Topic: Unattanium: Broken by design. (Status: Proven broken) (Read 5018 times)

I mined 18.87% of the chain that won. I stopped mining, because I believed my point had been proven. There were three fights for control of the chain. I won 3, and lost 2, I believe.


Well, I was hoping to try to clarify what EXACTLY the definition of a successful attack is, with the developer. But, he was not interested in facts, just hand waving 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' when I tried to nail stuff down.  See logs pasted earlier.

So, I got to define what a successful attack was. No-one's laughed at me, apart from the unat co-scammers, so I think that's pretty much a success.


OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD This is EXACTLY MY POINT. Are you NOT PAYING ATTENTION? SERIOUSLY?

I controlled the chain, with 18.7% of the blocks found.


Well, that at least we are in agreement on.


No. Now that's an out and out lie. I wrote it. 100%. Myself. I quoted two things, which I highlited, indented, and cited. This has been accused of me several times, without proof. And I know that it's not provable because I wrote it myself.

I'm skipping bits here, because you're ranting off about things that aren't really relevant.

Oh, really? I'd love for you to prove that - link to an orphaned block in the block explorer.

Here, here's a little place for you to link to it:

I'm skipping a pile of other stuff, because it's all dependent on this fallacy. Feel free to prove yourself right, and I'll address them all, but, as I know you can't, the rest of it is rubbish.


('He' is referring to the Dev in this context)

No. I asked the dev, specifically, if he will increase the block time, if I proved it was insecure. He refused to answer that. He vaguely answered that he will fix 'problems'. He has, however, been adamant that he will never change the block time. That's why I wanted him to answer that.


Is there any other reason you can provide for continuing to hype a provably broken coin? 

Let's take a step back. If we take your view that my attack (which was attack 2) didn't work, and is infeasible, then the coin is still broken for many other reasons. (Attack 1, Attack 3, Difficulty heterodyne, and Oracle are the four that jump immediately to mind).


Yep. That's what I'm saying. Here, let me clarify: I believe the dev of Unattainium is planning to steal coins,  money, or other valuables, from people.

Is that clear enough for you? Would you like me to write it down and take a photo of me holding it?  I'm quite happy to stand up and be visible. I don't skulk around in the shadows and steal from people.


Well. If you look like shit, smell like shit, and act like shit, you're going to have to expect people to assume you are shit.  And so far, the coin and the dev has proven itself to be exactly that.

Thanks for taking the time to examine the document and verify that all statements by x-rob are FALSE.

The title of his document was "8 Second block times are insecure".  Nothing has proven UNAT to be insecure.  Many have said that anything under 30 seconds blocks are insure, which may be true for other altcoins, but none have tested this against UNAT which was developed by #Unattainium to be extremely fast and secure.  UNAT creates auto-creates checkpoints.


BTCBTC
DoubleDD

Rob Thomas (aka xrobau aka X-Rob), Gladstone, QLD, Australia, You wanted it that way:

You claim to have successfully attacked Unattainium with 7% net hash rate.   

This is a lie.
I showed You days ago, that You didn't mine more than 50%

In fact You mined exacly 18.87% (10 blocks You found / 53 found during Your "attack")
Your answer was:
After I provided a clear and undeniable proof, You still speak of a successfull attack.
Now everyone's alarm bells should ring, since we know, it's impossible to attack a block chain with obtaining just 18.87% of the blocks!
This proven nonsense is still part of Your inflammatory pamphlet on Google Docs. Everyone interested should take a look at that toilet paper! Most of it is true (he copy pasted most parts), it's describing >50% attacks, but when it's comming to Unattainium the air is becomming thin.

So let's continiue:
I commented his paper at Google docs about 50 hours ago:

His answer was:
We got two outright lies in here and a wrong assumption.

To the wrong assumption:
Well, this shows You don't even know the basics how coins work. This is probably the most exposing statement You made, since You brought FUD to Unattainium.

The lies:
First part is true, a block explorer won't show orphans, at least here is something You know, not much, but for You quite a lot.

Second part is a lie.
Proof (I know, You like proofs, though You never delivered):

To that time there were two pools online. Your "attack" covered blocks 34221-34273 (53 blocks), as You said in the paper. Your address is 19pavgAuCh4Jr48XgpJEqggkUiFgMe3A97.

So let's check the pools for orphans (We remember, You said there were hundreds):


Surprise, surprise, not a single orphan. You lied again. (Status: proven)
Before You accuse me of having manipulated the image, check Yourself (tho You know the truth): coin-miners.info, hardcoreminers.com

I count 16 blocks at coin-miners.com and 21 at hardcoreminers.com plus Your 10. Makes 47 blocks out of 53. So we got most of them, rest were probably mined by the dev on localhost.
It might sound weird to You, but I think he had no thousands of orphans.

More lies? Here we go:

Hmpf, a drop in the diff is showing an attack? Interesting thought, but we continiue with the lie.

As You can see in the picture, the diff went up as You threw in some hash. My eyes ain't the best, admitting I should cosider getting glasses, but I see an increased hash rate. Sorry Rob.

Just in case someone got doubts, that Rob said this in the comments, I made a screenshot.

There are many more things Rob said that are just plain stupid in this thread, that google doc or on Unat's IRC channel, hard impossible to list them all.
E. g. he asked the dev about 10 times, if he's allowed to attack Unattainium and if dev "fixes" the coin in case he's successful. Dev agreed about 5 times. Then he stopped communication for obvious reasons.
What did Rob?
He claimed that the dev won't fix his coin after a successful attack. That's Rob.
Rob won't even accept, that his "attack" failed, even after this post. That's Rob, a full-time troll.

But all the FUD mentioned above is nothing what pisses me off that much.

What pisses me off is this:

In other words: He says the developer of Unattainium is a criminal planing a double spend attack! WOW!!
If I were the dev, I'd think about a legal action against Rob Thomas now.

This is the shit Unattainium has do deal with lately, but Rob, don't You think You went a bit too far?

Rob Thomas, broken by design. (Status: Proven broken) scr

Thanks. I provide proof, clearly written statements, and facts, and trolls hurl random accusations at me. Because ad-hominem attacks are so much easier than actually refuting valid evidence.

As I said RIGHT BACK AT THE START. I was interested to see what would happen with this coin, to see what would happen in a real world test of such a short block time.  The real world test has happened, the coin is massively insecure, and it will be attacked.

I'm not even running an unat coind any more, as I don't want to be accused of orchestrating the attacks, when they happen.

Someone will steal a few BTC, people will throw their hands up in the air about developers who don't know what their doing, and a couple of exchanges will quietly re-evaluate their criteria for adding a coin.

I gotta say...he's actually been way more pleasant than a lot of you assholes have been to him. I've seen him called stupid, a liar, a cheat, and many others all week

Not only that, but he has to put up with dumbfucks like you who post this kinda of noob shit that is totally false and very misinformed. You're the only idiot in this thread, and you're proving it every post more and more

It should be equally likely. I made a quick simulation and it confirmed it: 10 x 10k takes the same time (in average) than 1 x 100k.
I'm still convinced that the easiest way to exploit the broken difficulty is when it's too low.
The easier way to see it is like this: if difficulty is too high for the 8 sec target, then it works like a coin that has a longer target time between blocks, so the problem is momentarily alleviated. However when difficulty is too low it works like a faster coin, "embiggening" the problem of having 8 secs between blocks (because you now have 4 or less), making it easier to exploit.

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130217001558/dragonball/images/6/64/Implied-facepalm1.jpg

You are really, really dense mate. You failed. Twice. Give up already

Oh my god. I've just realised why he's so adamant about remaining anonymous.

This is all a plan to rip off exchanges

It's the only thing that makes sense.  The flat-out refusal to fix the gaping hole. The pumping of prices. This mythical 'hardware store' that he's setting up (well, he's not, he copied and pasted some stuff from the bitmain website, last time I looked).

I can only guess that his plan is to get some capital into an exchange, then run attack 3 in the background, withdraw BTC and let the coin collapse.   If he's smart, he'll do it on a couple of exchanges simultaneously.  (Which means he probably won't)

That's the only thing I can think of. There's no other sane reason, is there?

And yet, no-one has. Whilst Unat has been laughed at by lots of people.

I really don't know why you're posting in this thread.   It's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that your scamcoin is broken, and you've been lying about pretty much everything.  All that happens when you comment on this thread, is that it gets bumped right back up the top for other people to learn how bad it is. And you still refuse to admit you made a mistake. Well. You've made lots of mistakes, but this is only about one.   Shall we move onto another one?

Oh, and yet, when I make a mistake, I'm the first one to admit it. A slight error in attack 2 doesn't mean 1 or 3 is any less viable, nor does it mean that 2 is impractical. It just means that it would require a small amount of scripting to do, rather than just turning off the block notifier.

I could, of course, design some more attacks, if you want.

But here's the thing - no matter what I do, you will shut your eyes, put your hands over your ears, and go LALALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING. You'll claim I cheated. I used too much. I used too little. That the blockchain was broken for some other reason at the time. That what I said would happen didn't happen, because it was subtly different from what I predicted.

You lie. Incessantly.

Look, just go away and curl up with your other scammers, and and scam your little scam coin until everyone else gives up on it.  I've given up on it. Almost everyone else has given up on it. It's just the few poor people who haven't realised how much of a liar you are that are hanging on to some unat in the hope of a miracle.

I tried to warn you to only post your results when you were satisfied people wouldn't make fun of you...

Mine did. Repeatedly.

Sigh. Notice how I don't delete posts that disagree with me? And even accept that I may be wrong?  Taking advice and admitting you're wrong is a sign of maturity. You should work on growing up a bit.

Edit: See https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8288933 for his lies.

My problem is you posting "SUCCESSFUL" prematurely, without even understanding which chain wins 

Are you not a native english speaker? You seem to be unable to grasp even slightly complex statements. Maybe that's your problem?

 

Ahha. That makes more sense - I knew that was the idea but I didn't pick that up in the code.  (I'm not that good a C++ programmer!)


My hypothesis is that it's easier do an attack when the difficulty is unusually high.  Am I wrong in the assumption that it's easier to find 10 x 10k shares than 1 x 100k share?  Or is it equally likely?

If the blockchain is stalled for a few minutes because the difficulty is stuck up over 1M, I should be able to roll back the chain to before those series of lucky blocks (lets say 30 blocks, 2 minutes)  create a much longer chain of lower difficulty, and hopefully my cumulative difficulty .. say 80*50k for the rollback, and then another 80*50k  would give me a difficulty of ~4M head start.

This is a different way of looking at the second attack, and would probably still be doable, it would just require a bit more work.

I think it works like all other coins, using the one with most work: see in main.cpp it accumulates the values of GetBlockWork() in order to get the work of a chain, and uses nChainWork to select the best chain, so it's not the longest. On any coin it's possible to (relatively easily) create a parallel chain with more blocks, but unless you achieve >50% hashrate your chain will not be accepted, it will be orphaned. I see it is a common mistake to believe the longest chain is accepted, while it's actually the one with more work.

So I think the way to exploit the wacky difficulty ajustments is to take advantage at the time when blocks are comming faster than 8 secs, because that's when the most network hashrate is wasted (orphaned) and you can do your attack with much less than 50%.


damage may not have been done, and the attack may need to be refined, but it doesn't mean that it's not vulnerable.

Think of what happens on instamine: if a few nodes with relative high hashrate and relative low latency generate blocks faster than what it takes for nodes that have more latency to propagate their blocks, then those few nodes can control the blockchain regardless of the hashrate %.
8 secs is too close to the propagation time, moreover if difficulty adjustments do not cope well with block time variance, it can temporarily go lower than 8 secs making it worse.

Unat accepts the longest, valid, chain as the 'winner'. Not the one with the highest difficulty. (I may be wrong - I looked at the source for this, and only saw 'longest valid' - I'm, as always, willing to be corrected if I'm wrong, but this is what actually happened in the attack)

So, if I can control the block generation time once, that will be enough to control the entire blockchain.

Last time I looked, blocks were making their way to the blockchain, on average slower than 8 seconds per block. If I force my attack to only create a block every 8 seconds, no matter what, my chain will be longer than the public chain (because, the public chain will have created a block every AVERAGE amount, whilst I have created a block 100% of the time, 8 seconds apart)

This is, in fact, what happened in the attack. I ignored other generated blocks, forced the difficulty down to a very low level, mined along there for a bit, and then stopped.

The only thing I see being an issue for UNAT so far is a large blockchain to download. Looking at the explorer, it seems like there were already a few significant attempts to disrupt the coin, but I don't see any damage done at all

hi!

Of course 8 secs is too low, but seeing the atack really happening would be very interesting!
I agree that the attacks 1 and 3 that you describe are enough to say the coin is insecure, however I'm not sure I understand attack2...
The accepted chain is the one with more work (accumulated difficulty), not the one with more blocks. So if difficulty skyrockets and you fork before that, I don't see how you can take advantage of the unaccurate difficulty... high diff means each orphaned block throws away more power, but there would be less orphans. OTOH, when diff is too low there will be more orphans but each one would throw away less hashrate.
Either way you compete against the network's combined hashrate... how can the inaccurately high difficulty be exploited? The relationship between orphaned hashrate and difficulty is not linear, but I think it should be easier to attack when - because of variance or "luck" - the difficulty is too low instead of when it's too high...

regards!
gatra

That's what I'm saying. If anything, you just showed that UNAT works really well...