Edit: Attack occurred, and the coin is, indeed, vulnerable. I wrote a small paper on it, that's available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d8dwuGznri35uNHDxhUcRDXD0I8afKN9R3G3oPNhBboIt's only three pages, and contains far too much maths and hypotheticals. However, instructions for taking over the coin yourself are in the last section.
For those that are unaware, Unattanium is a newish limited-number-of-coins SHA coin.
They've recently had to fork the chain, because the difficulty calculations were broken, and it went far too high. Sadly, they've now broken it in the other direction, and the dev seems intent on ignoring this, and abusing or hand-waving the problems away.
It's now running at an 8 second block time.
Now, for everyone who is NOT facepalming right now, this is faster than blockchain propagation. Basically, it will be amazingly difficulty for the coin to agree on a valid chain, because there will be any number of chains that are almost the same length.
So, After being asked to help out to fix the stuck difficulty, I jumped on their IRC channel and had a discussion with someone called 'Unattanium' who was opped in the channel mentioned on their website.
I phrase that carefully, because I'd hate to slander someone who actually knows what he or she is doing. Because this person didn't.
Anyway, rather than addressing the issue, he (I'm assuming this person is a male. I apologise if you're not) said things like...
<•Unattainium> and who cares about orphans
<•Unattainium> it doesnt break a chain or anything
<•Unattainium> i dont care if it fucks up miner ui or stats
Well. Everyone who's mining cares about orphan shares.
uh orphan blocks
<•Unattainium> Everyone will be on the same playing field
Well no
<•Unattainium> I'll get the same amount of orphans are you
<•Unattainium> as you*
Which is obviously wrong. All I, as a bad guy, need to do is to have more hash rate than you, the innocent miner. At 8 seconds, it's highly unlikely that your block will even have reached me before I mine my next one, leaving me to perform a 51% attack with much less than 51% - it would be (coin hashrate * 0.51)/(average block latency time / coin block time)
Average block latency from bitcoind is around 4 seconds. Or, basically, I can now perform a 51% attack with only 25% of the coin.
if your'e going to claim I'm wrong, you'll need to actually back that up.
<•Unattainium> You're spewing nonsense\
Yet, here I am, saying I'm not.
<•Unattainium> I'm just gonna stop responding
And you're yet to provide proof that I am
<•Unattainium> Beacuse I think you are either a) ignorant as fuck, or b) trolling hard
I'm neither
<•Unattainium> there is no option c
I'm trying to fix a problem that you seem to be deliberately ignoring
problem is: 8 seconds is far too short.
<•Unattainium> I'm done
<•Unattainium> Not worth my time
So there you go, people. Fixing a design flaw in the change, that was to FIX a design flaw, is not worth his or her time.
Of course the next design flaw, which will be implemented to fix this design flaw, will be be something awesomely terrible, and I can't wait to see what it is.
Edit: The next design flaw, which was implemented ... for no real reason that I could see, was to randomise the reward, leaving the block times the same,
but not giving anyone any notice. So yes. It was awesomely terrible.
Have fun now.