Topic: Why we need a threat center (Read 870 times)

He took the time to post it, let me at least do a 

The blocks have a facility to add text, so would it be possible to add a log data health check for the quality of the network?

Think of it like the way SMS came from an engineer data status port.

If its automated, you don't even need special people!

Or does something like this already exist?

seeing as the bitcoin foundation are made up of the top people EG:
programmers
investors from gateways
etc

i think it should be part of bitcoin foundations standard protocol to make threats known instantly and develop methods to warn the community effectively, instead of people having to run off to #bitcoin-dev to get the latest info and spam the channel with questions repeatedly

so i propose that bitcoinfoundation.org has a section that has a bitcoin status update. as their threat centre idea the OP of this thread has

OP has regular bad ideas.  Such as the $5k investment for a copy of a game. 

(No offense to starsoccer.  <3)

Hmm, strange... Maybe the original post-er isn't aware of #bitcoin-dev on Freenode IRC?

Or is it just that not enough of the VIPs the OP would like to see hang out there actually do hang out there?

-MarkM-

The core devs already has contact details for pools, bitcoin businesses, etc.

Why don't we just get rid of all of this P2P nonsense while we're at it. Using a central server would be much cheaper.

Everyone will freak out, everything will turn out fine, and everything will go back to normal and people that follow up on the shock stories will find out that bitcoin is perfectly stable and is made to deal with this sort of thing.

Picking a group of people to manage or authenticate the blockchain is both not feasible, and not a workable idea. A voluntary model akin to what casascius suggested might work. But it would also rely on a voluntary model, for emphasis, a strictly voluntary model.

That all there, I think if several miners got together they could do this. Particularly a large pool could commit to one side of the chain and would effectively suggest where other miners should concentrate effort to keep their blocks valid. A large number of miners committing to a single chain could easily accrue majority of hashing power and make sure that everything heads in one direction.

In this case miners are suggested to switch back to 0.7 to mine on the more stable branch, merchants are suggested to avoid taking new money to prevent the transaction later being made invalid by a malicious party trying to double spend, and anyone else doesn't depend on the which blockchain "wins" at all and is advised to twiddle their thumbs, not panic, and wait as the world turns and things eventually smooth out.

agreed it will most likely make bitcoin stronger, but i still think a threat center with X amount of people is a good idea. The people would be trusted users from all around. for examplle maybe 2 people from the bitcoin-otc, then 2 people from bitcointalk forums, 2 bitcoin devs,2 well known and big busnesses, and 2 big mining pools

I have thought of this a long time ago.

No one needs to organize a threat center.  Rather, someone merely needs to start publishing digital signatures endorsing having seen certain blocks.  Let other people copy the same idea.  They become human bitcoin intelligence that can be used to supplement automated proof of work from the block chain.  The more people do it consistently, the more feasible the idea of subscribing to them will become.

If 10 or 20 authoritative "bitcoin intelligence" centers simply were to have issued a signed "kill" for the first block in the fork we're trying to kill, and clients were configured to trust that and were willing to act on a supermajority consensus, this issue would be old news within minutes.

This issue will not kill Bitcoin, it will ultimately make it stronger.

Who decides who gets to be a part of this group?

the group would consist of lets say 10 memebers each with equal control and needing a majority to do anything. 6 members

Too much risk of abuse with such centralization. The fact that we have a bunch of disparate groups with separate interests, each able to choose how to act in these situations, acts as an important check against abuse.

With the latest major bitcoin network fork it is becoming more apparent that in the case of a huge threat bitcoin might just not survive. I think we need to establish a board that will simply have contact info with all bitcoin businesses, bitcoin mining companies and such. Also I know this goes against the whole decentralized nature of bitcoin but i think we this group should also have a few switches, for example a button to push an older update, another button to push a new update out and buttons like that.I am totally open to suggestions and such but i think this is a need as the latest threat shows just how little we are prepared