not including other transactions in his forked branch is still a VERY VERY BAD thing to happen.
edit
ok you want a reason for the big stake holders to sign the blocks of the attacker/cooperate with the attacker/attack? fine, i will give it to you.
so the signing is not reversible. this is fine.
you do the "attack", get the big stake holders to sign it through whatever means. you then list litecoins for sale in an exchange. the attacker does not include these transactions in his forked branch at all.
when the next checkpoint is reached, whoever bought/exchanged these litecoins will then be left with IMAGINARY LITECOINS, but a real money/btc loss.
this provides a clear incentive for the big stake holders and the attacker to collaborate.
Yes, you just described a 51% attack with a double spend. Trust in Litecoin then quickly disappears and price of Litecoin goes to 0. All the stake holders just lost a lot of money. Tell me why any one of the big stake holders would want to do that, let alone most of them doing it together at the same time. |
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as far as i understand it this puts too much power into the hands of the people who own the most ltcs.
for example lets say there is a 51% attack, conflicting blocks and the biggest coin holders sign the blocks of the attacker anyway.
what then?
and before you ask stuff like "but if they hold the most amount of coins, why would they want to destroy their investment?"
idk, maybe they are even more heavily invested into bitcoins and another cryptocurrency being succesful is not in their interests?maybe the attacker convinced them it was for the best ?maybe they got their investment "refunded" by the attacker in bitcoins?there are countless other possibilities as well. humans are complex machines.
also again the biggest pool is being ddosed (so this show people with bots (which i might add atleast iirc are or were the biggest bitcoin holders) are clearly willing to go to any lengths to attack the network.) what happens if when the person releases his 51%ed chain into the network he ddoses the biggest stake holders?wouldnt this make the entire POS thing useless?
as for you checkpointing i am fine with that because you are the developer.
if i said anything too wrong you are free to correct me.
Your arguments are using too many what ifs. The point is that proof of stake makes a 51% attack cost more financially to the attacker. You argument is like an argument against proof of work: what if the attacker can convince everyone else to stop mining while he performs that attack? The point is that the incentives aren't there. Could the attacker convince one large stake holder to sign his block? Sure. But the chances that he can convince a majority of stake holders to sign his block is slim to none. And the chance that the majority of stake holders are heavily invested in Bitcoin and would be willing to see their Litecoin investment go to 0 just to see it die is slim to none. As Litecoins grow in value, this will cost even more. Also realize that exchanges have a lot of incentives to prevent a 51% attack and they will have a lot of litecoins. So they will likely sign all the signature blocks on the chain that their withdrawal/deposits are on. How would someone DDoS the biggest stake holders? You wouldn't know which IPs they are at. Even if if you do, there would be hundreds or thousands of IPs that make up the largest stake holders. Are you going to DDoS all of them? |
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Sorry, I've talked to iddo about this previously on IRC. Hard to keep track of what I've said where and when.
Anyways, I'm looking into Proof of Stake. And I'm willing to experiment with Litecoin if I think proof of stake is a good solution to our 51% problem.
please dont do it. the majority of people clearly are against this, and i am sure they do not want to lose their investment either, but this is clearly not the solution the community is looking for. Are you basing this statement on this poll alone or have you talked to a lot of Litecoin users about this? I think a lot of people are against this because they actually don't understand the proof of stake proposal. People think that with proof of stake, it means we give the control back to the wealthy and it's no different than what we currently have with fiat currencies. This is not true. (At least with Meni's implentation) Please read the wiki page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_StakeWith the proof of stake proposal, blocks are found the same way as they are currently with hashrate. And every 100 block, there will be a signature block. People who have a lot at stake (a lot of coins) sign signature blocks. They want to do that so that they protect their investment. If there are more than one block for that signature block, then block with the most signatures weighted by coins wins. Think of it in terms of checkpointing. Right now, one person (me) decides which blocks are checkpointed. With proof of stake, people how have a lot at stake gets to checkpoint signature blocks. So they can't control which transactions are included when. Miners still control that. All that the stake holders can do is that if there are more than one fork (if there's an attacker trying to 51% the chain), they can sign the signature blocks to help make sure that the fork with no malicious attack is the "true" chain. In order for an attacker to succeed, they need 51% of the network AND they need to sign their signature blocks with more coins than those that sign the regular signature blocks. This way, it's much harder to attack the network, and the attacker has a lot more to lose if they attack the network. |
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Sorry, I've talked to iddo about this previously on IRC. Hard to keep track of what I've said where and when.
Anyways, I'm looking into Proof of Stake. And I'm willing to experiment with Litecoin if I think proof of stake is a good solution to our 51% problem.
please dont do it. the majority of people clearly are against this, and i am sure they do not want to lose their investment either, but this is clearly not the solution the community is looking for. Are you basing this statement on this poll alone or have you talked to a lot of Litecoin users about this? I think a lot of people are against this because they actually don't understand the proof of stake proposal. People think that with proof of stake, it means we give the control back to the wealthy and it's no different than what we currently have with fiat currencies. This is not true. (At least with Meni's implentation) Please read the wiki page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_StakeWith the proof of stake proposal, blocks are found the same way as they are currently with hashrate. And every 100 block, there will be a signature block. People who have a lot at stake (a lot of coins) sign signature blocks. They want to do that so that they protect their investment. If there are more than one block for that signature block, then block with the most signatures weighted by coins wins. Think of it in terms of checkpointing. Right now, one person (me) decides which blocks are checkpointed. With proof of stake, people how have a lot at stake gets to checkpoint signature blocks. So they can't control which transactions are included when. Miners still control that. All that the stake holders can do is that if there are more than one fork (if there's an attacker trying to 51% the chain), they can sign the signature blocks to help make sure that the fork with no malicious attack is the "true" chain. |
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coblee, while you're here, it's a shame I haven't seen you respond to the OP (perhaps you voted, but I think a proper response is better).
Sorry, I've talked to iddo about this previously on IRC. Hard to keep track of what I've said where and when. Anyways, I'm looking into Proof of Stake. And I'm willing to experiment with Litecoin if I think proof of stake is a good solution to our 51% problem. |
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Instead of a potentially complex and fork-inducing proof of stake change, why not make a fork-free smart-chain? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64637.0All clients agree that competing blocks will have priority weight based on number of transactions, average age of coins in transactions, and other factors. Really comes down to using a "bitcoin days destroyed" metric. Say two blocks were created at the exact same time, but one had 500LTC days destroyed, one had 200LTC days destroyed, so the 500LDD wins and becomes the next block. Not only does it reduce the likelihood of the miner that ignores transactions scenario, but it also effectively prevents a sustained 51% attack. Anyone attacking the network will need lots of old coins and must destroy those days each block they create. It will also probably be more difficult to pull off a finney double spend attack because a pre-mined block will likely have less days destroyed than a legitimate one. As long as no one actually attacks the network, this change could be made over time and be completely compatible with old clients. If someone does attack the network, old clients would be fooled and a fork may be created. Additionally, if there is some large change that happens due to an attack or a network split or some other big event, instead of (stupidly) picking longest chain wins, the user will be notified that there are multiple chains, beware, find out what's going on, etc. All you have to do is create some slightly complex algorithms to determine block acceptance rules and a smarter interface. Sounds interesting. I can see how this makes it hard to do a sustained 51% attack. But it's still not hard to do a one time 51% attack. Let's say the attacker just needs to do 51% for about 10 blocks in order to do a double spend at the exchange. He just needs destroy enough coins to match the network for those 10 blocks. Also, the attacker will likely just want to revert his one transaction to the exchange. He (or she  ) can include all the other transactions that don't conflict. So in his own chain, he just sends the coins to himself instead of the exchange. And the days destroyed metric would be the same as the main chain. |
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Instead of a potentially complex and fork-inducing proof of stake change, why not make a fork-free smart-chain? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64637.0All clients agree that competing blocks will have priority weight based on number of transactions, average age of coins in transactions, and other factors. Really comes down to using a "bitcoin days destroyed" metric. Say two blocks were created at the exact same time, but one had 500LTC days destroyed, one had 200LTC days destroyed, so the 500LDD wins and becomes the next block. Not only does it reduce the likelihood of the miner that ignores transactions scenario, but it also effectively prevents a sustained 51% attack. Anyone attacking the network will need lots of old coins and must destroy those days each block they create. It will also probably be more difficult to pull off a finney double spend attack because a pre-mined block will likely have less days destroyed than a legitimate one. As long as no one actually attacks the network, this change could be made over time and be completely compatible with old clients. If someone does attack the network, old clients would be fooled and a fork may be created. Additionally, if there is some large change that happens due to an attack or a network split or some other big event, instead of (stupidly) picking longest chain wins, the user will be notified that there are multiple chains, beware, find out what's going on, etc. All you have to do is create some slightly complex algorithms to determine block acceptance rules and a smarter interface. Sounds interesting. I can see how this makes it hard to do a sustained 51% attack. But it's still not hard to do a one time 51% attack. Let's say the attacker just needs to do 51% for about 10 blocks in order to do a double spend at the exchange. He just needs destroy enough coins to match the network for those 10 blocks. |
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That doesn't scale very well though. What would happen if I wanted to run a litecoin testnet faucet? I really prefer scoping services on testnet prefix.
Then you'd use testnet-faucet.litecoin.net If you want to name this testnet-explorer, that's fine. |
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I've setup a testnet explorer on http://explorer.testnet.litecoin.net/. You can also add this domain to your testnet client with addnode to make sure you are always connected to an other testnet client. I have a few k/hashes working on testnet to generate blocks. I hope this helps others out when developing litecoin related applications. Can you rename it to just testnet.litecoin.net? I would prefer not to have 4 levels. |
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I want to keep this this thread strictly on topic, there are plenty of open threads to flame in. I encourage everyone to click report if this thread gets off topic.
Both goals of the "attack" were accomplished.
1) To focus you guys on central point to build hash rate to harden LTC against an obvious evolving 51% attack
2) To demonstrate that a hard coded solution is needed as hash rate alone is not enough.
Hard coding a 51% protection is simple really, but how do you engineer it so that it won't be abused?
Thoughts?
If this is a serious thread, let's try to keep it on topic. Trolls, please troll in one of the many troll threads. There are so many to choose from. Ok, so here are my thoughts. I think SolidCoin had the right idea with trying to do something about the 51% attack but had the wrong solution and execution. 10 or more trusted nodes is not the right approach. But the idea to let people who have a million solidcoins become trusted nodes is an interesting idea. Basically, people who have a lot of coins invested are less likely to attack the chain. I think this idea is worth exploring. What if we can make it such that people with the most coins decide which transactions are to be included in each block? I know there are lots of problems with this idea. But let's brainstorm and see if we can come up with something better. |
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But you did know about it from the beginning and it was my idea.
Yes, the PM you sent me is timestamped above. And theymos of any other moderator can confirm this. |
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So after I came out and told BCX that I've lost all respect for her(?) if she attacks Litecoin, I got this PM: Geez, don't sweat it, I'm not going to hit it hard enough to hurt it.
Have you noticed the hash rate in LTC has jumped 200K in the past hour. These guys needed a public face to rally against and defeat the DDoS going on.
Just keep this to yourself.
So I was not sure what to think of this. I'm not sure what she meant by "not going to hit it hard enough to hurt it." Either BCX is really just faking this attack to help Litecoin against an attack by someone else (because pools were indeed getting DDoS'd and there definitely was a possibility that someone is trying to 51% the network) OR BCX is lying to me in PM to hope that I do nothing to try to stop her. Since I didn't know BCX well enough, I couldn't just take her word for it. So I decided to treat BCX's threat as real. So that's how I've acted initially towards this attack. And if the attack indeed turns out to be a bluff, it would be a learning experience to see how our community handles such an attack. I believe we will get attacked for real eventually if this was not real. Since BCX announced when she was going to fork the network, I decided that the best defense was to just put a checkpoint in 12-24 hours after she forked it. This way if enough people upgraded, she would have wasted all the time and money and had to refork after the checkpoint if she was going to continue the attack. So that's what I did. In the meantime, I got a few more PM's from BCX: Have you noticed how the DDoS has stopped on the pools since I started all of this.
Well you kinda put me in a position to have to carry through now by telling them you didn't think I could  Honestly I don't care if they don't like me. In a matter of two days I have galvanized this community, the DDos have stopped, and LTC is at 0.0063. At this point in time (Thursday), I've decided that BCX's threat was indeed a bluff. Maybe she was just trying to help Litecoin in a weird twisted way. I told people that I thought the attack was a bluff and even if it was not, I believed our network hashrate was large enough to make it prohibitively expensive to attack us. And I decided there was no reason to do another checkpoint and told BTC-e that I think it's safe to open up deposit/withdrawal. So that's my side of the story. |
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You did instigate by trolling really hard with the request for troll.litecoin.net. I might have overreacted. So I've retracted it.
Did BCX get to you that much? Please continue to troll his threads. I'm actually trying to do something productive here. Thanks.
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I apologize. I am not familiar with the above term.
bitlane, I previously enjoyed your posts. That is until you started trolling really hard. I may have to put you on ignore. |
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Please request a subdomain yourself. See OP.
I would like to request troll.litecoin.net Along with adding myself to the TOP of the list, I would use it as a space to publicly expose and humiliate persistent Litecoin Trolls. If you feel this is a service that would add a certain ' panache' to litecoin.net, please feel free to contact me. The service has to be useful. If you really have a useful service, apply for the subdomain with afraid.org with the link in the OP. |
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I have a decent calc up here: http://ltc.kattare.com/calc.phpPlanning on expanding it to show weekly/monthly numbers before too long. I also want to take into account the other exchanges rates. I already have network hash rates and difficulty estimates up on another page, would be easy to move those over as well. Is that in-line with what you are looking for on calc.litecoin.net? Looks good, but it should be a dedicated calculator site and not part of your pool site. Sounds good. I could put domain detection in there easy enough. When it detects the domain as calc.litecoin.net I'd serve up a different header/footer. If you can setup calc.litecoin.net as a cname pointed at ltc.kattare.com, I could do the header/footer work tonight or tomorrow night. Just a thought, it might even make sense to have a litecoin.net header/footer template for everyone to use so it looks like a more homogeneous network. Edit - really quick and dirty example of how the header would change by domain: http://bitcoin.kattare.com/calc.php. Let me know when the cname is in place and I'll plug the vhost configs into the server. Please request a subdomain yourself. See OP. |
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There are a few parties interested in operating forum.litecoin.net
I figure this is a good thread for those people to make their claim for why I should pick them.
So if you are interested, post a replay with this information:
1) Who you are: Name, Age, Occupation
2) What have you previously done with Litecoin or Bitcoin
3) Why can you be trusted
4) Where's your forum if it's running right now
5) What forum software are you using and why did you choose that over others
6) How is your forum hosted
7) What are your backup plans
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I have a decent calc up here: http://ltc.kattare.com/calc.phpPlanning on expanding it to show weekly/monthly numbers before too long. I also want to take into account the other exchanges rates. I already have network hash rates and difficulty estimates up on another page, would be easy to move those over as well. Is that in-line with what you are looking for on calc.litecoin.net? Looks good, but it should be a dedicated calculator site and not part of your pool site. |
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Yeah, I will see if we can keep a testnet running.
I have a dedicated node running litecoind on testnet. I can run a abe instance from there as well for testnet if needed. Sure. I think we should keep the explorer for mainnet and testnet separate: explorer.litecoin.net and testnet.litecoin.net If you get that up and running, please request for the subdomain testnet.litecoin.net |
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Please add the Litecoin's testnet block explorer to the list of services. This is crucial to allow normal software development. By "normal" I mean that the developers aren't at the same time the owners of whatever they are developing. Currently it seems like the whole Litecoin development community consists of one-person shops.
Also, please run the testnet litecoind at all times. It doesn't have to mine, it is sufficient that it just sits there logged in to the IRC channel and is ready to serve the testnet blockchain. The difficulty on testnet is low enough that anyone who really needs to do some testing can CPU mine the required block on a spare computer.
Yeah, I will see if we can keep a testnet running. |
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