining for bitcoins.
Two or more competing cartels is an outcome that functionally prohibits the complete takeover of the currency, which was the endgame of your attack theory. I can't think of one reason that a consumer should care about any cartels, if the currency continues to function as far as he is concerned. Cartels aren't the risk, a monopoly is the risk, and that is impossible.
Cartels always functionally merge because it is more profitable, i.e. they can charge higher prices with less competition.
