Yeah we just watched a number of the high diff blocks real miners found get washed out by another huge load of 5K difficulty blocks from the attacker.

Basically he can mine blocks faster at 5K than anyone else can possibly compete with, so he has longer block chains to inject into the network at any time.

I can't believe BTC-E still has trading open on TRC right now.

Looks like literally thousands of blocks dumped on the chain from the attacker simultaneously.

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/chain/Terracoin?count=2016&hi=168576

I see they rejected the checkpoint someone did a pull request on earlier. The "current chain" the exchanges are relying on are, I assume, the one full of the blocks from the attacker...

It appears the time lapse attack is more of a bug in the code of terracoin, and would need fixed to prevent this from happening again. There isn't enough legitimate hash power on TRC to just force the attackers out if they are really using 1.2TH or more. Coinotron is by far the biggest pool and only runs about 1/3 that speed typically.

I see they may be adding a checkpoint, but they  need to add a fix for the timewarp attack issue. I assume they can fix it the same way BTC did.

Even if the community and exchanges adopted this checkpoint, wouldn't the attack be able to just restart his attacks at that point until/unless the client/wallet is fixed in regard to the 6+ hour issue?

Since TRC is based off the BTC source, is the 6 hour thing something BTC fixed previously that TRC never copied? Or is it a TRC-specific bug?

You might need to email him to ask for that.

I'd given up on pool mining for vanity addresses back in April because of the certificate problem. I did a fresh search in the thread but I only see the people reporting problems without a solution. Was one every found? On Windows 8 this is the verbose output result I get:

As far as I can tell, the devs aren't active any more. Hoping I'm wrong. But someone posted a serious big report a month or two ago about the 32 bit version of the client being able to download/sync the block chain, and it was never replied to or fixed.

Sure acts like it... I wonder if they found a way to do the same exploit even after the patch that was done in April.

The last time TRC's difficulty adjustment was made was because the network hash rate was pretty low and someone would mine with an ASIC getting tons of blocks, difficulty skyrocket, and they move to a new coin until it was back down. Other coins have had that problem too (like FRC). That's not an attack per se, just someone optimizing their mining efforts but disrupting the whole coin because they have such a large % of the network hash rate.

I'm not sure that is happening now or not though, or if it some other sort of exploit. When the difficulty drops to the minimum 5k for quite a while, even if the 'attacker' wasn't mining, it should never go that low. There was a DDOS attack on TRC pools about a week ago but that seems over with at the moment.

Coinotron has 363.4 GH mining TRC right now. Even someone with 2-3 60GH/s miners should not be able to disrupt the difficulty that badly, or conduct a 51% attack. Maybe someone has way more than that? (A BFL minirig?)

The only solution, which is pretty much always the solution, is for more people to mine on the established pools so the "attackers" make up a smaller % of the network hashrate.

How did vBulletin not make this list?

Better to use email I think.

Businesses sell products at prices the market will bear to maximize profitability. Production price is meaningless (except it provides a price floor below which selling the product doesn't make sense.) ASICMiner/etc are not non-profit charities.

Paypal has sometimes put huge holds on indie game developers that sell preorders or beta access to their games. Just can't quite trust them as a merchant, honestly.

Oh certainly, I agree. I'm all for capitalism. But dealing with the public takes a lot of time and hassle.

Ebay prices have dropped quickly after the price cut. Remember not everyone who is ready and willing to buy USB miners has the BTC to do so. Ebay makes an easy way to purchase them with fiat, albeit with a markup.

I was going to say this as well, but you beat me to it. Although ASICMiner does seem to only have one authorized reseller per country/region so far. But that doesn't mean they aren't open to more than one, of course.

Certainly I see Kosmo's POV though. You don't want to lay out $5K USD to buy 50 miners only to have the sales price cut to half that the day after they arrive. I'm guessing the authorized resellers have some sort of pricing protection in place for unsold stock at the time of a price cut, so there's no carry risk. I'm only speculating though.

Which is June, not April. The conversion date.