Bitcoin Forum

What is happening to different pools? I keep seeing references to pools going down, and most people think the pools are being attacked. What kind of attack, by whom, and for what purpose? What kind of protections can be set up against these attacks, and which pools (if any) are resistant to them? I don't know much at all about the whole arena of DDOS and whatever other online attacks that are taking place.

my guess is maybe some group of miners try to decrease upcoming difficulty increase..

or it could be competitor pools attacking each other so miners would switch to them hence increasing their own reward... then vigilante attack etc...

or maybe someone is trying to disrupt the whole bitcoin system.. but it seems strange way to do this. maybe these attacks use some special technology that can mess with transactions?

maybe something else, i don't k now.

No they can't mess with the transactions folks. Worry not these types of attacks have happened before and they will unfortunately happen in the future. Slush has resolved DDoS issues in the past and I'm sure he will fix this one too. Patience :)

The first thing to realize is that this crew immediately assumes the Government/Anonymous/Martians are attacking/controlling/eating the pools/Tycho/bitcoins.

.... a lot of the time... when a pool goes down....

It's because your run-of-the-mill service outage.  Nameservers being out of date, connections being lost, "oops" in the code, service provider accidentally blocked port 8337, etc, etc.

I especially enjoy when someone claims DDoS on a pool myself and others are currently active and using with no issues.  That's brilliant.

"That issues are called ddos, I'm solving it." -slush

"I is and or likes pie" - supa

loool...let's cut slush some slack, he's not a native English speaker :P

Ya, wasn't really intending to insult his English.  Just making random quotes. :)

Anyway, point being, don't jump on the "every pool is DDoS OMG" bandwagon until someone confirms something.

Or, even better, go solo! ;)

Supa, can you please explain the link between bitcoin & nodes and nodes & economic stability

Hopefully, it'll be back up soon. I only just started yesterday and both of the pools I've tried have crashed. It's making me not want to pool.

Well I wasn't jumping on any bandwagon. I was just relaying what the pool operator said. So it was not actually me that came to the conclusion that it was DDoS.

Did you want a dissertation or.... ?

In a simplistic nutshell package, more nodes mean you have more transports for the peer-to-peer traffic of bitcoin.  It was intended that these nodes be rewarded for performing work to keep the chain and transactions verified and correct without a single point of authority (or multiple points of trusted authority).

More nodes means more data can be transported faster.  More nodes actually performing verification (aka mining) translates to strength in the network.

Pools provide the opposite.

"Weekend warriors" can sweep into the bitcoin project with their insatiable requirement for instant gratification (that is, rewards from pool mining rather than long-term payoffs).  These individuals can drastically alter price based on them having a bad day.  For example, let's say 30 people that have a few hundred coins decide "eff bitcoin this is stupid I can't use deepbit DDoS Russian Chinese blaaaah!" and go piss away their coins on an exchange for nearly nothing.  Deflation happens.

If a 51% exploit is achieved believable... deflation will happen.

If people start losing transactions.... deflation will happen.

If downloading the block chain takes a year (current client requires the whole block chain) then no layman consumers will want to use it.  Ditto for actually trying to find a node to submit a transaction to.  Deflation will happen.

More miners and less nodes reduce the stability and trust in the network.

Now the opposite...

Nodes are available and fast around the world.  Transactions are nearly instant and there are hundreds of thousands of machines maintaining and verifying transactions.  Blocks are easily downloaded and nodes are abundant.

More nodes and less miners increase the stability and trust in the network (and by proxy - overall interest and willingness to use Bitcoin ~ stabilizing prices).

If the network is stable, fast and trustworthy at all times.... Inflation can happen.  Or at least stability. :)

sooo what's a 'node' and what's a 'miner' seems like the same when u explain hmm

Nope. A node is a client running and being connected to the peer-to-peer network of other Bitcoin clients, storing and distributing all transactions ever done. Sort of the bookkeeping of Bitcoin.

A miner generates new blocks and includes new transactions within them.

While mining is a decent way to make money (fabricate coins out of electricity), nodes are also needed so that everybody has the chance to download all the past transactions from somebody.

51% attack is unfeasible at current petaflops of computing power, it will also take a staggering, tremendous amount of luck to pull off.
The chance rapidly decreases as more blocks are added, and since there isn't a single network or supercomputer in the world coming even near the current computational capacity of bitcoin, the chance is reduced to practically zero,

Has anyone even read Satoshi's paper on Bitcoin from the beginning to end?

Ya, sorry about the ambiguity.  I didn't want to suggest that a miner (as in a program that connects to a server to submit work, ie poclbm), a node generating coins (an active node that may have clients like poclbm connected to it) and a node (passive, no coin generation, transmission only) were all the same thing.  But the terminology gets a bit confusing, you see? :)

If I were to say you should put a miner on a web server, someone would ask why the hell you would try to put poclbm on a GoDaddy VDS.  If I were to say an active node, someone would think I meant the passive node.  If I said you should put a client generating coins, either no one would know what the hell I was talking about or they would start giving me lectures about CPU = BAD, etc, etc.


Hey, people jump on the 51% soap box all day long.  Just search the forums for deepbit to see 9,000 examples.  Let me have my 30 seconds of flame. :P  I fixed it, though.

No tldr for Satoshi here.  Until I get to the forums, anyway.....

The way a DDoS attacks work is some guy who has a bunch of computers who have been infected by a bot hammers the server until either it goes down, or has no more available connections for new people... saying "Well, obviously it wasn't a DDoS attack because I'm connected" is about as ignorant as saying "Obviously it was a DDoS attack because I can't connect", without facts, they're both dumb as hell to say

What I don't get... is why the heck are they using the Botnet to do DDoS attacks, why not use them for mining?

Transactions will always take the same amount of time because the block rate is 'fixed' at ten per hour to make the proof of work that is involved in generating a block meaningful, and with most wallets requiring 3-6 blocks before accepting payment - even in the utopian bitcoin future, transactions still take half an hour.

Unless I've misunderstood something in the bitcoin paper, please correct me if I'm wrong!

Will

That's my understanding, too.

I didn't mean that blocks would instantly be solved for transactions - I only meant the transport would be faster and confirmations can be, too.  Also, depending on how the pool operates, they may only function as a single authority.  As you mentioned, you need 6 in the official client.