Bitcoin Forum

Promises Aside, There’s Still No Fix for Bitcoin’s Fatal Flaw

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/promises-arent-enough-to-fix-bitcoins-fatal-flaw

Man this horse has been beaten to death. I am not going to take the time to lay out the reasons why a 51% attack is not only unlikely but not at all "fatal" for bit coin. Please can we find a new boogie man?

For some people (unfortunately) it will come down to emotion rather then logic. No matter what you say, they won't believe you.

Yep. It does get rather tiring though. Of course it helps if I avoid bumping threads like this as well.  :-[

If successfully executed a 51% attack would damage bitcoin.

It would not be successfully executed because it would not be economical to do so and would be expensive to even try to attack the blockchain.

Just because one pool or entity has temporary control of 51% of the blockchain does not mean that the blockchain is being attacked.

Aw hell, I got a couple mill lying around.  Think I'll just start my own and beat their ass to the punch.  Then I'll control.  Who wants to be my sidekick?

If I had a dollar for each time Scratch that If I had a mbtc for every time I heard this saying  ;D

Well at least this one suggests something
Under the current protocol, miners have to solve one problem to get hold of fresh bitcoins, but in the professors’ "Two-Phase Proof-of-Work" mechanism, there would be an additional cryptopuzzle.

>??>>
Crucially, this second puzzle would require the miner to prove they have access to the private key of the mining pool’s Bitcoin address.

This means the pool would either have to enforce levels of trust amongst participants, as any of them could access all the coins collected by the group with that private key, or carry out the work on its own infrastructure, which would be hugely expensive.

There are some technical issues to be hammered out too. For instance, small miners might be punished by the proposed system as they won’t be able to afford to do the mining if they don’t want to share their private key.

Got confused with their proposal but don't mess with the private key its trustless for a reason here I would need to trust the group to keep my private key secured and not run with the coins.

I still think mining centralization is a real issue. It needlessly puts our money at risk, putting trust in centralized groups. And there is absolutely no need for it. Plus, 51% is a red herring, and isn't required for double spend attacks.

True enough but it's not as dangerous as it could be since it does not provide or have a positive incentive to do so.
One double spend and the price drops miners ditch you etc only a government trying to shutdown the network would attempt it, although that would be scary for an altcoin, although it would force a developer fork.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses

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.

The real concern for me is the centralization of Bitcoin nodes as having decentralized nodes is important for the network in terms of security and privacy.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

There really is no debate.   The facts are as follows:

1)  It probably wont ever happen.
2)  The possibility needs to be eliminated anyway.

The end.

I think 51% threat is more dangerous than most people think. It probably won't happen, but I don't want to hope it won't happen based on "trust". I want to know for certain it won't happen based on fixes in the protocol.

the only way i can see a simple solution is a monitoring mechanism that if a block solved by the same IP address appears 3 times in an hour. the bitcoin-core protocol will remove that IP address from the relay nodes list for atleast 40 minutes,.

meaning if everyone has the same version and are all actively running. it will ignore that mining pools solved block... allowing for others to essentially win the block.

but that will cause confusion if some have bitcoin 0.9 and some hav bitcoin 0.9.4 for instance.. as the 0.9 people will still b accepting data from that IP thus their block chain will be different (causing a fork for those that dont upgrade).

but atleast then it will cause miners to think about which pool to mine and make each pool a little more balanced so that the hashing time is not wasted by being ignored(making pools stay under 30% so that they only get 2-3 blocks an hour).

miners with multiple rigs will then split their rigs and put them across the top 3 pools so that thy still atleast get a slice of each block 'pie' without spending atleast 40 minutes hashing for nothing.

Select Standard Response:

1. Its already in the Wiki
2. We know about it, so some Captain of Industry will fix it in the future
3. Not a problem because reasons.

That is a pretty fair idea. If you got the major pools to agree on this it would solve the issue in a fairly painless way.

Large PoW facilities and mining pools tend to have physical addresses. There are any number of ways to deal with them depending on the threat level. Painless doesn't have to be off the table.  ;)

 ;D Quite true. I must admit I am a bit of a passivist so violence is not my first option but I can look the other way provided BFL and a few others are added to your list.  ;D

Stopped reading after the fifth sentence


A 51% attack is a very real problem, but if the person writing the article doesn't understand how the attack works or why it's a problem, then there's really not much point in reading the rest of it...

This is kind of like saying, "There's still no fix for humanity's fatal flaw -- choice."

Slow news day I suppose.

You can profit from 51% attack.

You take over a few key mining pools and pull the attack. Confidence in bitcoin crashes, you buy up after crash and wait for the recover while making a killing in whatever altcoins you invested in before the attack.

But the reason for an attack may not be financial.

Say you are Israel and Hamas is using bitcoin to operate.

You pull a 51% attack to disrupt their ability to operate.

That being said I think either scenario is unlikely, but your reasons why you think it won't happen may just be a lack of imagination.