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Title: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: bobitza on October 04, 2012, 03:56:45 PM Are there any contingency plans in case of a 51% attack?
I mean what do we do? Find out who's owning the IPs and hire al-Qaeda to suicide bomb them? lol Now seriously, what do we do? Do we stop all transactions until the attack is over? Just lay down and let the Bitcoin idea die? Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: Hawkix on October 04, 2012, 04:03:55 PM There is only risk for receivers of BTC during 51% attack. So, I would not accept BTC (and probably not send them, either). The question is, if we will know there is attack.
Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: schnell on October 04, 2012, 04:07:42 PM For it to be an 'attack' the blocks have to be blank, and not contain any tx. Therefore with every block the number of confirms goes down one on each transaction ever.
Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: Stephen Gornick on October 04, 2012, 04:08:26 PM Now seriously, what do we do? Do we stop all transactions until the attack is over? Just lay down and let the Bitcoin idea die? There's not always going to be a way to know. The total Thash/s might rise a bit or a lot, or not at all if the attacker had already have been mining with 51% just spread to various pools. There would probably be an alert sent out: - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alerts But there are no specific further actions, as the correct response with depend on what actually occurred: - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contingency_plans#Many_historical_blocks_replaced Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: gmaxwell on October 04, 2012, 04:17:17 PM For it to be an 'attack' the blocks have to be blank, and not contain any tx. Therefore every block the number of confirms goes down one. This is confused.Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: bobitza on October 04, 2012, 04:22:18 PM @Stephen
Been in that wiki but didn't notice there is actually a Contingency plan section. I would like to quote a few lines for folks reading this thread Quote
Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: schnell on October 04, 2012, 04:23:24 PM For it to be an 'attack' the blocks have to be blank, and not contain any tx. Therefore every block the number of confirms goes down one. This is confused.Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: gmaxwell on October 04, 2012, 04:41:06 PM For it to be an 'attack' the blocks have to be blank, and not contain any tx. Therefore every block the number of confirms goes down one. This is confused.It's just more clearly confused now. The confirmation count is the number of blocks following when the transaction was initially confirmed. Every block implicitly confirms all prior in its chain because you couldn't have creates that block without processing all prior ones. Leaving transactions out has nothing to do with it... the effect of leaving transactions out is only that new transactions won't start getting confirmations. Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: Come-from-Beyond on October 05, 2012, 11:20:19 AM If anyone attempts the attack we won't notice anything until it finishes. Then we'll just see that a lot of transactions disappeared. No pump in the hashrate, no confirmation numbers changed.
Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: bobitza on October 05, 2012, 01:40:03 PM Isn't the pools hashrate pie chart going to tell us if that happens?
Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: Come-from-Beyond on October 05, 2012, 01:50:16 PM Isn't the pools hashrate pie chart going to tell us if that happens? No. It won't be shown even in Unknown part. Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: Syke on October 05, 2012, 08:12:16 PM Are there any contingency plans in case of a 51% attack? A "51% attack" could mean any number of different things. Each of those could require a different response. So what sort of attack are you concerned with?Title: Re: Contingency plans for a 51% attack Post by: Come-from-Beyond on October 05, 2012, 09:21:39 PM Are there any contingency plans in case of a 51% attack? A "51% attack" could mean any number of different things. Each of those could require a different response. So what sort of attack are you concerned with?We should focus on the worst case scenario, when an attacker managed to create a fork with more than 120 blocks ahead. |