That part puzzles me.

On the one hand, Math claimed that to defend takes significantly more hash power than the attacker.

On the other hand, I thought the "length" of a chain is the total work, so that regardless of whether the work was done in a TARDIS or not it still takes more work than any other fork in order to be the main/real fork?

If the defenders do more work than the attacker, how is the attacker winning with less work? Or do they somehow get more work out of less hashes?

-MarkM-

Also though by the sound of it they can separately and independently conduct their attacks?

If so then maybe for example a PoW attack can be accomplished and over and done with then a PoS block or series of blocks come along taking the success of the attack as valid accomplished fact and building upon it?

And maybe vice-versa also?

So that although they are two independent separate means of securing a chain they are also two separate and independent vulnerabilities whereby attacks can be performed?

-MarkM-

It would not be the same as a standalone PoS system; rather, what it is is a PoS system plus a pathetically weak work PoW system which completely sidesteps aka does an end run around the PoS, so that the PoW attacker can attack without the PoS system getting in the way of the attack. Basically the PoS part is almost irrelevant given that the PoW attacker can do their attack and run with the loot before PoS even notices or acts?

Possibly the PoS might even lock into place the success of the attack, by building on a chain that already has the attack in place as having happened, over and done with, fait accompli ?

-MarkM-

I have still not seen any good proofs around Sunny's PoS methods.

Someone pointed out a gaping hole once upon a time, he claimed to fix it but refused to explain, and since then everyone seems to have run along in blissful ignorance blindly spawning clones of the mysterious unexplained but according to its author fixed system.

Which might even by why no one has bothered to actually implement either of the methods of PoS that discussions in the development and technical section had eventually managed to come up with that seemed as if they might actually be able to work.

(Sunny was proud not to have even read any of the research, claiming he simply came up with an idea out of the blue himself and flew with it. Then on having it pointed out that it was utterly broken/flawed/vulnerable, claimed to have come up with a fix out of the blue himself, that he refused to explain.)

-MarkM-

I was going to respond to that most recent huge rant above, but responding to this succinct post is as apt while responding to the same basic problem.

There exists a breed of marketeers that believes the "mainstream" is attained by bullshit, not, for example, by technical merit.

Their main real point in practice seems to be that "the masses" are snowed by bullshit far more effectively and efficiently than they are impressed and attracted and recuited by actual quality goods and services.

Thus basically their strategy is to keep throwing shit against walls until some of it sticks.

That is, pump out so much bullshit that lots of money is sucked in, then simply buy whatever actual skills, goods, services, techniques and so on that it takes to stay in business once they have snowjobbed a huge crowd into giving them huge piles of money.

They do seem to have a point in some ways, partly because once they have huge piles of money they often do find lots of technically skilled people who need money thus are willing to try to fix the garbage the snowjob marketeers made vague noises about in their propaganda / marketing-copy or to come up with something that could in some way seem at least vaguely akin to the vapourware the marketeers were raving about.

So the approach is snowjob the masses first and then try to come up with something, because first actually coming up with something so often leaves developers with a great product or service that no one buys because the marketeer snowjob people already have the masses hanging on a hope sending all their money chasing after vapourware. (And thus to an extent locked in by a throw good money after bad type fallacy: being already bagholders holding the bullshit bag, many often will opt to try to somehow salvage that bag and oppose anything actually good and useful that might devalue that bag.)

Thus the marketeers expect to win, because if any developers ever do actually come up with something that even vaguely resembles the vapourware the marketeers were bullshitting about, the marketeers expect to co-opt it by buying the developers or snowploughing them under with lots of hired help hired to copy their development as property of the marketeers.

So the value proposition they are really putting to the public amounts to "you know that bullshit is what wins the market, you see how good we are at bullshitting you, so buy in and we will make you rich by bullshitting everyone else too".

-MarkM-

I just woke up, or maybe still mostly asleep, so maybe my orders of magnitude are off or something but... one gigahash? Isn't that kind of puny to even be considered an attack at all? How the heck is any chain so pathetic that one gigahash is even hardly noticed let alone a threat?

-MarkM-

A point that puzzles me is how are the miners, following the implied instructions recorded in the blockchain, to manipulate the bitcoins?

Parts of the protocol seem to have the miners sending bitcoins somewhere, or holding bitcoins somewhere, but since the blockchain is the only data upon which to decide which bitcoins to send to where, how are the private keys controlling the bitcoins that are to be moved etc stored?

For example when someone uses bitcoins as collateral and gets a loan, where is the private key of the address used to hold the collateral (those bitcoins) stored?

-MarkM-

Even the "defenders" of shitcoins absolutely insist upon an actual attack, claiming that unless an attack is done and succeeds their coin is invulnerable to attack.

Some even offer to wager coins (usually the worthless crapcoins themselves of course), betting that no such successful attack will happen.

This is where Aurora is right now: an attack is purportedly in progress and defenders claim that it is not and/or that it cannot succeed and/or that if their scamcoin manages to scam enough money out of enough people it will sucker someone into securing it (notice it is someone else that is to secure it; they evidently do not plan to spend the wealth they themselves scam out of people with their scamchain to secure the chain, oh gosh no, they plan to scam third parties into securing it for them).

In other words just like any other ponzi: "It is not a scam, if the SEC had not shut us down we would have been a massive success for everyone, and even not illegal, but they shut us down before we could buy enough politicians to change the SEC / scam / fiduciary irresponsibility / criminal negligence / fraud etc laws..."

-MarkM-

How do you tell a faked UUID from a UUID that actaully corresponds to an existing BIOS chip?

Does the BIOS UUID change when people "flash" their BIOS? If so, where does the new value used as UUID in that case come from and what stops people from "flashing" over and over again to get more and more new UUIDs?

How do you prevent the one coin that a UUID will get from being worth more than two BIOS chips? As if you do not, people can just keep buying more such chips...

-MarkM-

AUR set out to scam a whole nation of innocents, using them as poster-children to motivate scamming money out of foreigners into this scam.

So I guess it is a particularly eggregious scam, not only targetting altcoin insiders like the members of forums such as this one who should know better thus maybe could be said to be deliberately participating in something they knew to be a scam, hoping to rake in some of the profits of the scam as fellow scammers promoting the scam (and thus maybe to have only themselves to blame if they made a loss instead of a profit) but also targetting a whole nation of innocents and heavily involving the press in promoting the scam and encouraging innocents to fall for it.

If the fact that the gravity well was broken was already established, and someone had already came up with a fix for it, going ahead and adding the gravity well to this coin seems a kind of weird move for a developer to make, doesn't it? Like huh why deliberately add broken-ness?

-MarkM-

Trying to encourage people to fall for scams in the cyber world is not justified by having as a side-effect the bringing of people into the cyber world.

Secure a blackchain, very very secure, provide an exchange for it, also very very secure, do all the penetration testing, checking of the reliability of mining facilities to try to harden them against DDOS attacks and so on, then when fully ready with a real product, go ahead and bring people in.

That way instead of being brought into the cyber world as people who know it is a scam, having fallen for a scam first thing upon entry into that world, you can bring people into a secure cyber world of secure ledgers and such. And even then they will likely have difficulty securing their own personally owned coins so a far better contribution to the cyber world would be to work on the usability-by-the-ignorant aspects of the wallets used by the very few actually secure chains rather than to work on "using" the ignorance of the ignorant to scam them with insecure systems that are not yet secure enough for the real world.

-MarkM-

Also that the coin is supposedly more insecure than just the normal vulnerability to over-fifty-percent attacks, due to using the gravity well thing that supposedly creates extra vulnerability that causes the chain to need significantly more hashing power than the attacker to resist the attack that gravity well thing makes possible?

-MarkM-

Crapcoins do not care about security. Try telling them their chains are too insanely insecure - too little hashing power - for real world use and they freak out totally, all they care about is scamming people with their crappy little insecure toy blockchains.

The only way exchanges can be secure against double-spends and blockchain forks and re-writes and such is by only listing coins that have seriously high hashpower.

But who cares? Just clone a bunch more crapcoins and keep on scamming, what does it matter if you lose a few now and then?

They utterly resist securing their chains, even to the extent of deliberately making them hard to secure.

-MarkM-

If your smartphone's CPU is so flimsy that playing a text mode adventure game on it kills it, wow why does anyone ever buy smartphones at all, intensive computations such as encrypted downloads or decoding of video codex must kill millions of them daily...

-MarkM-

It is the start of real serious scrypt, especially if Litecoin and DOGE adapt so they can be merged mined together, thus no longer trying to fragment the scrypt space making all scrypt coins weaker. Finally scrypt can mature to be a real option for serious finances instead of a toy that can only be used for trivially small transactions due to its vulnerability to double-spend attacks and such.

-MarkM-

They don't care, they just want to scam more money using their GPUs regardless of how worthless the resulting crapcoins are to actual users.

-MarkM-

There is supposedly no longer any need to "secure" p2p distributed ledgers using Proof of Work.

Thus, some non proof of work system of ledger can be used.

Thus, the activities performed on the phone to earn/acquire the coins need not require heavy computation.

The "mining" on the phone would be how the coins are distributed, not how they are secured.

The method of CPU mining described at http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining seems to resist botnets quite well and should be able to run quite a few "workers" per phone, so should be quite suitable.

However any game people like to play on their phones could also be used, players who do well at the game being issued more of the coins than players who fail at the game or do not do well at the game.

-MarkM-

The form of "CPU mining" described at http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining seems to resist botnets reasonably well, yet uses so little processing power that even a phone could not only do it but probably run quite a few "workers" doing it.

It is big on decision branching so not good for GPUs at all.

-MarkM-

Is anyone working on setting up some kind of GPUs for Aurora shop or something so the folk being air-dropped the coins can buy GPUs to secure the blockchain?

-MarkM-

It has end users? Whatever do they use it for? I thought it was just a miner circle-jerk.

-MarkM-