Interesting article but it failed to mention that if a chain is secured by Proof of Work you need hashing power, lots and lots and lots of hashing power, and so many miners cannot be trusted to actually secure chains, being instead rather more found of abandoning them to die, or at least to drive down the price of the coins so the miners can buy them cheap, that you really need to either deploy serious hashing power yourself or discover chains that have massive massive dedicated hashing power, such as by using merged mining so that their miners do not have to abandon their chain in order to mine more or different coins, they can just add more coins to their merge and can continue to secure their chains even when the coins appear worthless.

-MarkM-

I do not know if BCX can actually pull off the attack as I do not know exactly what code (s)he intends to execute nor with how much hashing power behind it.

Basically until we see it done it is obvious that scammers will go on pretending that pathetically vulnerable blockchains are actually fine.

All you need to do to launch a coin with a decent amount of hashing power is pre-arrange with several, or maybe even just a few if large enough, merged mining pools to add your coin to their merge at launch. There is no need to con people into imagining that a blockchain without massive hashpower is anywhere near secure enough to actually trade on/with.

Any new coin does face potential attacks.

Most seemingly were not worth bothering to attack.

But continued failure to attack has caused proliferation of so many scams so egregious that it is clear people need to actually see such an attack before they will even believe such things are possible.

I am pretty sure we did see a timewarp attack in action in the past. Maybe more than once? But people's memories and/or understanding are/is short plus scammers keep trying to convince newbies who do not know any better that their scam is different, their scam is fine and dandy, their scam is secure and so on.

-MarkM-

Proof of work blockchains are INSANELY EXPENSIVE to secure.

The only reason they are even remotely viable is bitcoin's massive massive investment in SHA256 hashing power combined with the support for merged mining that lets other chains piggyback on that hashing power so that more than one chain can maybe feasibly be secured.

To attempt to produce enough scrypt hashing power to make the family of merged mined coins that are mined using scrypt similarly potentially powerful enough to be possibly secured is going to cost a similarly vast amount of money.

It is only even remotely reasonable because so much is invested into bitcoin's hashing power that any backup in case SHA256 itself turns out to be fatally flawed ought to be similarly powerful so maybe, just maybe, the cost could be justified as a backup alternative hashing algorithm bitcoin can switch to if SHA256 turns out to be a fatally broken system.

Combined, the cost is so insanely huge that only even-more-insane things like the cost of vaults and paper money printing and regiments of government and banking clerks and armoured cars and endless inflationary printing of money and so on and so on and so on make it not totally batshit insane.

Compared to those it is actually hopefully a savings.

-MarkM-

Well I guess we won't know unless BCX's attack does in fact take place and does in fact work.

So we are reduced to awaiting the empirical evidence.

I guess we have to hope that BCX was not bullshitting but is in fact doing the attack and does in fact have enough hashpower to make it work.

-MarkM-

Wasn't part of the "beauty" of timewarp attacks the fact that you don't even need 50% of the hash rate of the main chain because you get "more time" to mine in by warping time so basically you get to keep on "letting the difficulty drop back down again" over and over again so you end up mining at lower difficulty per block but pouring out many more blocks, or something like that?

I thought the Aurora scam that BCX proposed to timewarp-attack had something like 3 or 4 GHash yet apparently that is not enough to defend against the proposed attack?

Also, I think a meme conjured up more hashing power than litecoin almost overnight didn't it?

Had the meme said "lets PWN all the scrypt blockchains" instead of "lets be yet another scamcoin" it could have PWNed them all, many at a time even.

So it showed how insanely vulnerable even however much hash power litecoin had was.

-MarkM-

That is bullshit.

Scams that try to pretend that patheticly insecure amounts of hash power suffice to secure a chain are what is being attacked.

If the scam has any chance of scamming lots of money out of people then that jsut makes it all the more important to put a stop to it before lots of people lose lots of money.

Your claim basically seems to be that the bigger the scam the more important it is NOT to prevent it, because big scams are successful scams so should be permitted or even encouraged.

These scams are deliberately trying to prevent blockchains from being secured. They refuse to enable merged mining even. They are designed not only to scam their own users but also to weaken all the other blockchains that also are trying to fool people into thinking that some puny tiny amount of hash power, so puny even a stupid meme can come up with more hash power, is enough to secure a blockchain.

Basically they are trying to make scrypt untenable as a way of securing a blockchain by totally fragmenting the world's available scrypt hash power so that no chain has enough to be secure.

-MarkM-

That so called fix of the timewarp is the ancient one, right? The one that this attack is not prevented by? The one litecoin never bothered to update to fix this attack because litecoin's hash rate seemed massive enough that the attack would take an inordinate amount of hashing power?

Litecoin is protected against this current proposed / planned / maybe-in-progress attack by its hashing power, as are most of the SHA256 merged mined coins that also do not have a better "fix" than that ancient "fix" that this current version of timewarp is not prevented by.

haven't you been following the thread(s) about this timewarp attack? All this was already explained, including BCX's assurance that most of the SHA256 merged mined coins have so much hashing power that (s)he cannot effectively use this attack against them despite their code being just as unfixed with regard to this variant of timewarp that the ancient fix you mention litecoin having deployed is no defense against this variant.

Basically coins like bitcoin and litecoin and, we are recently assured, even some of the SHA256 secondary chains, have so much hashing power they do not need a fix in code against this attack.

Nonetheless once you puny low hash power chains do come up with a code fix for it, it would probably make sense for even the high hash power chains to adopt the fix, even if doing so means waiting until their next schedule hard-fork in order to implement it.

It is possible, maybe even likely, that a need for a hard fork to implement such fixes might be a large part of why chains with enough hash power to deter attackers from trying this variant of timewarp have not yet implemented a fix for this variant of timewarp.

-MarkM-

Then why point to a thread that describes something as a scam?

If there is something somewhere that indicates whatever it was was or is not a scam, wouldn't it be better to point to that?

Or better yet, simply to state outright here whatever it is that is relevant about whichever post of that other thread is supposedly relevant?

The conclusion of that thread at the time had been that whatever it was was a scam. If that thread has been updated to show that the thing is not a scam maybe another post here telling us to go look now at that might be better. Or, the link maybe should have explained whether it was pointing to the thing concluded to be a scam or was pointing to something the person posting the link thought was not a scam (and why they thought it was not would have been useful too if that was the case.)

What I saw was a link to a short series of posts that succinctly explained some thing or other was a scam, with references to more material purported to provide deeper details of in what way it was a scam. With no refuting claims that the scam claim or the referenced further details were incorrect.

-MarkM-

The buying starts when buyers offer enough to match the lowest sell offers. The more they offer the more of the sell offers on the books will get bought up. The way to catch the rise is to have your sell offers already in place; the way to catch the bottom is to spread buy offers all the way down to far below the lowest bottom you think it could reach, even down to the lowest offer the platform lets you place even if possible, so that no matter how low it goes you were there ready to buy at the bottom, as well as having already bought just above that in case that was the bottom and so on.

No rush no hurry, it is all just orders put on the books long ago ready to profit from any rise or fall in price...

If you wait until the fluctuation already happened you end up selling low and buying high instead of buying low and selling high.

-MarkM-

You really insist on seeing for yourself just how over it is, eh?

Well as pointed out earlier, it will take some time to creep up on you, as one of the little changes that were put in place was a delaying action, a change that makes the timewarp take longer to creep up on you - to become visible in its effects.

Basically you go on thinking nothing is wrong, because your client does not yet know that it is not on the main chain, because it has not yet seen the real chain, which is the attacker's chain, which when your client sees it will be the chain with the most work thus the valid chain.

If the attack is underway then you are on a fork ever since the last hard-coded checkpoint or genesis block and just do not yet realise that you are so all looks fine so far.

-MarkM-

So are you claiming they did not bait and switch the IPO buy-in period, people did actually have the amount of time they were told up front they had in which to reach their decision to buy in?

Which coin was it that did, then?

I distinctly recall there was an IPO type coin that did a bait and switch, announcing the deadline by which to decide to buy so that people could schedule it in their to-do lists then actually closing it quite some time before those to-do- list items would have actually been reached in people's day to day processing of deadlines.

-MarkM-

Then why point to a thread that is about a scam? The thread linked to goes on about some scam or other. What does that scam have to do with this thread?

Why point to a scam-thread / scam-accusation thread / scam-report thread?

-MarkM-

Like IXCoin, its volume has probably been low so long simply because until they are worth $1 or so per coin it is hardly worth firing up a wallet and getting caught up to the blockchain, since thanks to merged mining the difficulty is so high that even after years of mining it one hardly has enough coins to make a nice hefty year or few of salary let alone make one a millionaire. So it has always been like lets wait a few more years, they are way too undervalued so far to bother worrying about. Lets just forget about them until we have a huge enough pile and/or they are worth enough that they will make me rich...

(Since one gets them pretty much free anyway. So like airmiles or suchlike, why penny-ante with them, why not wait until ready to retire and then check how much of a retirement they will buy you?)

-MarkM-

The higher the price and/or the more valuable the goods one can buy with the coin and thus obtain free by double-spending, the more juicy an attack target the coin is.

Hashing power is what secures the chain, not rich pickings for the attackers.

The richer the pickings, the more an attacker can profitably spend on an attack.

On the other hand if you manage to lower the value of the coin enough to make it not worth the bother/cost/trouble of attacking, then maybe, if you manage to lower it enough, you might make your chain a pointless-enough target that the attacker might chose some other target to attack until your coin is worth enough to be worth attacking.

-MarkM-

In other words you demand that the attack actually be done, and done successfully. Fine, okay, its your funeral.

Don't believe the people who know how such attacks are done and how vulnerable the chain actually is as compared to the actual amount of attack power available to attack with, force them to prove it to you the hard way.

Don't complain of course if they do that, since you are insisting upon it.

The scamcoin creators always seem to come back to "we are not attack-bait designed to screw people out of their money unless you actually do attack and screw people out of their money" as their defense of their practice of deliberately luring people into insecure garbage chains.

Thus there really is no choice but to actually carry out attacks, as the only way to prove the scamcoins are scams.

-MarkM-

If it also brings awareness that massive hashing power is needed to secure a proof of work blockchain that is good too, albeit maybe a costly lesson for some.

-MarkM-

Worldcoin is insanely pathetically insecure, its hashing power is a bad joke, it is begging to be PWNd.

"Storing" wealth in such a pathetically insecure blockchain is insane, you might as well seek out some theives directly and hand over your money to them.

-MarkM-

Not just devs, miners. Unless you want centralisation, in which it is the devs that decide which transactions happen or did not happen rather than the miners?

-MarkM-

Again someone who does not understand the timewarp attack.

It does not involve any "forking" anyone would notice, instead you simply wake up one day to find that all the coins you ever mined, and all the transactions, never actually happened.

The entire chain from the start, or from the last hard-coded checkpoint hard-coded into your copy of the client, simply did not happen the way that you thought it did.

-MarkM-

It is also in a great buy opportunity moment right now, a great time to buy it cheaper than pretty much ever...

-MarkM-