Topic: Wonder who this solominer is? 88.6.216.9 - page 13. (Read 60438 times)

Quite right. Irrelevant to anyone with enough reason & capital to kill bitcoin.

If you're a government, or a bank, trying to kill bitcoin, the way to kill interest in bitcoin is simple - kill the value of the coin. At $41M market cap, it wouldn't be hard to kill it with money, no need whatsoever for hash power. That's way too much work. No need to slow transactions, too much work again.
Acquire coins, dump 'em, tank the market. At the level of trillions vs. millions, it doesn't take much effort to do this.  Do it a few times, and no one wants to hold that asset. Oh, and maybe stop allowing transactions related to it, but that's probably secondary.

Only a smaller competitor to bitcoin would likely want to try to defeat bitcoin by slowing the network - and this is only due to the attacker's lack of capital. Honestly, if it's this, it seems more like s script kiddie style attack, and not much to be concerned about in the long run.

Will the protocol allow for a free market solution to this? Could one pool offer to process transactions for X fee, and another for Y? While the client doesn't seem to do so today, could the client then be altered to allow the user to direct the transaction at a given pool ("clearinghouse") If it can work this way, then there is no reason to care about the no TX miner - people would direct TXs to the fastest/cheapest processors), and miners not processing TXs would have no effect.

Honestly, it seems to me that not finding a way for the miners to compete on fees is the real longer term problem. The only way for a miner/pool to make more money is to control more of the network.

No.  There is no BIP 16 in the coinbase flag.   Still with 70%+ support he will have to upgrade or risk generating orphaned blocks.

Does the MM vote on bip16 ?

+1

I guess we differ in opinion.  Hacking into other people's computers and mining without incorporating transactions is IMHO stealing from the bitcoin network.  Those are blocks and rewards that you and any other miner could be solving.  This MM is essentially stealing 0.1 BTC (figuratively speaking, whatever your block reward is) from each miner every time MM solves a block.  But I guess there are no rules saying you have to mine with computers that you have permission to use, so I see your perspective.  As to the potential upside, what happens if/when MM grows to 1 million computers (less than 1% of PCs shipped last year) and achieves 10Th?  I agree that it might not be profitable as D&T pointed out, but just for the sake of argument.

A botnet is costly.  It is called OPERTUNITY COST.

If I have a botnet that can be used to generate $10,000 per day doing X and I instead use to "attack" Bitcoin where my attack slows the network down to less than statistical variance in normal confirmations that is stupid.

Simplest explanation is likely the most accurate:
botnet = lots of computing power = easy to amortize mining blocks.
tx fees = nearly worthless = not worth the cost & complexity to add them.

Yes because a botnet is costly, and Windows users are security savy, and botnets never grow.

Indeed because we are stupid.

It seems the stupidest and highest cost possible way to kill Bitcoin.  This is what the 20% attack which costs the attacker a huge sum of money and slows down avg 6 confirm time by a whole 3%.   Oh noes Bitcoin is doomed because my 6 confirm time went from 60 minutes to 63 minutes.

If this thread didn't exist nobody would even notice.  The 95% confidence interval of 6 confirm time is 60 minutes +/- 18 minutes.  The slowdown isn't even statistically valid.

Without including tx, profit can still be his goal.
Assuming it's a botnet, he don't want people to notice the trojan/virus/whatever, and the little program must be as small as possible so doesn't download the complete blockchain to check the tx for validity. If he would download the blockchain, he would a very little more profit each block he finds, but he will find less blocks because more people would notice the trojan.

TX fee increase will not solve the problem, because probably profit is not his goal. Were that the case, it would not deter similar attacks in the future.

A party interested in destroying Bitcoin, would be first interested in people losing interest in Bitcoin.  And what better way to accomplish that than to slow down transactions?

Heh, that would be funny! But I think DeepBit's miners would soon notice the statistical anomalies.

That's why I vote that every miner software should LOG the winning share. It can be later compared with the blockchain and thus allow identify that where your winning ticket ended at all. This would reveal other proxies, like ABCPool, too.

Plus, you can cheer and drink a lot after found block .

1. Hacking into 100k computers is a crime against the owners of those computers. It's not an offense against the Bitcoin network, which does not require processing of transactions and certainly doesn't require "consent".

2. Stealing 43k BTC from Linode is a crime against the owners of those BTC.

Since you asked, that's the difference.

Also, there is an upside (of sorts). If mystery miner is getting 25% of the blocks, there's less risk of DeepBit getting 51%.

Reminds me : http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html

Now that the old man is out of the way, Kim Un is free to focus on bringing the shambling NK economy into the digital age...1 TXN at a time!

They dont want to risk it being a back door to getting Stuxnet'd so they wrote their own version...skipping the complexity of implementing TXN handling.

Phase 2 will be to enlist every Korean language copy of StarCraft into the botnet and they will have the capitalist dogs south of the 49th printing money for them!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

I, for one, welcome our new Hermit Kingdom blockchain overlords!

If it is a botnet, what is the difference between:

1.  hacking into 100k computers, and "mining", without consent or processing any transactions, roughly 700 BTC a day (est. 1 Th/s)

and

2.  hacking into Linode and stealing 43k+ BTC?

If it is a botnet:
1) It can't grow exponentially and can be ignored.
2) The CPU cycles consumed will increase energy costs, meaning people will be more likely to find and remove it so it can be ignored.
3) It is possible it has always been around, but mining sporadically via the other pools so as not to draw attention to itself.

The thing is, if it is a botnet and it has been *this* loud? Why hasn't any AV vendor reported it in the last two weeks plus?

I think my argument still stands, it is someone with a lot of FPGAs or ASIC and they are just being quiet and not processing transactions. As I stated, ArtForz did this once before, if he is dropping sASIC, he could be doing it again. So could any small country or government agency with the wherewithall to do nothing but mine.

i am not seeing a jump of 30%

Botnet: only explanation that fits.

Why do you think this is no botnet?  Do you think ArtFotz would sabotage his own investment in bitcoin by delaying transactions and reducing confidence? 

All signs lead to a botnet.  Changing IP addresses.  No transactions because transactions would lead to more internet traffic making the botnet easier to find.