Bitcoin Forum

Could it be possible to fabricate a presumably 2 years old blockchain in less time (or even instantly) ?

Recently a coin has appeared that claims to be launched two years ago, however, no evidence can be find about it but the blockchain with the actual timestamps.
So I am asking, is it possible to manufacture a blockchain that appears 2 years old but has been recently forged ? The chain has the difficulty and cumulative difficulty values, so I gues this could be possibly checked.

The blockchain in question uses the same concept as Bitcoin (the same byzantine generals solution) but with a different implementation and different PoW.

Yes, timestamps can be forged.

If someone was careful enough and had plenty of fakes nodes, they could fabricate such a thing.

Why are you beating all around the bush?  Which alt are you talking about?

But what about the difficulty of the proof of work, considering it is high, wouldn't it require massive amount of computer power to fabricate it ?

What coin are you talking about?

The question is about the technology and concept, the coin is irrelevant.

I think the difficulty can't be faked, you would need time to compute.

Perhaps he is referring to Bitcoin-Scrypt? In which case, it is possible to retain the same blockchain and use a different PoW.

he refers to bytecoin

The difficulty can't be faked, but the creator could choose a difficulty such that they could mine 1 year's worth of blocks in 1 week with the equipment that they have.  They could then manipulate the timestamps so that it looks like it took a 2 years to create those blocks when it really only took a 2 weeks.  The difficulty wouldn't adjust much, because they timestamps would make it seem like the blocks were taking a long time to solve.  If the creator was concerned about the consistent difficulty being noticed, they could adjust the timing of the blocks so that the difficulty slowly increased from the point where the first blocks could be solved VERY quickly until the most recent blocks which may have taken the creator the same amount of time to create as the current difficulty actually would.

You'd have to know what the entire difficulty history is, and how much money would have to be spent on equipment and mining at each of those difficulty adjustments to decide how expensive such a scam would be to create.  Then you'd have to decide if you think the creator would have been willing to invest that much in the scam.

In the first place, does anyone you know (I mean, REALLY know, as in know their real name/ID and could potentially take them to court if they were scamming you) actually know of this coin before the recent appearance?  If not, I would assume it's a fake and stay away.

In the second place, yes, you can in fact do that.  People launching an attack on existing altcoins in fact use this technique on a frequent basis when preparing 51% attacks with block chains that aim to create a fork where they get the block rewards that the real chain has already awarded someone else.

Here are the steps.

First they take their client source code and replace the calls to get the system time with calls to a shim that returns a fake time stamp.  This shim returns a time that starts a couple years ago and advances 100x as fast until it gets up to the "real" time.  This will affect what the client will write into blocks as timestamps, AND also the difficulty adjustment it will apply between blocks in order to adjust block timing.  So, if you're solving a chain with ten-minute blocks, as in Bitcoin, your fiddled client would be writing time stamps approximately ten minutes apart, and adjusting difficulty to get such blocks about once every six seconds.

Then you set up two of these fiddled clients and let them talk to each other and create blocks.

A week later, you have a two-year-old block chain.  But the cumulative hashing power (its "length" when we talk about the "longest chain") - only has a weeks worth of hashing from the two rigs you sicced on it.  If you have a couple of 20GH/s Antminers, then it'll look like your chain was sucking up about 400KH/s of hashing power - trivial compared to Bitcoin, but believable for a very small alt.

Now you go back, remove the timestamp fiddling from your client source code, and release - keeping, of course, your newly created 2-year premine. 

So, the question is whether the blockchain you are looking at is or is not fake.  So look at it, make a graph of how much hashing power it was getting over time, and see if the graph looks "realistic", meaning does it look like the hash power graphs of other coins that were running at that time? 

I don't understand all the secrecy. More than anything else, that makes me pretty confident that it is a scam. Just say what coin it is, and people who have been involved with cryptocurrencies will be able to quickly tell you if it's actually been around that long.

2 years is a LONG time in terms of cryptocurrency. If it isn't one of 2 altcoins, I'd be extremely surprised if it has been around that long.

yes, imagine you going to update your block.file and I can sent it on Dark Fiber Channel without traffic, no delay etc ..

Imho dev could chance constatnts of only client(node) in network(his pc) to have very low difficulty and block time and then change the timestamps to look like real.

But after that he would have to persuade community the coin is worth something(= worth mining)

I do recall an alt called bytecoin that has been around for a while.  But it appears that there are two different bytecoins, which adds to the confusion.  gmaxwell has said that the "cryptographically interesting bytecoin" has some interesting privacy features (and also some issues with it). 

I do not know if the "cryptographically interesting" one is the same as the one that has been around for a while or not.

BCN is the one we are looking at ;)
its the one gmaxwell posted about

edit: i found his critiscm really interesting. it is about the non-prunable uxto set which is kept in memory atm by bytecoind and which could lead to problems in future

btw, "dark fiber" jargon in networking is the cable that was rolled out but is not in use. It's makes sense ... if you going to rool out cables (layer 1) you should rool an extra one as a spare cable. Sometimes networking engineers use theses cables to perform tests ... like latency measurement, etc since this cable have no traffic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre)

ByteCoin was/is the first prototype of the CryptoNode devs.

And coin is only "1 year and 8 months old".

CryptoNode is 100% no scam und 100% innovative tech, many people waited for.

At least read:
https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf
https://cryptonote.org/inside.php

Better everything on the homepage. It's worth it. These guys really manage their plattform good and avoid errors made by the Bitcoin team/in Bitcoin development.

It's very hard to fabricate such a thing but it is still possible. Hope it will not happen

It's Bytecoin (BCN). They claim to have been around "on the dark web" for two years and then suddenly launched forth into the light in March (with 82% of the coins already mined). I went into a fair amount of detail as to why I think we should dispute their 2 year claim in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg6850085#msg6850085).

Incidentally, we forked BCN and create Monero (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449) a while back, which is based on the same CryptoNote protocol, but obviously has a blockchain that has had many observers from launch (and is already diverging from BCN's reference implementation as we rapidly improve it).

Yes it would...
It hasn't been dome before simply because it requires this much power

Wow, there are more and more people think CryptoNote-based Bytecoin is a scam.

Fortunately, CryptoNote is the most innovative technology for several years  so far. XMR (Monero), BBR (BoolBerry) have fair and transparent launch that you can rely on. Those 2 coins fix a lot of bugs in Bytecoin too. Basically, they become separate CryptoNote implementations

The privacy tech is indeed very interesting, the rest of the tech... uh. some is very clearly ill-advised (e.g. the "CPU-only" pow is now much faster mined with propritary gpu software— now it's just acting as an albatross, the slowest to verify POW yet deployed and failing at the advertised goal in record time—  the blocksize control algorithm is totally incentive-busted in the long term) and the software is very immature.

The history around the launch is pretty sketchy, and as far as I know there is no evidence that it's as old as it claims to be, but why the heck would anyone lie about such things? It isn't like anyone is really going to believe it or that it matters if they do or don't. Now there are a zillion forks, it's not clear which will survive, they're also being secretive for "competitive" reasons  ... in any case, this is the tech subforum, and the tech is interesting without regard to the (usual) altcoin drama.

Back to the question, it would be trivial to prove something— like a blockchain or a program— existed at particular point, it would have only taken someone who knew about the something to have posted a hash of it someplace durable, like in the Bitcoin blockchain. This doesn't seem to have happened here, but instead things outside were very aggressively committed in that chain, which proves the other side of the boundary (it wasn't created any earlier), so aggressively that the absence of any proof in the other direction is additional suspect.

But perhaps who cares? Alt these "CPU" altcoins seen to end up sending most of their coins to a small number of fast speculators, seemingly powered by stolen computing power and private optimizations... if you go by hashrate you'd see numbers like a coin that hardly anyone has heard of having 60k fast cpus worth of mining a month after it was created... Uh yea, right. The unfairness of some launch or another I suspect mostly impacts the squabbling between very early speculators, and fairness to other people depends more on transparency and on "fitness to purpose", allowing people who are not speculators to participate in the economy. So the bigger question is if anyone is going to go complete anymore of the ecosystem, rather than if someone got an early advantage, because its very clear that in all these things someone did.

Thanks for this!
Kindly,
       Muhammed Zakhir