Topic: You are threatening Bitcoin’s security - page 4. (Read 32360 times)

I have to say I choose deepbit for the insant pay option, and also cause I hate to see that uncofirmed/confirmed numbers. I just want to see one number going up and cash out my coins whenever i want to.

Simple as that.

If BTCMine had that option I would surely move on there in a second!

Just DDoS it when it reaches 45% of the network's hashing speed. Loic is always ready.

1) You're not sacrificing anything. As a matter of fact, by mining elsewhere, you're increasing your profit.
2) Your own good. If Bitcoins crash due to an attack, you lose money...
3) The goal of mining is to secure the network. The reward is the consequence of that service provided. You want to rip the reward while providing the work but not caring for the service, because you're too lazy to understand what you are contributing to and are motivated by obscure, emotional perception of this network, point of view which has been defeated times and times over. A simple proof is that you are willing to pay the highest fee out there, yet you somehow try to build an argument based on the concept of income.

Mindlessly catering to the biggest group, expecting others to deal with the consequences... who's the socialist again?


No. Even right now Deepbit has variance. Tycho even provides that data on the statistic page. What Deepbit is missing in a day is what other pools are getting as extra. You really want to beat variance? Spread out.


1) Takes half a minute per worker and you're done, forever.
2) This is EXACTLY why people need to move off of Deepbit, because people like you would still be mining there a week after the pool gets infiltrated and starts being used to attack the network.

Make less now - hurt health of network to allow for possible attack and risk future income
Make more over time - help health of network to help prevent possible attack and secure future income

Socialist argument? LOL. More like smart argument. Did someone say no brainer already? I hope so.

Two things:

First, the US government attack is a example of non-economical attack.

Second, as you said yourself, the time to take down a network is if it has a central point, and deepbit is becoming one, take down deepbit, take down BTC with it.

What kind of socialist argument is that? I should sacrifice getting a regular income to make a neglible impact on the security of the network, just for the greater good?

That would increase the variance, because Deepbit is larger than all the other pools combined. It would also be a lot more work to set up and maintain.

... right.

Yeah, he should up his fee to 7.5% to help pay for all that too.

obviously the solution here.. isnt necessarily that tycho's pool should be smaller.. its that it should be more reliable and spread out. say 10 pools, each one hosted in a different country on a different server... :p take out one, you only take out 10% of his total.

just telling him to shrink his pool isnt going to be effective.

 The US government would be more inclined to listen in on the network and watch transactions or just find where the pools are hosted and raid them, including Great Britain, Canada, and any other friendly countries. From there they would find out who was making the most amount of money and trace them back by IP wherever possible within their jurisdiction and build an income tax fraud case against them. This wouldn't happen for a few years though since coins didn't have much value this tax season, not many people could say they actually made a profit. No government has been able to shut down Bittorrent. They raid and seize servers that are hosting pirated movie, music, games, software, etc. but they haven't stopped it from existing. It's just psychological warfare to make people think twice before pirating. The only time they manage to take down a network is when it has a central point like Napster and Limewire.

 To think that any government or treasury would bother with bitcoin anytime in the near future seems pretty far fetched to me. There's only 6.245 million in existence at a peak ( ~8.00 ) value of about US $50 million.

Also assuming the motivation for such attack would be economical is a weakness too.

Suppose the US decide to get rid of bitcoin. They only need to put CIA to DDoS the 3 pools, and Roadrunner to create a chain split that make business unreliable (if not outright seemly fraudulent), as soon people start to mistrust each other unti they figure what is going on, not only the bitcoin market will crash, but people will freak out, and stop using BTC, in a worry that it will happen again, and after that we will have the issue of merging the chains again or rolling back everything or something like that.

People that assume someone will attack the network to doublespend are naive, at best. Or so greedy that they can only think in greedy terms.

xD

No. Simply no. Unless you intent to mine for ridiculously short period of times, every pool will provide you with the same payout minus fee in the long run. The reward for mining is to secure the network. To brainlessly jump into the biggest pool because you like the pretty numbers is a mistake, effectively using the very tool that secures the network to harm it. It's like saying human beings need water to survive and then trying to drown the guy.

If your interest is indeed lowering variance, then you should be spreading your mining power evenly among ever possible pool. Also Deepbit is the most expensive pool out there. I am wondering what kind of people make a point of paying higher fees in the process of ripping the same reward...

So someone get's into his network. Say they manage to take every coin in the system and send it to themselves. Say they even manage to wipe out the logs files so it can't be tracked. It would still show in the block chain. If the pool operators didn't notice it, the users surely would when they weren't getting payouts, and pretty quickly inform the pool operators. Worst case scenario they halt all mining and go into investigation mode. People see that the pool is inaccessible and go elsewhere just like they did when slush's pool went down. There's a very limited time window for an attack like that. A more sophisticated approach would be to redirect the last 2 or 3 digits of the balance, but since people with updated clients can see that and all transactions are public it would be found out eventually. Sure people would freak out, but the network would endure.

Someone would either already have to have a LOT of coins, buy up a lot of them at the market, or investing in a lot hardware to get enough coins to make an attack like that worth it. They would have to accurately predict what the network hash speed after said take down would be and have more than that running. I doubt DDos could do it effectively, it would have to be a more sophisticated attack than that on all pools are the same time and something to leave them offline for an extended period of time. Compound that by pools starting to have backups on different continents now. After all is said and done, someone might try this just so they can double spend what? 100,000? 200,000? 250,000 BTC? Confidence would definitely take a hit and value would definitely plummet for sure. At best they would be getting their almost worthless coins back.

It sounds more far fetched and much harder than pool operators conspiring to pull double spend attacks.

I agree it would be great publicity, especially when the network survived. BTC might be back to $US0.25 per BTC, but it would survive like it was designed to do.

The idea that his pool is too large is not stupid, it is a valid concern.  If you are worried about the security of bitcoin you should try to not put such a large area of trust in anyone's hands.  While I agree it is not in Tycho's interest to do anything bad and really doubt he would..... an intrusion (attack) into his systems (online or physical) could effect the network.

Currency exists on trust, value is secondary. Everyone seemed to trust it enough to to be making businesses exchanging it for cash back when it was US$0.80 per BTC when I first started using Bitcoin. The fact that it floats between US$7-8 per BTC is nice, but if you're only worried about it's value then apparently that's all you're into it for. Every currencies value fluctuates all the time, there is no question that Bitcoins will be minted in the future and there will be a finite amount of coins in the end. I trust that more than the US printing more money.

In this sense a big enough botnet could kill all pools. Effectively the safest thing would be to stop pooling.

If any sort of takeover happens, I can garuantee you Bitcoins will be almost worthless faster than you could react and will have a very hard time ever recovering.

People will never value a currency that can be taken down this easily. No value, no currency.

Bitcoin doesn't fail because the pools go down. There's still at least 1/4-1/3 of the network out there working solo and as soon as people see that the pools are down all the technical users will switch to solo and the semi-technical will be looking for information on how to go solo. The network will most likey be back to at least half speed in 6-8 hours at the most. That's a far cry from total failure!

And since both slush and bitcoinpool have both publicly acknowledged being ddos'd and they're stlll surviving it would take a lot more than that.