Bitcoin Forum

Something going on difficulty is not moving around and seems its stuck at 5254.96 and has been like that for the last hour or so...

Anyone know what the hell is going on is their an attack on forcing the difficulty to remain at    5254.96

Hoping someone can spread light is this possible that someone or some people are forcing change in difficulty and keeping it at a fixed position.

For last 60 min someone has generated 250 blocks at diff about 5255.  He has more power than entire TRC network :(
All blocks go to address: 1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB

Maybe it's a repeat of this?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167493.0

Like how much power if one person is doing cant be must be an organized attack or something. dam thats a stack of coins rolling in

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/address/1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB


Balance: 6140 TRC was on 5k and refreshed within 2min to find over 6k now.

1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB

Short Link: http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/a/1PAnMKuTs9

Balance: 7580 TRC
Transactions in: 379
Received: 7580 TRC
Transactions out: 0
Sent: 0 TRC

 :o

Maybe this?

https://products.butterflylabs.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/i/mini-rig-1_2.jpg

Sure is going to be interesting to see what devs say and fix this. as the difficulty is frozen too.

Network Hash Rate now 4.02TH

WTF. This is insane!

15.4 btc :)

if he dump much less...

not smart move

coin is dead now

Because the diff adjusts every block its just trying to compensate for the attack. It recently just went back up to 11K diff which it sometimes goes down to during 'normal' daily cycles.  Annnnd its down to 5.25K again...

ha diff is 42k now, no longer profitable, congrats to those that got on the quick BTC @ coinotron =)
The hashrate went from hardly anything to nearly 600GH for TRC while it was goin from 5k to 42k diff =P
hilarious...

Woo! I managed to sell my TRC at the usual rate before the crash!

Have a look at those stats!

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/

LOL this is hilarious, the attacker is making mega BTC at each diff reset to low, Im watchin coinotron and once diff gets high, he must stop mining and let it reset to low or something. then starts right back up..
Man, the people on coinotron are trying to get in on it but the blocks are being all orphaned =(

Yes I solo mined some orphans too.

BTC-E is the only exchange with significant TRC buy interest, as far as I can tell. (~200 BTC)

well looks like its an exploit difficulty went back up to 40,000 5 min and now back to 5254.96 diff again difficulty the same 2 times is impossible unless exploited it would be a little different each time but this is showing some sort of exploit is going on.

and back to Current Difficulty   38094.28 lets see if another diff of above more than likely.

Here we are again I bet who ever is doing this is loving every moment of it.

5920.05 Difficulty

Someone got an ASIC working on TRC?

You can use Asic on TRC and others that are sha256D

Application Specific, I would assume TRC is slightly different in the code and would require tweaks would it not? If not then why has an attack like this not happened yet?

It already has happened a few months back when the first asics where coming about it got attacked by 1 Avalon unit and it messed the difficulty up so they changed how it works and seems someone else has no found a way to attack and gain in the event of it.

Naw, I don't have ASICs but I have mined TRC with FPGAs. Same principle. The "application" isn't the miner, it's just the hashing algorithm. You can use the same setup to mine TRC that you would to mine BTC or PPC.

Blockchains are insanely expensive to secure. Someone didn't care and wanted to fleece the suckers anyway so went ahead and made one anyway. The rest is pretty much just yet another repeat of why suckers are called suckers.

-MarkM-

This is what happens when you keep the hashing algorithm the same when another chain that starts with a "B" and ends with an "N" has ASICs coming out for it.

This was not hard to see coming 8 months ago.

This has nothing to do with hash algorithm. FTC using scrypt didn't prevent someone showing up with 51% attack.

It's always been a problem in the implementation of terracoin's difficulty adjustment. Difficulty adjustment shouldn't be too fast.

How many scrypt ASICs are you aware of?

We are talking apples and oranges here. Gpus vs ASICs are a factor of 10 in speeds. Two totally different scenarios.

When I first mentioned this issue was before they changed the difficulty adjustment, back then the same issues still applies.

Difficulty adjustment is a moot point when it comes to 51% attack. If it was an issue then a new sha256 chain with adjustment every week would still have the same issues of a 51% attack because 1 sha256 ASIC would be enough to 51% attack it.

To be clear this is assuming fact someone is 51% attacking TRC, which I'm not sure is true.

Are the Devs gonna fix this?  Kinda worried for Terracoin.  No activity on Git for over three months now.

Dem 10 second blocks:  :o

Yeah, and Scrypt vs SHA-256  is a factor of 1000 in speeds. For a lot less than what it costs to put together a 1.2TH attack on Terracoin you could put together a 1.2GH attack on, say, Feathercoin with GPUs. It would cost a lot more in electricity, but an attacker wouldn't care about keeping the farm going on an ongoing basis.

Correct me if I'm making faulty assumptions or if my seat-of-the-pants math has led me astray.

However, the part about messing with the difficulty level is actually relevant. The attacker could have made it easier to attack by making the difficulty so unpredictable that miners gave up on it. I know I gave up on it for that reason. Difficulty would be enticingly low so I'd mine for about a half hour when I'd notice the difficulty had gone through the roof. After a while I learned not to pay any attention if TRC had a low difficulty. It wouldn't be worth my time to switch. Enough people give up and you keep the fluctuations going, eventually you can catch the network with its total hashrate down.

I'd be surprised if there weren't already a name for that tactic.

The last time TRC's difficulty adjustment was made was because the network hash rate was pretty low and someone would mine with an ASIC getting tons of blocks, difficulty skyrocket, and they move to a new coin until it was back down. Other coins have had that problem too (like FRC). That's not an attack per se, just someone optimizing their mining efforts but disrupting the whole coin because they have such a large % of the network hash rate.

I'm not sure that is happening now or not though, or if it some other sort of exploit. When the difficulty drops to the minimum 5k for quite a while, even if the 'attacker' wasn't mining, it should never go that low. There was a DDOS attack on TRC pools about a week ago but that seems over with at the moment.

Coinotron has 363.4 GH mining TRC right now. Even someone with 2-3 60GH/s miners should not be able to disrupt the difficulty that badly, or conduct a 51% attack. Maybe someone has way more than that? (A BFL minirig?)

The only solution, which is pretty much always the solution, is for more people to mine on the established pools so the "attackers" make up a smaller % of the network hashrate.

Sure acts like it... I wonder if they found a way to do the same exploit even after the patch that was done in April.

So in an attempt to make diff adjust more often due to ASIC attacks they still have another issue.

I still say a big part of the problem is they chose sha256 as the hash algorithm which there is now an army of ASICs to rape it at no cost to the attacker...well not much.

Devs?

As far as I can tell, the devs aren't active any more. Hoping I'm wrong. But someone posted a serious big report a month or two ago about the 32 bit version of the client being able to download/sync the block chain, and it was never replied to or fixed.

The main factor seems to its relation to Bitcoin and its standing armies of asic.  So maybe it has to become more similar in its defense by raising difficulty in time

They are already available. TRC is SHA-256

Off topic but what is up with the "D".  For the first couple years nobody got the hashing algorithm wrong and then recently there has been this poliferation of "SHA-256D" and "SHAW-256".  Once could be a typo, one person multiple times could been someone who is repeating a mistake but multiple people over multiple threads.

It is SHA-2 or SHA-256 (or without the hyphen SHA2, SHA256).

I'm not sure whether it started with miner software using sha256d to describe the double sha-256 hash or if it came from outside of bitcoin circles. A quick google is inconclusive. I know the term has become pretty common and since it's the switch for algo selection in several miners it's probably here to stay.

Sha-2 and sha-256 are the related like squares and rectangles.  All sha-256 is sha-2 but not all sha-2 is sha-256.

I haven't seen shaw-256 but it reads like a phonetic typo. I'm sure I'll notice it now.

The security model is pretty simple brute force: have more block-confirming computation power than all the supercomputers/competitors in the world all put together, by several times over.

That is not conducive to having umpteen chains that are not merging the same computer-power. By far the majority of the relevant computer-power on the planet needs to all achieve consensus as to the correct blockchain. Deliberately creating alternative blockchains undermines the very basis of the blockchain-security concept.

-MarkM-

This seems to be a bug or a exploit regarding the "RETARGET: artificially lowered diff; hard time mining current block..." change from April.

Block generation rate is very high and so this special retarget should NOT happen.
The block generation rate in the last hour was 4.6 blocks a minute!!!

I've seen it on a thread here, and I think I even made a "SHAWty got low" comment. People speak out of ignorance without bothering to do even basic research.

If this is a design problem (vulnerability) with the source, and if the developers have forsaken it, and the code is still publicly available, it behooves anyone with vested interest in the coin and sufficient programming skills (mine are insufficient) to address this. Even if that means pulling the newest source from an unmaintained repository (is it maintained?), making the fix, and uploading the source to some other new, maintained repository.

asics have always worked with TRC. I use my asics for it but this shit right now is insane....

Since TRC is based off the BTC source, is the 6 hour thing something BTC fixed previously that TRC never copied? Or is it a TRC-specific bug?

I happened to speak with gmaxwell and he pointed out it's a timewarp attack:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114751.0

It's been fixed in Bitcoin.

TRC not only didn't copy the fix, it made it worse.  Asymmetrical difficulty changes (where difficulty can go down more than it can go up) allows the attacker to amplify the effects of the attack.  No serious crypto-currency can have an asymmetrical difficulty system.  It is trivial to exploit.

So, what some honest miner(s) can do to help the coin to survive the attack? Mining trc using official client or may be there is some more effective way?

ASIC works for TRC 'per default'. It's SHA256.

It appears the time lapse attack is more of a bug in the code of terracoin, and would need fixed to prevent this from happening again. There isn't enough legitimate hash power on TRC to just force the attackers out if they are really using 1.2TH or more. Coinotron is by far the biggest pool and only runs about 1/3 that speed typically.

I have a script that queries terracoind every 5 seconds for the current difficulty.  If it's below my arbitrary threshold, it calls the cgminer API on my miners (about 200GHps), and has them hop onto mining TRC (solo, using eloipool locally).

It's worked nicely for me for a few months now, to mine when difficulty is low, and then hop off again when it becomes high (contributing to the oscillation effect).

But now that this attack is underway, no more mining for me.  All of my mined blocks become orphaned now because the attacker refuses to confirm them.

Looks like the terracoin repository is now active. Attempted fix put in place at block 175000

https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/commits/master/src (https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/commits/master/src)

I see they rejected the checkpoint someone did a pull request on earlier. The "current chain" the exchanges are relying on are, I assume, the one full of the blocks from the attacker...

So the devs are active but either not aware of the problem or actively working against a fix?  Not making me feel any better...

quick look\/FRC looks very undervalued for another SHA-256 type coin!=)

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/coins/freicoin

Some good comments on this thread, should archive it for future reference since new coins are so common

Hardly a new coin. This has been here for a while.

And for others talking about devs. I wish they would get their acts together and provide more support to their miners seems their never active anywhere.

Aren't most scamcoins past the insta-mine, pump and dump phase.  You didn't really think most of these have a future do you?

Yeah even the gimmicky "we use a different proof of work" coins seem to be losing value, which shouldn't be a surprise since all the gimmicky proofs of work are less efficient than SHA256 so its like hey not only do we have a silly gimmick we are also less efficient, isn't that great, buy us!

-MarkM-

all we need is sumore SHA256 tribe coins to muddy the waters imho ;D whoop whoop

Nope not all will have a future some but not all. Most of all the new ones are just nothing but pump and dump. TRC, PPC I do not see much of a future with them unless theirs company's taking them on like bitcoin and have something new to offer. If they don't then all I can see for them both is yet another pump dump

Looks like literally thousands of blocks dumped on the chain from the attacker simultaneously.

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/chain/Terracoin?count=2016&hi=168576

The timing is not ticking. So the attacker can continue mining at the low difficulty because he fake a special timestamps set. Extremely clever and know the implementation of the diff algorithm.

Maybe the same group that attacked the FTC.

I decided to suspend TRC mining on Coinotron.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49182.msg2806162#msg2806162 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49182.msg2806162#msg2806162)

Yeah we just watched a number of the high diff blocks real miners found get washed out by another huge load of 5K difficulty blocks from the attacker.

Basically he can mine blocks faster at 5K than anyone else can possibly compete with, so he has longer block chains to inject into the network at any time.

I can't believe BTC-E still has trading open on TRC right now.

Poor Terracoin... SHA256 ALTs are going to be seeing some troubling times as ASICs become more widespread.

However, I think over time that this will decrease. As less power efficient ASICs become unprofitable on Bitcoin, ASIC owners will be looking for another way to use their machines other than as a paper weight. I predict most of these people will switch to SHA256 ALTs, which will greatly increase the network speed and help to fight off attacks such as this.

The above mentioned movement is akin to the Bitcoin ASICs moving the GPU power over to Scrypt coins. It is just another inevitable step in the evolution of mining hardware and crypto currencies.

It will be interesting to find out if I am right, but I predict at least one SHA256 ALT to really become popular like Litecoin once certain ASICs start becoming unprofitable on Bitcoin. Which one will be the lucky winner? That's anyone guess, I am thinking a new SHA256 coin will come out in the next year or so that will blow all the others out of the water. Hopefully it is one that is innovative and brings something positive to the world of ALT coins. All the current SHA-256 ALTs are not very innovative IMO.

TRC has multiple real ASIC miners on it already. This isn't an issue of an ASIC coming in and rocking the boat. It's some sort of timewarp attack where the attacker gets to use a 5K difficulty but the rest of us use a far higher one and can't possibly compete...

Ah, I haven't been keeping up with this attack. I just assumed it was a standard 51% attack.

I should probably read the thread before posting.  ;)

I just installed Terracoin 0.1.3-42 here.
Now the download bar jumps back and forth between 18 and 19 hours behind.
Block 168940 and counting (10-20 seconds per block).
I guess this has to do with the currect problem discussed here.

That pull request was actually merged and not rejected (https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/pull/11).

The change was merged and later removed. And the time travel bug is still present...

24 hours and seems they was an update but for something else. I wonder if devs are even aware of this and are going to hard fork. I know if its not hard forked then this coin is forked for good.

Just realised the checkpoint was part of the "corrupted" blocks aswell.
I have to agree that its getting hard to recover from this tho.

Sounds like the time warp attack.   What was TRC forked from?

The dev did say in the issue though his fix was for this issue.

there seems to be an update:

https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/issues/12

and a new client update

http://terracoin.org/news/

Terracoin update 0.1.3-42 is now available for download at our sourceforge mirror and github repository.

yeah i rebuilt last night and there have been no commits since... still about 4500 more blocks for the patch to kick in... so i guess 90k TRC more to our attackers before the fix may or maynot work... probably we see some chain forking then. Anyone know if the exchanges will upgrade their clients before 175000 ?

I wrote to btc-e to advise the update.

what's happening to the coins that have been moved since last night? they didn't hit the destination address (I'm waiting them on my btc-e account, but not even showing as pending) even after 100 confirmations required, are they lost? will be deposited anytime? what's your opinion on this issue?

They day when less power efficient ASIC become unprofitable on bitcoin is very, very, very far in the future. Maybe years. Kids in their basements with free (parent paid) electricity have a very high threshold for expenses.

I'll ask again and an answer from experts will be very much appreciated:

what's the issue with trasferring TRC right now? yesterday everything was still working, 100 confirmations were required by many exchanges but the trasfers were still working, then since last night (CET time) they stopped working and TRC don't reach the account of destination, seem to be lost in the web, anybody has any clue here?

has anybody been succesfull in trasferring trc in the last 10 hrs?

if someone has, I guess it's the exchange I send the TRC to which is witholding the deposit.

thanks in advance.

This applies to any crypto-currency.  If the transaction is recorded on the blockchain then it is an issue with the recipient simply not giving credit.  There is no such thing as "not complete".  A transaction is either confirmed or it isn't confirmed.  Now if I was running an exchange right now given how trivially easy it would be to deposit, exchange, double spend I wouldn't be posting ANY deposits not even ones with 1,000 confirmations.

Even if your transactions had 120+ confirms, the attacker can still wipe them out by providing thousands of new blocks in a moment, thus getting a longer chain and making everything else invalid. When this happens, your coins never actually were sent (since the block chain with the transfer "never happened"), and instead they would still be wherever they were previously.

If your coins were mined after the attack started and the blocks that you mined are wiped out, then the coins you earned for mining those blocks no longer exist.

Transfers will remain unreliable until at least block 175,000 when the patched client will change the algorithm to prevent this sort of attack (as far as we can tell). In the mean time the attacker is free to do what he wants and continue minting coins only for himself.

many thanks


very much appreciated. in fact the amount is withheld by the exchange without any official statement on the matter

Not sure: unlike GPUs, you can't sell your mining hardware to someone who won't mine with it and the current reward/electricity is 50:1.
With stable prices when the total hashrate reaches 10PH/s, Avalons/BFL and 1st gen ASICMINER chips will become unprofitable.

400GH/s miners based on bitfury chips with at least 6x better energy efficiency are being ordered right now and competition seems to come for them too. This is at a price point comparable to what batch3 Avalon were sold for not so long ago. Very, very, very far in the future might just be 2014...

At current exchange rate the network would need to be more than 20 PH/s before even the least efficient ASICs are unable to operate profitably (note once purchased the capital cost is sunk so we are looking only at ongoing electrical cost).  It is more like 40PH/s for BFL and KNC devices and 80 PH/s for Bitfury.   With the network currently at 0.2 PH it would take a massive amount hashing power (and thus capital) to push the network rate that high. 

No matter how efficient Bitfury are sales will slow once the ROI% on new hardware is pushed low enough and that should happen long before the least efficient EXISTING units become unprofitable.  The one thing which could change this is a significant rise in exchange rate for an extended period of time and then a substantial crash (i.e. exchange rate rises to $500 over next 6 months and then crashed back to $100).

At the worst moment of attack : Power of attacker was not 1200 giga but like 3600 giga power (like 60 avalons power)

Does there are 10 people with such amount of asic or hashrate power? I dont think... then the attacker is easy to find lol...

We have a smart attacker changing timestamp and all ( smart attack, the attacker know what hes doing with algo), but stupid enought to mine with 3600 giga showing it can be only few people behind...

Notice : when attack stop, ozco.in get 3600 giga hashrate more (1 anonymous user with 3600 giga LOL), So we can assume this miner is our attacker. Hes actually no mining on ozco since attack restarted but just wait it stop and see again + 3600 giga ( one user) coming on ozco...

Maybe ozco.in can report his IP so some can have some fun too...

I hope they give out his IP.

Do you know his username of forum Im going to request him his opinion about. Cause 100% at least 99.99% it s our attacker

I mysef was minning on cointron with 2 avalons TRC and changing for osco when i mine BTC. I also noticed the game...behind on both site when attacker playing...stoping restating...

You gotta be kidding right? You want a pool to give out the IP of someone who might have done the attack, so you can harass him?

First you need to start by realizing that it is not even wrong to attack a coin. If there is a weakness that can be exploited everyone that wants to spend the energy and hashes is free to do so. That is the problem with most of these alts, they are not secure enough so dont keep money in them that you cannot afford to lose.

Ah, I just love Terracoin summer sales.

Well that's a point of view.

Another example : someone hack your own bank with a weakness in your computer. Theft your saving. Then you will have same point of view about exploid of weakness in your computer? Or so I could say as you : dont let in your bank account what you can afford to lose?

Point of views are different according what we own or not in a quoted situation. I agree with you about that.

1 I have checked all pools and theirs no one or even a pool close to that power.

2 Looks more of solo mining and or they have a private pool setup exploiting all others.

3 if wanted providing their is blockchain that gives the info like blockchain.info you will find location of where he or she or group is mining coins from.

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/address/1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB

Short Link: http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/a/1PAnMKuTs9

TRC address of coins going to 1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB

Balance: 7580 TRC this was taken 24 hours ago and now well probs 10 or 20x that amount
Transactions in: 379
Received: 7580 TRC
Transactions out: 0
Sent: 0 TRC

I was happily mining away over at multipool when I seen orphaned  and then I seen the difficulty go really low then went back up then down and all over the place. I thought ok must be a few blocks bad then more was like ok whats going on no word in irc no details then decided on posting and seeing what has gone on. I hope that TRC devs are working to fix this and the only solution tho it seems would be a hard fork to the date before this happened.

Updates after looking around seems theri aware of it new updated client.

Terracoin update 0.1.3-42 is now available for download at our
sourceforge mirror and github repository.

This build addresses the difficulty manipulation issue currently seen on
the live chain, and will be mandatory on block 175000.

The code allowing such difficulty manipulations was added to the client
prior to the ema difficulty adjustment implementation, it should have
been removed from the client long ago to prevent this.

Once most network nodes are updated, and block 175000 is reached, the
capped ema implementation should take care of abnormally forged blocks ;
as usual, this is supposing the network gets more hashing power than the
attacker(s).

With the current artificially decreased difficulty, and the network
hashing power way higher than the 'awaited' rate, network will generate
a lot of orphan blocks until this issue is addressed.

Download links:
---------------

source: master branch at https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin

windows binaries:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/terracoin/files/SatoshiClone/terracoin-0.1.3-42-win32.zip/download

Source-based update:
--------------------
If you previously cloned our repository, you may update using:

cd /path/to/your/local/clone/
git checkout master  # locally on the master branch locally
git pull origin master  # fetches and merges remote master branch

# headless daemon:
cd src
nice make -f makefile.unix -j 4
strip terracoind

# qt-client:
cd /path/to/your/local/clone/
qmake USE_IPV6=-
nice make -j 4
strip terracoin-qt

--
TRC.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=terracoin-announce

Can't trust those balance figures though. Heck, this single block he's moving around 290K coins:

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/block/000000000008966b58e347395e01f667550e88dc88df6524ee4af66b570460bf

I cant believe that no one has already found his IP. There should be a proper hunt for this guy. I don't agree that its not wrong to attack a coin. What makes you think that its fine to steal? just because you know how and have huge hash power? what a bollox..   If your bank account was wiped clear by a hacker, would you say its nothing wrong with that? because the guy knows how to do it and has processing power to make it happen?

111k just sent to same address on block 171932:

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/block/000000000009277b83c701f9f6b7639eb1dcc057ce02f3d34613ffb89d12b75d

The attacker mined at max using 3600 power solo mining TRC...The total network TRC has been 4200 giga ( 500 was on Coinotron) or so for few time before to back to 1200. When attack stopped, 3 minutes later ozcoin got a anonymous miner havong exactly same power around 3600 giga. This new ozco miner dissapearead after few hours. And the attack restarted in matter of minute on TRC :)

99.99% sure then yes still 0.01% for coincidence. Sure can be lot of people behind, we all have friends having 3600 giga power those days...

I'm partly inclined to agree with the above.

Also correlation does not prove this entity's guilt. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

This is a very clear explanation, thanks.

Thanks for posting this update link!

I wonder what happens when #175000 is reached. Attacker seems to have a lot of power.
How long is the sampling interval for difficulty changes?

you guys realise chain hopping has been happening since before NMC was merge mined with BTC? I am sure some of you have done it yourselves (actually people in this thread have admitted to it)- so this guy has lots more hashpower than you? ....bummer
ASIC were always going to screw up sha-256 alt coins - this is no surprise.Miners were working out which alt coins would be viable to mine ASICs on before deliveries even started.

I don't see evidence of an attack, just a miner doing what many others have been for years, what makes him unusual is the size of the hashrate - don't worry there will be more and more like him as more ASIC devices get delivered.

Hence merged mining... no hopping needed, just mine all of them at once.

-MarkM-

You don't see evidence of timewarp attack? You'd better look more clearly at blockchain.

I would agree if he wouldn't do 51%(80% in his case) attack and timewarp attack...

TRC had some problems early in the year with an ASIC coming in and out of the chain and it was dealt with. This has nothing to do with that, and how you cannot see "evidence of an attack" when there are hundreds of blocks introduced on the blockchain simultaneously with invalid difficulties because of the timestamp/timewarp attack boggles my mind.

I don't trust the network hash figures from the explorer at the moment given the way he can mine blocks at a different difficulty than the rest of us. A 51% attack on bitcoin, for instance, still has to obey the difficulty rules.

This is the attacker's address.
And here you can see it's current balance: http://trc.cryptocoinexplorer.com/chain/Terracoin/q/addressbalance/1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB
It's 131119.8705 currently.

As an attacker seems to have enough hashrate for 51% he can continue manipulating difficulty even after halving is removed.
The easiest way to lower difficulty is creating a specific chain of blocks. As actual spacing is limited to 1.5 * 2min = 3 minutes when calculating EMA, an attacker needs to make every second block 3 min in the future from previous, and the make next block in the past. By creating such a chain of blocks where even blocks are in th future and uneven are in the past he can manupulate the difficulty down.

This is because when actual spacing between blocks is negative, terracoin assumes it to be 2 min so it doesn't affect retargeting.
Look here if you want:
https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L1160

PS. It's what I got from sources, if I am mistaken please let me know.

Just a quick FYI:

The daemon on CCE has been updated to the new version on Github.

To think of it in another way.... 3600 GH/s is approximately what one would get from a single batch of Avalon chip orders... and I think first deliveries started couple of weeks ago.

You don't see evidence? timestamp... Yes you need glasses

Thanks for support to attacker

Can anybody give a small summary of what happened? Seems confusing at the moment. I have some TRCs and am wondering whether they will be worthless.

I'm asking the same questions, 800 block to 175000, then what? scenarios? can some expert outline some possible outcomes?

It is not a point of view, it is the rules of the game. Let me explain why there is a big difference. .

You do not seem to understand that the only rule when it comes to cryptos is that whoever control 51% of the network makes the rules. Whenever you put any money into a crypto that is not proof of stake you basically agree to this rule. Hope you understand that, because it is a very important point of how cryptos work.

So because not enough people found it worthwhile to put their hashing power towards protecting TRC, it was possible for one person to get more than 51% thus now controlling the rules of the coin. This person then decided that the old difficulty adjustment rule was something he wanted to change and did so. Guess what, nothing wrong has happened here. He threw a lot of hashing power towards TRC because he found it more valueable then everyone else and took advantage of the rules og the game.

He just wanted to earn profits, don't overestimate ;)

So the only other real answer until block 175k is to have an additional call to 1000-3000 GH come online and mitigate his 'twisting' of the block chain from his >51% manipulation of the current chain?

https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/issues/12

some updates from the devs.

we just hit block 175000
now? blocks seem to be generated at same high pace... difficulty is already on the rise though
how long will it take to get back to normal?

seems difficulty has overshot the other way, 198k and blockchain stuck at 175037

new block 038 difficulty 253k... weird, isn't it? what's happening, any expert to answer this question?

17 minutes between block 37 and 38, 30 minutes since 38 and still waiting for 39... experts? what's your take? what happened? price on btce has risen from 137 to 143, which is to be taken as a positive...

i guess that attacker - now unable to lower difficulty at will - made it skyrocket to harm the currency :(

Things will probably stabilize, supposing network gets a constant hashrate, and will progressively return to normal difficulties ; time will tell

how do you get those? that means a block every few hrs

what block am I suppose to be on I'm showing 175038?

i tried direct connection to a seednode, and that's what i am at too.

It's weird, it looks like p2pool isn't following the same scheme ; i guess p2pool users are not up to date :(

Just let TRC die already IMO

Yes, they are on a different chain, probably since block 175000.
With 54 GH/s

Stuck on 175031 on several different PC's.  :(

175027-175037 were all mined by the old attacker in succession, using address 13kfKR1BS9gtsxppMeqDTx4rAvbwWjvYSL.  This address accepted a deposit from 1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB at block 174999.  Looks like he is still affecting the network and still orphaning massive blocks.

Yes that was correct.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=31222636

Specifically

height: 175038   
hash: 00000000000010fc5dc8c16d2e8edf721ffbc450ee325ed3515192db11f0469d
time : 1374955622 (2013-07-27 20:07:02)
nonce : 2584811947
bits : "1a421cf5"

That's the block you should see in your terracoind if you are on latest version and in sync with official chain.

From the announce mailing list:


I see in my debug log peers trying to submit blocks well past where the official chain is actually at. People need to update!

I installed the 0.1.3-44 update, and it shows me at block 175200.

+1

Don't understand how that's possible. All pools and explorer that are running new client are on 175039 at the moment. Devs confirmed p2pool is on wrong chain with wrong hash for block 175038.

Ah. He downloaded the new client -after- block 175,000 so invalid blocks already in his data files.

Confirmed by someone in BTC-E chat that BTC-E is on the forked chain. Deposits/withdrawals working with forked chain, not with official chain.

start your client with following parameter :
(append it to your shortcut command), it should do the trick.

loaded only 108222 blocks



upd.
deleted all files (except wallet and conf.) in appdata
loaded only 175038 blocks on 0.1.3-44 client

Reindex doesn't help, it just gets confused on the more recent blocks and doesn't process them. Even with deleting the other files. I think the problem is out of our hands, hopefully the dev(s) can sort something out, although I wonder if the coin can ever continue on from here.

weird that with all these problems price actually rose on btc-e up to 160 and now currently at 146 well above yesterday prices. so what's with block 038? are we stuck there, any chance for the block chain to resume regularly? if the attacker has all these coins he wouldn't want the coin to die I guess, cause he'd lose all, wouldn't he?

You are assuming the motive of the attacker(s) is to make money.

how's the attack? is it over?

This seems to be the most concise explanation, crucially there are two things going on; the timewarp bug and the attacker currently has >50% hashing power on the TRC network:

Halving removed, old times of dead blockchain back.

Did not work.  It got stuck reindexing 175009 (I assume that's where the chains diverge).

Deleting the chain and redownloading, it's now on 175038 like I hear it should be, but it still says "14 hours behind".

I think it's OK. Client sees blocks from old chain but rejects them due to code changes. Users should upgrade their clients.

Sounds correct then. 175038 is how many blocks we have at the moment. If the client says something like "of an estimated X" you can ignore that

The current block being worked on is difficulty 305K and we don't have a lot of hash power on the network. Sooner or later we'll get it solved though. Because when the exploit was closed there were so many fast blocks at low difficulties, the difficulty shot up quite quickly. Will need to do a few high difficulty blocks to get past the 'peak' and things should then lower back to pre-attack levels...

Is the difficulty adjustment not based at all on time since last block? I guess I was assuming with this block taking so long, it'd more quickly adjust back downwards. But I don't know how the EMA algorithm in TRC actually works.

So here's much of our problem, very low hash power.

Coinotron and Multipool have TRC suspended. If you add up the other 3 pools I know of (Hynodeva, Redpoint, RoyalMinindCo) that adds up to 39 GH/s.

P2Pool who is still on the forked chain has a "local rate" of 30Gh and a "pool rate" of 54Gh. So at the moment, p2pool is more than half of the total pooled hash power but they still haven't upgraded to new client and re-indexed.

An ASIC with 2x60G/h helped us reach block 175K and sent me a private message about doing so. I'll ask if he'll solve block 175039 for us, to keep things moving ever so slowly.

The large TRC-friendly ASIC just landed block 175039 for us. Hoping he stays around to kill a few more until diff drops. ;)

That's nice but I guess that's gonna happen frequently from now on and afaik this was why they introduced the diff halving (that was now abused) in the first place... what's gonna save us when for example at one exchange prices rice dramatically, hash power increases accordingly, then prices drop & miners leave and we are stuck who-knows-where?
Does anybody know where such kind of discussions by the devs can be followed? On terracointalk.org there seems to be not much going on :-(

Looking at the github comments on the patches, I believe the difficulty halving was before the change to an EMA based difficulty algorithm. When that went into place, the halving should have been removed but wasn't, and the attacker found a way to exploit it. Once we're back to "normal" I'm not sure we need the halving.

Remember before attack the network had a lot of hash power on it, sometimes 500Gh or more, and difficulty worked fine to adjust up and down as people changed coins. None of that was using the halving code.

No, they were using the halving code all along, I was monitoring it and you can see it by the fluctuations in the timestamps (+/- 20 mins).
Whenever a block was >5mins old, they'd make their client think it's actually 15 mins in the future ( so the client thinks the block is >20 mins old) to trigger the diff halving). It's difficult to see in the block explorers since they don't have the timestamp when they actually received the blocks, but when you see something like

block 1      10:10h       Diff 10000
block 2      10:30h       Diff 5000
block 3      10:11h       Diff 6000

then you can be pretty sure that the timewarp magic was used for block 2 whereas blocks 1+3 might be from regular miners.

Another scenario was when they found a block that was not yet 5 mins old (so they couldn't use their magic yet) they dated it 5 mins into the past, that way being able to mine the next block at half diff right from the beginning.

Something along

block 1    10:10h     Diff 10000
block 2    10:05h     Diff 12000
block 3    10:25h     Diff 5000
block 4    10:11h     Diff 6000

But they did it way better than the attacker from the last few days because they didn't take a 100% of the cake.
And also everybody else was profitting of the generally-low-difficulty as well, whereas last days' attacker was so fast almost everybody else was filling the orphanages.
But there were quite a few situations where we probably had been stuck for quite a while hadn't someone used the halve-diff trick for getting diff back down sooner than otherwise.

Kind regards
Mike

Coinpolice shows TRC being on block 175,433 and 5k diff, does this mean they are out of date and on the old client?

Yep

They'll need to upgrade and use -reindex once to get synced up.

As far as I know, only the mass of p2pool users (who have to all individually upgrade since it's decentralized) and BTC-E need to get synced in.

i withdrew some TRC from BTC-e while we were at block 175038, and got my 1st confirmation with block 175039 so it looks like they're on the right chain.

Whew! Last night they were on the other one. Yay.

block 039 in fact has 304518 difficulty, so your calculation looks pretty much accurate, does that mean that we will have 1 block per day at this pace?

Depends on network hash power. There is a big ASIC helping us out on my pool right now:

8 miners @ 123.42GH/s are mining block 175040 with difficulty 351362. Avg time/block: 3h 24m

So to use 24 hours for an example, we should have roughly 7-8 blocks found, depending on luck of course. At current difficulty.

I have no idea how long our benevolent ASIC overlord will keep working on TRC though. Hopefully a while. ;)

Speaking of which, he's moved on to greener pastures it appears. Still, that was a big help to move one of those blocks off quickly. But yes, will take a while now.

Thank you Mike270. I forgot, but I spotted this a month ago. I just didn't understand what I was seeing. I reported it to the forum and never heard anything further about it:

http://www.terracointalk.org/index.php/topic,331.0.html

Where can you mine this coin?  Coinotron and Multipool doesn't seem to work.  

Also, What are the rpc ports for solo mining?

You can use my pool in my sig (www.royalminingco.com).

Not sure on solo mining port off hand.

Can solo mine on whatever port you set it to in terracoin.conf

I just put 220 G/H to you Royal Mining - for the rest of the day.

If anyone wants to donate a few TRC to the 'lets get us to block 175050 fund' (Not a requirement! taking a ~$300 loss on BTC mining for the day).

1NssLXDC854RRzs8DTWKmFtfgzGmJxBzuY

Awesome iluvpcs, thank you!

8 miners @ 224.66GH/s are mining block 175040 with difficulty 351362. Avg time/block: 1h 52m

That should knock a number of blocks out.

I'm stuck at 175038, 22 hours behind. I'm using 0.1.3-44.

Do I just wait or do I need to take action?

EDIT: Waiting did it. It now says it is up-to-date.

175039 took several hours to clear, I'd bet the problem was downloading all the transactions that occurred during that time.

Doubtful. Transactions are tiny in bytes. The block itself should be no less than 1 MB. If it took horus for you to download 1 MB something is wrong with your connection.

If you want to mine terracoin on a pool, go to http://www.royalminingco.com/ 2% Fee DGM

Newest block is 175046 ... How many more blocks to get back to normal levels?

if you have trouble with sync - open console and type getpeerinfo

pick all IPs that have "startingheight" : higher than 1750xx

find some tool* and close those connections, if you have a firewall, you can temp block them for a while

at some point you will be connected to unaffected peers and it will sync, when you kill connections it will add new IPs that could be affected too, repeat if you see "0 hour(s) behind"

* I've used http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html

coming down in difficulty

9 miners @ 190.41GH/s are mining block 175053 with difficulty 154491. Avg time/block: 58m

Yup, and looks like last couple blocks were p2pool miners. So they are getting onto the new chain too.

Rebooted pool just now to apply a bfgminer fix that was crashing one of the bigger miners.

Does this mean if redpoint has found block 175598 then it's on the wrong chain?

Yes

And the supposed attacker came back when difficulty dropped - look at coinbase address starting at 175064

At least he has to mine at the real difficulty though.

How's TRC status these days?

Yeah I'm wondering the same. Low hash power and profitability on multipool is scaring me away from running my block eruptors on trc again...

Difficulty isn't stabilized yet. The EMA difficulty algorithm swings like a pendulum around the target until it settles down, at least until hash rate changes. So after block 175K it shot up above 400K (because there were so many too-fast blocks before that), down to 5K, now it's almost to 100K but the increases have gotten small enough I'm guessing it's just a few blocks from going down again. It'll probably not go quite as low as 5K, then go back up again but not as high as 100K.

Another "bounce" or two and it should be around the range it used to be before all of this happened. We had a lot of hash power getting us through that first 400K diff hump, but there's a lot less out there now to get through this smaller 100K diff hump.

TRC isn't profitable to mine vs BTC right now, so it relies on people willing to help out to get sanity restored.

Oops, I just woke up. Block 175092 was the 2nd peak, at 99K diff. It's on the way back down now.

well that will teach u for sleeping!! Don't you know sleep is for the weak :P

Well in that case I'll help the network stabilize. Not much just ~3.5 gh/s but its something lol. I just didn't want to start mining and then find out its taking a day or more for a block and everybody is abandoning lol. Personally I hope TRC survives this because I think it has some very important improvements over bitcoin...and somebody else obviously feels the same otherwise why bother to attack it?

Noticed all my mined coins were no longer showing as the same address...

I know this seems far-fetched... but...

Are you guys sure that someone didn't purposely release a "branch" or "update", that makes all miners mine on that address that seems to be getting all the coins? EG, using the credentials of that wallet, thus we are all essentially pool-mining into that one wallet for someones personal gain.

My wallet is filled with mined-blocks with addresses that don't appear on any block-chain. They were all confirmed, then now, mysteriously after the 44 update, they disappeared and no chains have "completed". (Deleted the entire block-chain and nodes, several times, redownloaded it several times, and it always says 8 hours left, and never gets the last 8 hours of blocks.)

Seems someone hard-coded in a fork that was invalid, and there are sooo many versions out there, creating more forks, which are also invalid. I don't think there is a legitimate fork anymore, to build off of. Might be why those who download from the beginning, can't connect, because we actually SEE the audited chain with the invalid block transactions... as opposed to those who are just building off an invalid chain that were once forks, and were not actually audited, since they were hard-coded, and the program told them the chain was correct.

Who exactly decides to add hard-coded blocks into the chain, and "pick" which fork is correct? Apparently they did it wrong, or did that on purpose. (The one reaping the rewards?)

Great, you compile the code yourselves... but do you actually look at the code? That is the whole purpose of compiling yourself... so you can be sure you are compiling something that is not tainted.

Wallets need a way to detect multiple chains, and let us select the ones to mine from. As opposed to just assuming the longest one is real, without actually auditing it, before joining it. (If only for times like this, where every block shows as an orphan, and there seems to be five hard forks. I have seen five "end-block" values in all my downloading... none that are valid, and matching any of the block-explorers, so the block-explorer is on the wrong side of the fence too.)

The block explorer is correct. There is a hard fork that happened at 175000 between people that applied the mandatory update prior to that, and those who did not. If you are on the right chain, the client will still at times say you are 'behind' or 'syncing' but you can ignore that. Those messages come because a peer connects to you and says "I have a newer block than you". They talk for a while, -44 client realizes the blocks they are trying to send are no good, and bans the peer for 24 hours.

The pools, BTC-E, and explorer are all in sync and coins are moving properly between them and show up on the block chain.

The key is to check the tooltip for your wallet and if it says "Processing X of Y" where X is the latest block on the explorer, you are golden. Ignore the Y number. You an run -44 with -reindex and it should fix you up, you'll sync as soon as the next block is found and distributed.

https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/commits/master

I always skim over the diffs.

Anyone can read the full source if they wanted and raise an alarm if something was off. Thats the advantage of opensource, and compiling your own binaries. Im pretty sure if something malicious made it into the repo it would be noticed and made public immediately.... but i cant say the same for binaries...

Well, I am not golden, nor are many of the pools... And I think you only "think" you are golden... (You might have gotten on the right chain, by luck. But I assume you are on the chain that I was, when it looked "golden" to me... but was a dud-chain, producing blocks that were useless and invalid, though they showed in the wallet, as if they were valid.)

Doing all the above, results in fail.

Being 8 days behind, and not being able to mine, and when I can mine, the blocks that were valid, later disappear... is not "golden".

I will laugh when you find you have mined all week long, and all the coins you think you have mined, are all gone, the next time you restart the wallet.

Which block-explorer is right.... there are two, not the same results. Every pool I see is generating all orphans.

Current diffs showing as... 71960.69, 5183.834, and 5432311.847...

Which fork are you on, that you "think" is the right one?

If you upgrade to the latest client, and re-sync the blockchain, im pretty sure ull end up with the same chain as http://trc.cryptocoinexplorer.com/ . Tried it twice, same results.

Current block 175098 with difficulty 63031 is the correct chain.

http://trc.cryptocoinexplorer.com/block/000000000000db5e0afa0cc2b30a08c11ffa41429597f2252477694dab5ec60f

Is the correct block 175097.

RoyMiningCo, Redpoint, Multipool, Hynodeva are all working on 175098. P2Pool nodes using the github patch to support Terracoin -44 are working this chain as well. Coinotron hasn't resumed mining yet but we know he's upgraded to new client via IRC.

DustCoin and CoinChoose web sites show this as the correct block.

If you see any crypto web sites that aren't on this chain you should let them know to install -44 and run -reindex. If you want to pop into IRC later tonight, maybe someone can zip up the block chain for you to download directly if you just can't seem to sync properly off the peers.

Remember that the "Processing X of Y" message in the TRC wallet doesn't mean Y is correct or that you are on a chain with Y. It means you have processed up to block X, and some peer is trying to send you a chain ending in block Y. A peer with a short chain is silently and immediately ignore. A peer with a longer chain your client will talk to, to see if it has better info that you do. However, if you are synced properly it'll recognize they are wrong and ban that peer for 24 hours. Of course, the "of Y" message in the tooltip returns every time a new peer tries to give you newer blocks that aren't correct.

If your wallet says "Processing block 175097 of Y" then I'd say you are on the right chain, no matter what the value of Y is. Y might change to various numbers as various forked peers try to lead you astray. But it won't work, and you'll sit on 175097 until the next block is found.

yay current block diff down to 45657 ... i guess 1 or 2 more blocks to reach positive ROI levels...

Then the attacker will dump his systems onto the coin and cause another spike.

But... since time wrap exploit has been fixed... they wont be able to do as much damage as before...

really?

1PAnMKuTs9R4U9FF7xdQSmQc655d2r9zeB sent 6279.8705 to 13kfKR1BS9gtsxppMeqDTx4rAvbwWjvYSL in block 174999.  According to the block chain, 13kfKR1BS9gtsxppMeqDTx4rAvbwWjvYSL has since mined blocks 175027-175037, 175064-175074 and 175076-175080.  Sure looks like he's stil 51%ing the network when he wants to with those numbers.

Very possible but not happening atm it seems. I'm interested to see how difficulty will work long-term without the halving code in there.

In the last 13 blocks we've stayed between 33783 - 39113 in spite of two peaks. So the direction changes and speed of difficulty adjustment has mellowed out at last.

13kf popped in with diff got down to 10K. On the way back up a bit now.

He might have the hash power for a 51% attack, don't know. Only way to prevent that is for more people to mine, but that's true for every coin.

i'm affraid network is way too small to resist any chain hoppers or regular spikes from relatively heavy miners joining the party

EDIT : profit indicators sites are also starting to mark it as "green green green!" "Boogidy boogidy boogidy, lets go racin"

CoinChoose has right block # but showing wrong difficulty, so the profit % is off. Dustcoin has correct block # and difficulty, showing TRC around 245% a few minutes ago.

We should start attracting back more miners I'd think with difficulty floating between this level and ~90% of BTC at prior peak.

Wish CoinChoose had correct difficulty on their site though.

Recent difficulty graph:

https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2659326/883477/9dd23aa8-f988-11e2-8d01-4ecb10ad4249.png

Latest peak was only 22287 and next dip appears less shallow than prior one. Things are about as stable difficulty-wise as they are going to get I imagine, until a large amount of hash power pours in to rock the boat.

It'd be nice to get total network hash power up higher. At these difficulties mining is more profitable than BTC. (22287 is about 140% of BTC profit.) To match BTC I imagine avg difficulty needs to be somewhere in the 30Ks. More hash power means less profit, but also more stability.

Each of those up-swings were prefaced by the attacker mining again.  1pan mined 17 blocks between 175000 and 175025, 13fk mined 175027-175038 and diff spiked through the roof.  After diff came down(53 hours!), 13fk mined 175064-175080 in 122 seconds.  Again after diff dropped(22.5 hours), 13fk mined 175107-175121 in 51 seconds.  Difficulty only took 2.5 hours to come down, then he mined 175152-175158 in 67 seconds, 12 hours later he mined 175188-175197 in 123 seconds and another 3 hours before he mined  175220-175228 in 133 seconds.  It's only been 2 hours, but he'll prob strike again soon.

The only plus side is he seems to be only burst mining and not outright destroying the network like he had been.

Maybe the attacker didn't want the coin dead. He wouldn't have stopped even after the fix if he wanted it to die. The burst mining is just to accumulate more coins at this point

The idea is interesting but if the purpose of the attack was to test it on a strong sha256 coin, why bother continuing to mine even after the fix was put in place? The only purpose for doing that is to generate more coins for themselves while network hash power and difficulty are low...but for what purpose would they need the coins if they wanted it dead?

One minor flaw in that theory, with the power he has to throw at the network, he can easily 51% it at will.  Maybe he is testing new ways of orphaning blocks.  Take a look at all of his latest blocks, never a transaction other than the 20 coins to him.  With the tipewarp fixed, he can no longer get 100's of blocks an hour, so he holds off, powers through ~200 coins, leaves.  Sure looks like a test to me.

Then again, maybe you are right and he's not out to kill it, after all, at current exchange rates, he's earning ~.27 BTC for 2 minutes work whenever he decides to.  

I think we'll know a lot more when those mined coins start getting moved

The coin is dead.

The attacker has demonstrated publicly that he can halt the coin as long as he wants.
Only a fool would still use such a coin --> the coin is dead.

Then there are delusional people that will still use it, and speculators that might be able to exploit those people and earn some real money.

Also remember before 175K the difficulty could be forced down to 5k using the exploit. That's why the swing up so high happened, tons of blocks mined at an artificially low difficulty.

Sure he can mine in the valleys, anyone can. And a 51% attack is possible by anyone with enough power. But so far the difficulty has been behaving very well.

aha now I know who

http://youtu.be/UwKryuazNMk?t=22s

Liar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsYT8YHL-R0

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaVIIoRKBlk (starting at 5:30)

Who am I kidding, there isn't a single line Khan said that isn't pure gold.  

Version -46 is mandatory in 10K or so blocks. (Should be final update.)

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=31258292

Seems that they use this exploit now.
Is it the attacker's address?
13fcjC81VzihkYPhkJrNyi2eQKzDaUzA2F
http://trc.cryptocoinexplorer.com/chain/Terracoin/q/addressbalance/13fcjC81VzihkYPhkJrNyi2eQKzDaUzA2F
There's one more address that started mining today: 1MLxxvrHF3bHkW1ti7juj4fxqzd7ym8hXQ

Since it seems it continues and I'm getting somewhat pissed off by what is currently going on with TRC, I created a blacklist available here:

http://teracoin.org/blacklist

Which records major past&present acts which I personally consider as contradictory to the spirit of CryptoCoin movement.
The idea was to deploy a full-fledged economy and not a playground for morally crippled criminals, no?

Ideally,  in the future, merchants and exchange offices shall simply not accept coins which have ever passed through such dirty addresses.

Perhaps you should look into the possibilities of exploits with a particular coin before using it?

TRC exploits have been foreseen many months ago, especially the one where ASICs can jack up the difficulty at a moments notice.

Dear smoothie,

Existence of exploits is not my concern. Since it has been long ago postulated by many wise persons whose opinion I respect that EVERY SYSTEM IS EXPLOITABLE (BTC included, of course), I personally consider it to be a waste of time to give a big fck about exploits. What interests me, however,  especially in this stage of CryptoCoin paradigm shift, is to propose robust reactive mechanism against immoral usage of such exploits.

Blacklist whose URL is above is my minute contribution to such a mechanism.

(a propos,  many [ c.f. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2322.msg30913#msg30913 ] things were "foreseen" months before You even registered to this forum, thus if I were You I would be somewhat reluctant in making definitive statements from such a distinguished supervisory pose)

Maybe you can reformat your page?  All I see is 1 long continuous line of garble that makes no sense.

Change something or end this bs.

I don't know how Your browser displays pure text files but the http://teracoin.org/blacklist ain't nothing else than a ";" separated CSV file whose
1st column specify the currency
2nd column specifies the address of the thief/attacker
3rd column specifies the brief name of the incident
4th column specifies the  URL describing the incident (and thus justifying the presence in the blacklist)

If such a (ideally decentralised) blacklist should be adopted by the most impotant merchants&exchange offices, it would mean for an attacker that he's burnin away his ASIC circuits 4 nothing else  than keeping the amount of "non-dirty" coins on a stabilized level, hence raising the value (in comparison with other currencies which inflate by mining) of the coin for all participants of the network except  himself :)

it's called an antiassholebollock positive feedback

[and You can be sure that the copies of the blockchain before the attack are stored on definitely hundred places or so, some offline, so TRC is definitely NOT DEAD, no definitive rewrite of the history could take place, coin is just hibernating]

Just realized that my TRC wallet is empty. There were just few coins, but still..
Transactions log is empty also.
Is this because of the attack?

Possibly. Did you install 0.1.3-48 before block 181200? If not, install it now and run it once with -reindex. That should get you sycned in and give your wallet accurate information on your coins.

A bit necro but there arn't many TRC threads on BCT.

I have noticed that on most days the network hash rate is ~400-600 GH/s. I was surprised to see that no matter how many blocks pass, it seems now that the network difficulty has remained constant at 104K diff. I suppose there could be something wrong with my client/miner but it seems to be the case on multiple computers so perhaps not.

However, yesterday I saw that the network hash rate climbed to about 4500 GH/s. Right now (http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/) it's being reported at over 17000 GH/s (17 TH/s). http://coinchoose.com/ indicates 15 TH/s. But the diff is remaining at 104K despite block times down to between 30-60 seconds (supposed to be ~2 min avg).

Were there changes made to the difficulty adjustment algorithm to prevent the previous 'time-warp' attacks described in this thread? I see that its now set to adjust ever 30 blocks (http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/coins/terracoin) however it seems strange it always goes back to 104K diff given the hash rate variance (at least between 400-600 GH/s if not more with this T-hash boost).

Also, 15+ TH is a lot. I suspect either the coin is once again being exploited OR a profit-switching pool has aimed in terracoins direction, although I had thought those were always only scrypt based. Are there switching pools for ASIC miners too?

 ??? ??? ???

Build 0.1.3-48 available
This build include the new retargetting algorithm, returning to a common retarget window.
Target will be adjusted at 2160 blocks interval

http://www.terracoin.org/news/

Yes the latest TRC client mirrors BTC's own adjustment algorithm. So it changes every 2160 blocks. There is a max change cap of x4 or /4, so what happened last change was it went down to /4 because of the long time it had been too slow. Then everyone piled in since TRC was so much more profitable than BTC. Forcing it back up by 4x.

As-is, TRC probably won't sort itself out using this algorithm until sometime after BTC's difficulty increase pushes TRC profitability up even at the higher difficulty level. If it does raise to 400K, then it should eventually settle around the point the profitability is similar to BTC's.

A shorter retarget window (with smaller max changes) is probably called for.

not sure about that : current estimations shows an estimated difficulty at next retarget block of 44059 (in 161 blocks)
(this varies a lot, due to the insane increase in hashrate seen yesterday)

This is higher than previous decrease, where it went down to 20k diff.

The next 2160 blocks after this retarget will be quite crazy, but then diff should increase to 160k or so, a much more reasonable value imho, with current hashrate (i saw more 3TH/s at coinotron recently).
Actually in the process of rewriting a pool engine (actually, pool engine is rewritten, website and extra tools on their way), this puts quite some stress on the infrastructure, and more will come in a few more blocks (123 at the moment). Hopefully, things will stabilize right after the next 2160 crazy blocks we're gonna see in a few hours.


But i agree, profitability/markets will play an important role there. On a short-term range, reducing the retarget window may indeed help, but on the long-term it shouldn't change anything. Hopefully, hashrate will stabilize once at 160k diff.

EDIT : new estimated diff : 43887 (in 67 blocks) ; this is gonna hurt :p
43783 (in 19 blocks)

Pretty much what you predicted happened last night. Diff dropped to 40-something k and my cgminer was literally just endless lines of "Stratum from pool 1 detect new block" (solo mining). The block times were about 5 to 10 seconds. Somebody made a lot of TRC!

As of this morning I wake up to find diff raised to 175k to compensate. Now its going to be a very slow march to get it back down. Still ~11 TH/s on the network... wonder how long it will stay.

There is now a mandatory Terracoin wallet update.  View the whole thread here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1364146.0