Topic: [XMR] Monero Speculation - page 2154. (Read 3313670 times)

This time, at least we know it is coming.

I waste a little time on the psychological aspects as well, but feel no personal malice or ire.  To polish a good game of chess, one needs worthy opponents.  I also don't mind if the little FUD games were profitable for him.  He sold or bought a bit of reputation and maybe got or lost some XMR or BTC out of it, none of that affects me.
What it did do is it raised a challenge, and though it distracted from some important pursuits for development, it may result in raising the security level a bit.

Monero is very easy to mine.  I can run it in the background on one of my game machines and add a few hashes to the network when I am not goofing off.  Everyone can.  It is like the early Bitcoin days all over again.  And hey, it just might catch on, you may want to get some for yourself.

There will be MUCH greater opposition in the days and years to come.  Few or none will give prior notice.  This was little more than a friendly fire drill.

My guess is behind door number 3 -child.

Ah - that makes me understand your definitions better.  I do believe that BCX had hinted at basically doing a timewarp and then dumping all of the coins on an exchange for bitcoin.

So in that scenario there might be an attack that was both beneficial inside the network and destroys it.  But it's probably not worth bringing up.  I do have to wonder what happens inside of BCX's head.  Odd duck.

First remark: interesting discussion. Thanks.

Second: Agreed, but I didn't intend to distinguish "malicious" (or "benevolent") as moral categories.

Inside the economic system of one individual crypto, an actor will be economically irrational if he attacks the network to the point of destruction: he is going to experience a net loss if he destroys the value of the currency that he is paid in. The network value post-attack times his share of the network he gained through the attack must be higher than the cost of the attack for him to consider the attack economically viable.

For an outside actor, this doesn't hold. He could either have a higher level economic motivation that allows him to take the cost of an attack (e.g. removing a competitor crypto, to strengthen his preferred crypto), or he could be what you called a "joker type personality". I claim that from the practical point of view of the network that needs to be defended, the two are indistinguishable. This is the case I meant by "malicious actors".

The defense against the first type is keeping the total network market value in balance with the cost of an attack. If the former is a lot higher than the latter, a (controlled) attack becomes profitable. "Outside" attacks (joker type attackers, or competitors) can only be deterred by strengthening the network further, to the point where the attack is prohibitively expensive for the attacker on its own.

I'm pretty sure the Monero network is far from the second type of security yet (the Bitcoin network might be close to it, for anyone other than a government organization or extremely large company), but I suppose your point could be rephrased as that the network isn't even secure in the first sense so far.

I guess in cryptocurrency when somebody threatens to be a computer bully.  I expect the response I would expect from a SEAL team dealing with a bully.

"If you can beat us - go for it.  We deserve it."

Not a sniveling coddled grade school kids response "ur being meaaaaannnn"

Because he's behaving like a bully, and no one like a bully.

Perhaps I'm out of line but I don't really think in terms of crypto actors as "malicious" or "benevolent".  But more in terms of self interest.  If the majority of the computing power involved in a crypto is in it for their best interest (which stands to reason).  Then their best interests will line up with protecting the network (vs destroying it).  

What we had with BCX was a joker type personality.  I think maybe that's where I'm offending people.  I'm not angry at BCX trying to destroy my coin.  I just view him as an environmental variable that needs to be dealt with and if a coin cannot deal with it then it lacks the security needed to survive.  

I don't understand where the anger towards him comes from.


The weakness here in my opinion really wasn't that we didn't have enough hashpower but that

1 - The hashpower was centralized at three points of failure.  This is the pool problem which even bitcoin hasn't solved.  This is a technical issue IMO that still needs to be worked out - litecoin made some strides with P2P (AFAIK this isn't supported in crytponote yet).  I'm NOT suggesting this needs to be added.  Devs already have too much on their plate.  Poor guys.

2 - The financial interest of the pools AFAIK are just the fees they collect from the miners.  Which I estimated to not be more than $200ish a day.  So really you have $600 a day in incentives as the gatekeepers to protecting a $5 mil market cap.  Bitcoin is slightly ahead in this area as the pools have larger incentives (cloud mining, etc).

This opens attack vectors that have nothing to do with how much mining power the coin has.  It would probably be more secure with half the hashrate solo mining.

The added attack vectors (that I can think of) are

DDoS the pools
Hack the pools
Bribe the pools
Quietly buy the pools

Some would add that, if a (relevant) majority is malicious anyway, no system based on higher authority is going to rein them in anyway.


EDIT: meandering dangerously close to off-topic, I am... sorry smooth.

It is a dilemma here. If the price of the coin is not high enough, miners will not mine, the network is not secured.

That's a scary assumption too, but maybe a correct one.

I think Nekomata was under the impression that you are defending BCX behavior, as morally justified, which I'm pretty sure you are not.

You are (correctly, imo) pointing out that security in an open-source decentralized environment can't be achieved through an appeal to a higher authority, based on a claim of moral superiority, which in some posts seems to be the implicit premise.

In crypto, security can be achieved as a collective effort only, which is a scary thought only if one assumes that the majority (of users, computing power, etc.) is malicious.

The attack was priced in. The weak hands dumped the price down to 290 or so. Most of us just have too much faith in our devs and community to dump every time there's FUD. If whales had any effect on the price, it was just from buying up cheap coins to make money, like many others did.


I'd expect the price to go up to 400+ within the next week, depending on the length of the FUD attack, then sink a bit as the market finds support. If the attack ends definitively and beneficially for XMR, I'd imagine we could see an even higher spike. Where the bitcoin price goes from here will also influence things.  

I really am 100% unable to tell if you are a troll or a shill.

Regardless.  Any coin that expects to actually make it into the top 10 market cap should view it as it's responsibility to secure itself.  Not the application of moral law to all human beings around the globe.  Just seems self evident to me.  If you make the claim of wanting to be secure - but then don't welcome attacks as a challenge to be overcome then it makes one question if the coin wants to be secure or only wants the perception of being secure.

If you want something that relies on centralized authorities enforcing moral code - I would highly recommend fiat as there are (many) fewer risks involve.

No idea what any of that has to do with fetalio.

If you think BCX is "just" a narcissist[ic] idiot then I would encourage you to do more digging.  Narcissist sure.  Idiot not so much.  Narcissist with tons of resources who likes to blow up coins would be a more accurate description.  Which is a bad combination for XMR.

Also XMR is centralized to three pools that make less than $600 a day combined.  Which means the economic incentive to keep XMR secure is less than $600 a day.  Might be something the MEW wants to take a look at from an economic perspective.

I am back in XMR & supporting it.  But you are another irritating shill. 

P.S.

I suppose the arguement could be made the whales are part of the market - I just find it puzzling that it didn't really factor in the threat.  Or maybe the threat still hasn't blown over?

We're almost there, but not quite yet.

There is still a threat of forking.

It was kinda nice to buy back in at not more than I sold off.  I was a little surprised that there wasn't a larger jump in price.  Which means (to me) the market never priced in the attack.

Or maybe it was artificially held up by some whales?

With the BTC rise * XMR rise, we are back around the pre-threat price in fiat.  It seems the market may have now fully discounted the threat.