Bitcoin Forum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2u3BNiANVA

true or bullshit?

My vote is for the latter.

No one seriously believes a 51% attack is a realistic possibility at the current hash rate. Especially with the ASICS coming online. it could only result from the hostile takeover of more than one mining pool simultaneously, or the clandestine development and launch of some new ASICs orders of magnitude faster than the current chips.

Anything like that would probably be detected/shut down in close to real time.

The video makes the ridiculous assumption that nobody would notice a 51% attack, giving it plenty of time to succeed. Just another litecoiner's fantasy ;D

Here's the reddit post. I thought it was a pretty good analysis.

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/

Exactly.  The Litecoin massive are doing their best though.   I think they just need to realise that Bitcoin isn't going anywhere, and if for some reason it does, it'll just take Litecoin right along with it.    Litecoin will never, ever, take over from Bitcoin.  It's way too late for that.

Not doubting that the math is okay... just pointing out that it's a "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" argument anyway:

If it takes one year or a hundred years at 35% or 50% hash rate or whatever - it can never realistically happen.

Found it a bit weird - either the author doesn't understand, or is purposely being disingenuous.

The argument about being able to mine 6 blocks in a row with good odds over a certain period of time is a red-herring, and speaks nothing about the ability to exploit your mining power for evil.

In fact, there is nothing inherently wrong with mining 6 blocks in a row.  If you were going to try to exploit the system (double-spend), just mining some blocks in a row isn't enough.  You need to mine _ahead_ of the rest of the network (keeping the blocks for yourself), then spend (on the rest of the network, which is behind you in terms of block generation), and then release your blocks, effectively rewriting history.  That's why it's called a 51% attack - because the only realistic way to get ahead of the rest of the network is to be more than 51% of the network.  (Actually thinking about it the name seems to be a bit of a misnomer - it should be a 101% attack, because the attacker has to have at least as much hashing power as the rest of the network to have a chance of pulling off a double spend).

One of the "arguments" for litecoin is the faster blocks.  So comparing, say, an hour's worth of bitcoin blocks to an hour's worth of litecoin blocks and saying "litecoin is 10x more secure" seems to me to be discounting one of the supposed selling features of litecoin.

Litecoin tries so hard to be the next bitcoin, but seems destined to remain the chuck-e-cheese token of cryptocurrency.

Edit:
Disclosure: This commentor holds a quantity of chuck-e-cheese tokens.

LOL.

For me, litecoin will always be just another altcoin that was started by a group of butthurt newbies that were pissed that they didn't get in early when bitcoins were cents-per-bitcoin (assuming of course that they'd have seen it for what it was and not ignored it if they had that chance).

The fact that they chose to implement it with a different crypto algorithm (at the time advertised as "cpu-friendly, non-gpu-minable", later updated to "cpu/gpu-friendly, non-asic-minable" when that was shown to be false) just shows that they gave it more than 5 minutes of thought, unlike so many of the other altcoins that popped in to (and almost as quickly, out of) existance back in 2011ish.

This is bullshit. For a 51% attack you don't need to mine EVERY SINGLE BLOCK in a row! You just need to mine MORE than the rest of the network!

Yeah well, that is not how it works. No need to mine every single block in a hour or so! That's why it is called 51% attack and not 100% attack! You don't need to mine every block. You just have to mine more, so your chain will be longer and all the other blocks will be ignored.

Litecoin IS bullshit, just fyi.

You know how much you need to pay a botnet to have a few hundred thousand CPUs running litecoin clients? Probably no more than 10 thousand dollars, hmmm..... ::)

I don't see anyone clearly dispute his mathematcis

That "bullshit" was worth 7 cents a few months ago...now going to be $4.

Made me a ton of profit.

So even bullshit can make you money.

I don't want to watch 8 minutes of a video looking for "mathematics" (I would be curious if it was a .tex file).

There are heaps of threads about Litecoin being more secure that are just mountains of bullshit happily ignoring the fact that currently scrypt is botnet friendly although sha256d isn't since FPGAs and ASICs appeared (and was arguably already less friendly when GPU mining became popular).

If someone takes the time to explain the "mathematics" and it's yet another variation on the same theme I won't even bother answering.

Yep, speculators are prolonging the life of GPU rigs.

In this game there must be losers though (money doesn't magically appear out of thin air unlike some might want to believe).

Does no one see my posts? The mathematics are described in this reddit post:

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/

OK, same bullshit then.

Litecoin won't scale with their rapid-confirm tweak. Different parts of the network will be in different states - causing continuous re-orgs and merges of the blockchain.

They also don't have the collective hashpower to make any kind of 'secure' claim. We're at what -- 70 - 80 Thash/sec?
From the litecoinpool.org I see a collective hashing rate of 1,624,292 Khash/sec - a considerable difference.

Since you put it in the press forum section, can you tell me which famous news outlet published these "news"? I don't think this Adam Kosh person qualifies as Press  ???, unless you mean that all people are press, cause then I'm press too  ;D

Arguing about the technical advantages and disadvantages of Litecoin is moot since it hasn't been put under any significant pressure yet.

One point which the Litecoin enthusiasts don't mention is the lack of development and a developer community. An alt coin which is always going to stay "one release behind Bitcoin" (according to the Coblee guy) is never going to attract top developers.

You definitely either dont understand the math or cant be bothered to read it. Its fairly simple math, too.

I copy and pasted the important part for you:

"At 50% hashing power and 100 years an attacker has a 46.46% chance (6.06% for a 10 year period) but bitcoin hits both those thresholds in under 1 day. At 100 years bitcoin is vulnerable to a miner holding just 8% hashing power, while litecoin remains secure all the way up to 50%. No matter how you run the numbers litecoin remains significantly more secure -- entire worlds more secure -- than bitcoin."

Basically, owning 50% of the network doesnt mean shit for Litecoin. Owning 35% of the hashing power for Bitcoin means you have a 99% chance to successfully attack it after 1 month. When you consider who these currencies really threaten - banks and governments with billions of dollars - this is a major consideration, especially considering as how much harder it is to hash Scrypt to begin with.

I don't have to. I've already read Meni Rosenfeld analysis and demonstrated elsewhere that it doesn't apply in the Litecoin context as he himself hinted in his analysis: here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167028.msg1742946#msg1742946).

What matters for the security of a currency is the cost of an attack. Currently Litecoin is orders of magnitude less costly to attack than Bitcoin. If that's not clear enough...

how does owning 50% of network mean less for litecoin than it does for bitcoin?