Bitcoin Forum

Hi All


Been thinking about possible risks to the bitcoin network and most people trump the 51% attack, although i think this is overstated.

What would happen in this scenario.

A concerted DDOS attack against all the major pools in the network, i could imagine NSA or other large organisation having the know how to coordinate this.

This would hit all the large pools Elegius, Ghash.io, btcguild, discus fish, slush, bitminter, deepbit, together these make up approx 90% of the network.

Would this reduce the hash rate enough to stop new blocks being found and undermine the strength of the network catastophically?

 :-\

 

In this scenario I reckon that altcoins would simply take over, you have to bear in mind whenever you think of this stuff that Bitcoin is open source, the code being duplicated is actually one of its good points which is why I suspect nobody has bothered trying anything yet, that isn't to say of course that it couldn't happen, it's just very unlikely that it will have any long term effect.

I was thinking more of it happening in a couple of years when we have larger adoption and lots of merchants using btc, if an attack happened then, it would give crypto currencies across the board a massive PR nightmare.

i hope not anyway   :D

To be honest I think if it happened in a couple of years it would be suicide because you'd have at least several hundred thousand angry people with lots of money and hacking knowledge that will either track them down or fry their PCs lol. In regards to the 51% attack, think of something like the Zombie apocalypse, it's one of those things that people scare themselves about so much that they get as much knowledge as they can on the subject so if it ever were to actually happen they'd just crush the problem extremely quickly.

Well, if there's a big acceptance of BTC by the time it ocurrs, there would be alternatives for people to go for. There would also be counter-measures against that sort of thing, I imagine (though I can't really concieve any, as i'm no expert on the matter myself)

And like Lethn said, there would be a buckload of very angry people that would track them down... And if they found them, they would be in HUGE trouble

Your thought experiment has already been done against some alt coins. The result is that such an attack is ineffective because the pools have ddos protection. If the attack is large the pools just buy more protection. DDOS is a thing of the past.

There are enough solo miners to sustain the network.

I think you'd see a drop in difficulty and total network hashpower but little more. Transactions would be unaffected.

I hope to gawrsh.  I wonder what altcoin the attacker is working for?  Bitbar?

Makes u think

in this scenario you should add CEX.IO also @OP

DDOS protection is snake oil. It's just a new service that's being advertised with purpose to be sold for profit to computer illiterate customers. Just like antiviruses.

Most major pool are protected from DDOS.!!

No. The difficulty can drop only after 2016 blocks and if DDoS attacker reduces network hash rate he will need to wait much longer than 2 week average for adjustment to take place. Meanwhile he will need to maintain DDoS for more than month. And reduced actual hash rate does not make network less secure because the attacker still need to overcome original difficulty to do 51% attack.

DDoS against pools is good to do following things:
1. Reduce rate of block creation and confirmations take much longer.
2. Price drops as people who are in bitcoin for pure speculation start panic sell.

And Bitcoin will quickly recover as soon as DDoS is over. And maintaining weeks of DDoS against several targets when the targets are smart and try to cope with that might be problematic even for NSA. They probably will do it in different way like disrupting critical network infrastructure points by router backdoors or 0-day exploits against operating systems.Seriously? Scamcoins with 1/100 of Bitcoin network hashing power and size? I think the altcoins are permanently under attack then. And not by NSA but Thomas Nasikomo like coders with too many spare time and ability to modify some parts of Bitcoin sourcecode. And the IXCoin was not so scammy like some of the other altcoins.You cannot have protection against nuke. DDoS is like nuke, if You are hiding in bunker it is only question to get bigger nuke.This.

Nobody can DDOS that many pools over a longer period of time, especially since good pools now have DDOS protection.

Very true, kind of a nice Load Balance such as A10 AX Series that implements a series of specialized programmable ASICs to offload attack detection and prevention functions :) .. just lite propaganda ;D