I seriously doubt the owner of the visable website is directly connected to whoever runs the Silk Road hidden service on Tor.

I saw the first season of Prison Break on TV, but after that they quickly lost their muse.  The plot of the first season, the idea that an intelligent person would first engineer a new prison, arrange to get his brother transfered there, and then get convicted to be sent there, and have his break-out plan encoded onto his skin as a tatoo is pretty cool.  But once they were out, it was just like so many other drama shows I've seen before.

I'd wager you 50 BTC you can't actually find it's physical server location.

That you can see, that is.  I quetly wonder how much of the BTC exchange price is black or grey markets like Silk Road.  Certainly such markets exist, even if we here couldn't access them, and even a small percentage of those who could access them using Bitcoin as their medium of exchange could explain the large run up over the past 8 months.

Except that can't work.  As I mentioned earlier, there is a difficulty adjustment parameter rule that prohibits the difficulty from adjusting up or down by more than a factor of four.  So the max that can be expected is that the Google can do is move the difficulty by that factor of four, which may or may not actually be worthwhile, but if the attack cannot be repeated in consecutive cycles (maybe, but I would say that it would be very unlikely to work out that way) then it's probably not a worthwhile means of manipulation for profit motives alone.  What kind of harm to the system itself could such an attack cause?

Yeah, it's been surprising to watch it all unfold.  It never really was destined to last.  Still, I would contest the assumption that there are no wealthy players involved in Bitcoin.  All that we can really say is that no wealthy players have invested excessively in Bitcoin.

Stopping at 8 connections implies that inbound connections are being rejected.  If all you did was add the wifi router into the mix, it's probably configured by default to deny incoming connections on unknown ports.

That assumes that there is collusion, when there isn't a need for it.  The stand-alone complex theory is more likely.

DVD-R's are a pain in the ass.  What about a mailable USB drive with return postage and an address label?

I can see a usage based opp here for some teen with cheap bandwidth.

Yes, for no other reason that before they were in power, they were those people.  And more of those people are the greatest threat to (now their) status quo.

Are you implying that the 'Mystery Miner' was such an exploit? 

Okay, so how would this attack vector aid in a double spend fraud? 


How?

This is the issue with relying upon a marketplace that represents a minority of the trade in question, but as far as I know, the MtGox spot price is the best metric of this kind that we have.  Getting funds into and out of such markets have always been a limiting factor.

I think that he was talking about my post concerning a collective defense of a true anarchist society.  The problem being that those people or groups with the greatest resources to contribute to the collective defense against a foreign threat also are the most mobile among society, and as such, their own greatest-self-interests are unlikely to lie with the collective defenses, but rather with flight and re-establishment elsewhere.  Leaving the anarchist society gutted of capacity (relative to it's prior state) and only the lower classes to it's defense, and only because they were those who did not have the capacity to vacate before the invading hordes.  Think Katrina with an invading army.

Hmm, Would you have space, and electric heating needs, to accomodate a server rack?  If you could afford to build such a system, you would have already done so; but there might be major mining groups on this forum willing to partner.

Even if this were a realistic exploit, the difficulty has an adjustment rule that prohibits an adjustment of greater than a factor of four in either direction.  So the difficulty couldn't be cut down to less than a quarter of the prior difficulty.  It's still something to consider, as this is one attack avenue I don't think that I've seen discussed on this forum before.  But before we consider how difficult the attack vector may be, we need to determine what the goal would be.  If the goal is simply to spoof the difficulty calculations in order to make it easier to capture some blocks in a short period of time, (perhaps someone decided to buy a couple of hours of mining capacity on Amazon's cloud?) then really no great harm done, and if such things were to become an ongoing thing, a tighter difficulty adjustment parameter could undercut such activities.  However, if the goal was to actually harm the network in some fashion, the impracticality of the attack may not be a great defense.  How might this harm the network. or introduce another fraud vector?  thoughts?

Bitcoin miner hosting opprotunities.

The latter.

Honestly, looking in the rear view mirror, one can see signs of a breakdown of an empire as far back as 1970.  And the same could be said for the USSR as far back as 1955.  The problem of a collapsing empire is that it takes quite a long time, and there is no reason to suspect that the modern world will be significantly quicker at such things than the Roman or Ottoman empires.  The risks are in the transitional periods anyway, at least to the individual.  Clans will fare better, as happened to Roman enclaves as the Roman empire imploded.  The small independently functioning regions loyal to Rome preserved the culture for generations longer, functioning as city-states.

Even that only applies to direct trade of crude between Russia and China.  Which, admittedly, is a pretty large market; but by itself is not a game-changing event.

Not an official one.