Bitcoin Forum

Time for some people to wake up.

I do want to say that while I am a big supporter of crypto's and am heavily invested in both Bitcoin and Litecoin, this is not why I'm doing this.  Not many seem to be catching on that almost all the latest alt-coins are being attacked, or are susceptible to a 51% attack - well here you go.

http://i40.tinypic.com/2potapi.jpg

For example Elacoin's blockchain has been longer than reported by the explorer for some time and no one has said a thing about it.  Without closely following a real-time explorer, you have no idea what's going on.

It's unbelievable how money is being thrown into coins that can be so easily attacked.  How can you feel safe investing in a coin (ie. Powercoin) that can be manipulated with less than 5 MH/s?  If you were using GPU's to do this, you would need less than 8x 7950's.  Lots of people have far more.

My personal advice is not to even think about investing in a coin with less than a 2-3 GH/s network hash rate.  I myself get nearly 200 MH/s on a good day, and collectively with my mates we can achieve nearly 1 GH/s.  I don't see any coins surviving unless everyone mining the latest alt-coins jump on one coin to secure it.  I see exchanges making some changes!

Cheers.

P.S. Let's see how many devs actually create a checkpoint now.  ;)

Excellent post, be sure to post it again outside of the noob ghetto.

And, oh yes, I think that is almost half of all Powercoins in existence in my wallet.  Waiting for my mates hash power to come online then on to the next coin.   ;D

Hate to call you a looser but I am anyways. Hope you enjoy watching yourself kill other peoples money.... May the same happen on your end.

Then you wonder why Cryptos will never catch on. Small miners WILL NEVER mine, then you lose a majority of your base, and when that happens the retailers give you the middle finger. If its not accepted by the community, retailers will follow suit.

BTW you say that lots of people have more than x amount of GPUs... only here that do mining. These are not the people you need... you need to normal people.

Luckily Yacoin has a good dev and nicely high hashrate.   :P

As mentioned, whats the point?  Your not helping bitcoin or litecoin in any way by destroying other alt-coins.  All its going to take is for you to affect enough people's money for it to gain a tiny bit of mainstream attention, and all crypto-currency will be labeled with the same brush.

This could be helpful, so people actually stop investing in (mostly premined) shitcoins.

Why do you people even invest in shitcoins? For me, it was logical that price will be dropping, and it is dropping.

This is crazy, but good.  This just shows how easy it is to kill a coin that just doesn't have the hash power. 

I wonder what the exchanges are doing to protect themselves...I see a lot of angry customers not being able to withdraw coins.

There is a point, if he wouldn't (try to) do it publicly, someone else would (try to) do it secretly...

So is PWC dead already?
BTW: Sounds like OP is operating a botnet... ("on a good day i get 200Mh", this indicates variable hashrate, i.e. he's not-GPU mining)

Its not the case at all. People need to wake up and stop fighting against each other.  It doesn't matter whether coin X succeeds or coin Y, if ANY single coin fails and it gets any mainstream media attention, you've destroyed any chance for any crypto-currency to ever truly make it.

People outside this forum don't care if its scamcoin-X or scamcoin-Y or BTC, they don't understand the differences. They'll see "crypto-currency is unreliable" or "I lost thousands in crypto-currency hack", and they are all sunk.

I think it's dead.  More than twice the total coins in existence got sold on Cryptsy in the last two days.

Bitcoin Testnet as an altcoin. Seriously.

Someone with lots of GPUs set up for mining probably has no interest in destroying an altcoin. You make no money destroying a coin, but you sure do loose out on coins that could have been mined elsewhere.

But if 200Mh can bring down one of those altcoins then it's obviously doomed to failure. I can get 200Mh without even touching my mining rigs  ::)

oO

Just noticed he's also targeting BBQcoin. It's way older than Feathercoin, leave BBQ alone!
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/300x300/38821482.jpg

might be some FUD in the OP's threats

You can't just magically create coins out of thin air and you can't change the block chain history.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power)

An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions. This allows him to:

Reverse transactions that he sends while he's in control
Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations
Prevent some or all other generators from getting any generations
The attacker can't:

Reverse other people's transactions
Prevent transactions from being sent at all (they'll show as 0/unconfirmed)
Change the number of coins generated per block
Create coins out of thin air
Send coins that never belonged to him
It's much more difficult to change historical blocks, and it becomes exponentially more difficult the further back you go. As above, changing historical blocks only allows you to exclude and change the ordering of transactions. It's impossible to change blocks created before the last checkpoint.

Since this attack doesn't permit all that much power over the network, it is expected that no one will attempt it. A profit-seeking person will always gain more by just following the rules, and even someone trying to destroy the system will probably find other attacks more attractive. However, if this attack is successfully executed, it will be difficult or impossible to "untangle" the mess created — any changes the attacker makes might become permanent.

all altcoins is nothing to Bitcoins.

I would say if he doesn't, someone else will.  It's too easy to perform a 51% attack, I'd be surprised if it's not already rampant.

It's easy to double your money on each attack.  Send to an exchange, reverse transaction, withdraw.  Or, send to exchange, trade for bitcoin, reverse the transaction.

Edit:  By the way, that last paragraph in your post is only true for currencies with significant hash rates.

Exactly. So people should stop investing into shitcoins, because they are losing money and spreading bad PR about the coin. There were orders of magnitude higher money loses on premined coins than there will be on attacking weak coins with 51% attacks.

Sure, they should.  But attacking them isn't the way to do it.  And its not bad PR about the scam-coin you have to worry about. As I said, most outside this forum will NOT distinguish between 'scam-coin X' or 'Bitcoin'.  Its all just crypto-currency. 

Pulled it from the bitcoin wiki.  But I see your point about the exchanges.  It's a catch 22 then, in order to create innovation you need to start with a new coin  but you have people who will 51% attack the coin to suppress it only to protect their bitcoin and litecoin investments or out of greed to get more bitcoins and litecoins.  So older but flawed networks are protected by their size.

I see a few things coming out of this.

protection networks.  developer can rent the services of miners to maintain a certain hash rate on the network to reduce the chance of a 51% attack.
merge mining.  coins banding together to consolidate hashing power to reduce 51% attack risk.
improved trust.  actively developed coins gaining more support and lift their price per coin.

Is there a real-time block explorer for DGC somewhere?  I want to see this.

Alto's will always be pump and dump. Period. Only exception might be litecoin, and maybe some other random one that isn't made yet that has a decent distribution algorithm.

Besides that Nope...

This!!!!

Oh no, and I don't have any popcorn!

Blockchain explorer is usually here

http://dgc.p2pool.nl/chain/Digitalcoin


But it doesnt work at the moment.

How to know if powercoin is dead? I withdraw 180k powercoins just now . I also found powercoin blocks every 10 minutes.

Well if this guy has over 500,000 PWC and has sold more than twice the amount of all coins in existence in the last two days, I'd say it's dead. 

Are you going to hit feathercoin for a 5th time? Maybe people will stop buying it and giving money to the FTC mafia.

I think your post is mostly FUD, but I'd love to see you clarify this.

When I check http://elc.webboise.com/chain/Elacoin - Which is just Abe scraping blocks from a live daemon, it shows block height at 21890. My other elacoin wallets show the chain at the same height, so where are you seeing the blockchain longer than reported?

Elacoin is one of the coins that had a hard fork and I'm sure there are old outdated clients in the wild. I will say that a lot of the alts don't have proper developer attention to keep attacks at bay. ELC devs had been pretty aggressive at putting updated checkpoints in source to fend off attacks. FWIW, I set up the ELC block explorer and that is my site, so I'm curious how you think it's wrong. It seems to jibe with all other ELC info I see online.

It would be nice if attackers only went after coins that had premines.

This is so true! The majority of the people who would invest in coins don't know or care about the technical specifics. To them Bitcoin, Litecoin, BBQCoin, etc. are all the same. If one goes down, you are effectively destroying all of them. The only value any coins have is what is perceived by investors. If they aren't comfortable, the prices drop; it's that simple.

Which is better?  Let people blindly throw their money at crypto's they know nothing about or educate people on the value of choosing a secure vehicle for their investment.  I don't think most people don't even know what a 51% attack is and what it can do.

Agree, all this trash talking of other coins and attacks on coins is just pulling the entire industry down.

Pretty, soon,  mining coins will become completely restricted to trusted parties.

Its mostly irrelevant.  You aren't going to educate the masses on something as technical as BTC, or why it may be safer than other choices out there.  Because of this fact, if you kill one coin and it happens to get media attention, you're pretty much killing them all.  (I'm not talking about the market of people that are currently into crypto, or at the least investing in it even if they have little knowledge of it.  I'm talking about the media outlets that started talking about BTC when it spiked over $200 earlier.) All it takes is for them to run a story with "$XXX,XXXUSD lost due to crypto-currency hack".  99.99999% of people reading it won't know or care whether it says coin X, coin Y, LTC, BTC ect. 

Yep! Pretty much spot on with what I said. Cryptos are universal to most people. Much like when we hear about a car that had a recall due to problems (like the Crown Victorias and their gas tanks exploding). To a lot of non-technical people (that don't know about cars) that was a sign to stay away from Ford itself, not just CV's. The same goes for cryptos. They group them all together.

I have to disagree with all those that think alts are/can be/will be lumped together with Bitcoin.

In fact I think the opposite is true:  most people see Bitcion and that is it.  Very few people even know of the alts at all.  If an alt is destroyed it is not even news worthy.  If they know about alts then they have "Bitcoin" and "all those others I do not care about".

All the alts can burn each other to the ground and the general public will not care or even know about it.

Even within this forum, which is not Bitcoin, most people totally ignore all the alts and are only upset by having to skip over all the alt threads when scanning over what interests them.  You expect the public at large to care about them?

I think not.

I agree 100%.  Thats why I said "If it happens to make mainstream media that person X lost amount Y".   Its an outside shot, but all it takes is it to happen once.  Maybe someone with friends in the media, or someone with enough cash to cause a stir, or any other number of reasons.  Sure, its not likely anyone outside this forum knows of or gives a shit about PWC, but that doesn't mean it will be the case for the next coin on the list.  Eventually someone who perhaps took some advice on investing in an alt instead of btc, would get burned by this, and that'd be enough.

Would it be their own fault for not being knowledgeable enough about their own investments? Obviously, but the PR about a crypto-currency being hacked is what would count.

It's a good/bad double edged sword.

The OP is displaying how easy it is, which is good, and yes destroyed some peoples money, but in the hope that a lot more peoples money is saved.

Personally I always thought the design of the current block chain tech is too wobbly and I invite all to test out eMunie's once we are close to launch and try it for weakness.  Considering it's a new design completely, can't be GPU'd, cant be ASIC'd, isn't based on "mining" you are going to need some SERIOUS server horsepower to get anywhere near overloading it to the same level as a 51% attack.

As someone who is invested into DGC why would you invite something like this? Totally confused why you would make a statement like this  ???

Agreed, DGC is based on BTC blockchain design, so it will suffer the same fate if enough hashing power is pointed at it.  Hell, point the latest Cray supercomputer at BTC, and you'll suffer the same fate, you just need more HP

To show that he does not think his coin can be manipulated the way the OP claims.

And if it can be manipulated we as coin holders are screwed. You don't got poking a bear with a a stick. 

Inviting someone to try does not change whether it can be manipulated. If it can it's probably better to find out early... though my money is on baritus.

Sometimes 51% attacks are done sometimes just to wake up the Dev's if they think they are not making progress or fixing obvious mistakes.

I have looked at every single new coin, since yesterday and all I can say is that faster is not always better. 12 second Block time? I cannot see that working. Remember Liquidcoin with its fixed diff of 0.05, that didn't work as the diff did not change to match the hashrate, orphan central. 12 second Block time? Orphan Central.

With such a massive Alt-coin collection now, for the new ones released at least, there needs to be little in the way of a pre-mine, have a purpose, as in a reason to buy the coin, not just to trade it for another one and have something different to improve Crypto-Currency in some way.

Why don't the Dev's before they release the coin, have a website up and running, with a mining config guide already written for everyone to see and maybe a website that is ready to take that currency as payment for Good or Service's, then do the [ANN]. That would be such a fair coin to mine, as all the miners could have the configs ready to go ready for release.

If a new coin is released and it is not showing innovation or is different in some way and more of these stagnant coins keep getting released, I could imagine the community getting fed up and just killing those coin off, to maybe give some room for a coin that could make a difference in some way.

Opened up all the war chests now lol :)

I just added up the hash rates of DGC pools to be 954 MH/s.  Coinchoose.com is showing total network hashrate to be 719 MH/s.

This is a good indication that very few people are solo mining this, hence a simple DDoS of the pools would let someone with very little hashing power to 51% DGC very easily.

EDIT:  Obviously the stats on pools aren't accurate - but an indication.

Umm.. can you 51% GLD first so we can stop the 'Bitcoin Ranger' video series?  If anything needs to be destroyed it's that.. and hell Microguy will probably pay you for the hashrate!

A coin crashed would be perfect.


It would make total sense for a foundation member or other Crypto expert to then take a stand on national media and clarify things.


Like this, for example:

"Yes, alternative coin projects have sprouted, but to create a cryptocurrency, you need calculating power. With Bitcoin, we have the total calculation power of a whole city of supercomputers. It is so strong, you just can't take it over. The problem with the new innovation currencies is that attackers have enough power to take them down in an instant. Innovation, as we all know, needs to take place. But at the current time if a new currency comes out, it might not survive an attack, something we HAVE to think about in the future. We have had this success with Bitcoin and Bitcoin by now, is completely secured, the costs of attacking this network are so tremendous,even the preisdent would have default on this one. We have to see the new currencies as experiments, and some experiments will tremendously fail. Unlike Bitcoin, that until now, has survived and thrived through all attacks it has taken."


You have to ride the wave. The main problem with decentralized systems is this: There is no marketing spokesperson. If there is one guy that you simply can't get rid of in the media, that is the guy people will listen to after some time. Companies have them. They are fun, but annoying media people. Spokespeople. Word Twisters. I'd love to see one for Bitcoin.

Here's a block explorer I just set up for Digitalcoin: http://dgc.webboise.com/chain/Digitalcoin

It's important for bitcoin to learn from these alt-coin experiments.

They are basically just simulations of 51% attacks and watching how they respond to them and how that works out could prove important to Bitcoin's future.

Yeah, I view all these alt-coins as a type of testnet

The last checkpoint you added was 22 days ago and the majority of DigitalCoin's hashing power is on a couple of pools. What happens if someone DDoS's those pools? The answer is simple, say goodbye to the majority of your network and watch as DigitalCoin gets 51% attacked.

It is extremely irresponsible of you to challenge someone to attack your coin in this way. You may want to get off your high horse and update your source code with some new checkpoints and issue some new pre-compiled wallets now you've invited an attack.   ::)

Why are you bringing Feathercoin up in this thread? FTC has nothing to do with 51% attacks..

Ok.

Want to sell PWC cheap!

DGC coming soon.

What is the best crypto now to invest?

If you cannot do this. Then you are only good in 51% a coin with 4mh/s. lol

Anyone with 3x 7950's right now can perform a 51% attack on Elacoin.  Only 5x 7950's to kill Americancoin.  This can be done by anyone.

Any exchange would be crazy to accept the liability of supporting these and most other alt-coins while risking the assets of traders.

Normally I would not even bother with a thread like this, but with dam near 5000 hits a day, how can  CryptoCoin Explorer not been mentioned.

dgc.cryptocoinexplorer.com (http://dgc.cryptocoinexplorer.com) for digitalcoin

Just hit the home page to see what other explorers I have there. www.cryptocoinexplorer.com

Makes me wonder if all the effort to keep the site up and updated is worth it  :D

I don't know how all you can believe all this BS  ;D .Any l00ser can make an account and say is going to destroy this and that. Don't you see his a kid without life.

Hey kiddie ... go sing at another table with you BS ... You probably need someone to knock some of you teeth out, or you parents to pull your ears out.
I'm sure you will think twice about talking all this BS around here.

P.S. Go get a life and stop jerking off all night you are going to grow hair on your palms  :D

Nice post!

Can anyone read the address that the coins were sent to in the OP? You can look that up on the blockchain to see if it's even legit. Watch you find out that he just used a memory editor or photoshopped it, lol.

Should be easy to find.  The blockchain isn't huge and 500k+ transactions should stick out.

Can someone explain to me what a 51% attack is?  does it steal coins?  how so

Very simply it allows someone with 51% of the total network hashing power to send you coins, then essentially take them back later.

The fact you made this ignorant statement does not bode well for your new "revolutionary" coin design.  If you do not understand Bitcoin fundamentals then I expect your new coin to be just about as good as all the other alts and do just about as well.

Dear BCX,

Please do take out let's say the weakest half of the alts for starters so I don't have to wade through all these darn alt threads in order to find something interesting to read.

Thanks!

EDIT:  Nevermind, I just found the "Ignore Boards Preferences" setting and discovered that I can ignore the entire alt board.  Learn something new every day.  Carry on...

No. The top 500 supercomputers in the world combined couldn't do it now.

Sure ddos the crappy coins if you must, but no need to have a go at dgc. Its a great new alt coin and deserves to succeed long term given its services, great dev and strong community support now

Peace out :)

Next day's headline...

How did you amass such a huge sum???
What type of computer must you have?
How do you have half of the market, there must be someone with a bigger and better computer than you.

Just to inform everybody , Big Vern found nothing wrong with pwc and powercoin is back on trading on Cryptsy now.

51% attack will never happen.

Why bring up feathercoin

Why would anyone interested in attacking powercoin? Does powercoin a threat to litecoin and powercoin? Does powercoin does anything wrong to you? Its no honor attacking powercoin you are like 500 pound wrestler attacking 1 month infant.

This seems to be a problem with many alt-coins lately.

Most alt-coins are doomed to fail.

Only life and trust can support one coin or another. Things like 51% attack are too 'sophisticated' for regular user, outside of IT/mathematics area.

How many sides has a triangle?
Topology says 2, inside outside.
Simple maths says 3, the edges.

 ;)

A 51% cannot change blockchain history. But it can fork back in history creating a new chain. The old chain containing previous people's transactions, disappears.

Will the same happen to bitcoin?

Probably not, bitcoin is still getting more public and accepted. But people outside crypto business will still talk about bitcoin like about money, they will not divide crypto currencies into DGC, BBQ, NMC and so...

No, it would be a phenomenal achievement to successfully perform a 51% attack on either Bitcoin or Litecoin.  The amount of computing power required to do that is immense and would costs millions and millions of dollars to achieve.

It was confirmed by Cryptsy now that Powercoin was in fact attacked.  I suspect we will see many more of these attacks on all these copy coins...they're just nowhere near being secure.

Thanks for sharing