A Sybil Attack is defined (at least by Wikipedia) as, "an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks."  I don't believe my choice to run ten Classic nodes comes close to qualifying under this definition.  Also, how many people have foregone running a classic node because they feared a DDoS attack or experienced one?  I would argue that I am trying to deskew the stats -- and let's not forget that more nodes benefits the network as well.
 

I agree with some of what you are saying here, but I don't want to digress into a technical discussion on the relative merits of the different approaches to solve the congestion problem.  It should be sufficient to acknowledge that a solution is needed, and that certain special interest groups are going out of their way to prevent the simplest and most obvious solution from being implemented.  I wouldn't mind if they were using discourse to push their agenda, but they are using cyber-terrorism to force it on the community and that should never be tolerated.

You are changing the subject.

The issue is whether or not the Bitcoin community is going to stand by and allow a small, currently anonymous organization or special interest group to subvert its interests.

If so, then say goodbye to Bitcoin and hello to JPMCoin, or GovCoin, or SIGCoin.  Whoever has the money to pay for the most DDoS attacks and the most shills will either get their way, or they will attack the network so that no one else can use it.

Allowing the current attack against Bitcoin Classic to continue unanswered is setting a precedent.  If it is allowed to stand, it will be harmful to the interests of most people in the Bitcoin community by paving the way special interests.  Don't let special interest groups control Bitcoin in the same manner they control so many other pillars of our civilization.

It seems that certain elements in the Bitcoin community seem to think they know what's best for the rest of us.  Not unlike their cousins in political office, or sitting on the boards of large companies, they posses a degree of arrogance and narcissism that predispose them to this belief.  That would be fine if it stopped there, but when it extends to:

• DDoS attacks against people running Bitcoin nodes that conflict with their personal visions of the future
• Ad hominem attacks on respected members of the community that don't agree with them
• A refusal by other members with the same preference to disavow the above actions and shun the guilty parties

Then I find it past time to call for action.

I'm interested in hearing others thoughts on the subject, but here are a few ideas to discuss:

• Start a bounty to reward anyone who comes forward with information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individuals responsible for the DDoS attacks.
• Encourage more people to run Bitcoin Classic nodes as a way of protesting the unethical actions taken by those parties opposed to it
• Facilitate the creation of more Bitcoin Classic nodes by providing howto guides as well as prepackaged distributions ready-for-deployment on popular cloud service providers

I am prepared to fund ten Bitcoin Classic nodes myself and am presently working out the details so I can get started.

Regardless of your thoughts on block size, it is important to realize the precedent that will be set if the actions of the Bitcoin oligarchs are allowed to stand.  It will send a very clear message to the world that a small group of people will be able to take control of Bitcoin's destiny and steer it in whatever direction suits them.

If and when the DDoS attacks stop and we see concrete progress being made in the development community towards a solution to the current congestion, however temporary in nature, then it may be time to end this effort.

That depends.  If the OP is willing to spend more going after bitmixer.io, and if the jurisdiction of their owners (Norway?) is sufficiently friendly, he may be able to force their hand in the courts.  I'd start here:

Domain : bitmixer.io
Status : Live
Expiry : 2016-09-20

NS 1   : edna.ns.cloudflare.com
NS 2   : jake.ns.cloudflare.com

Owner  : Alex Bitshe
Owner  : Bitmixer
Owner  : Pb 1034 Sentrum
Owner  : Oslo
Owner  : NO

Then maybe hire a private investigator to track down the owner(s), and a lawyer from Norway (or wherever they turn out to be) in order to see if your case is viable.  You should also have the lawyer insure that they are following all of the laws of the jurisdiction in which they are based (which seems unlikely for most Western jurisdictions).  If not, you may be able to extract some satisfaction by having your lawyer notify the authorities in their country that they are operating outside of the law and providing them with the contact information turned up by your private investigator.

Good luck.  If enough people put pressure on companies like these to catch up to the rest of the world in customer service they will either change their ways or be forced out of business.  Either outcome would be good for Bitcoin.

You keep posting this gun control propaganda image over and over again (presumably hoping that if you repeat it enough times, people will somehow overlook the fact that while it claims statistics in support of your beliefs, it does not cite the source(s) for them).

Let me instead cite another source which tells a different message:  https://archive.org/details/MoreGunsLessCrime

In his book, "More Guns, Less Crime," John R. Lott (a former professor of law and economics who has held positions at a number of distinguished universities in the US including Yale, Stanford, UCLA and Wharton) uses statistics collected by the FBI to show that within the US, the more guns in the hands of the people in any region, the lower the crime rate.  Interestingly, the book was originally commissioned by a gun control group (Handgun Control) under the assumption that his conclusion would be the opposite of what he in found.

I'm sure most of you who disagree with this message will ignore the book and continue to cling to whatever evidence you can find to support your own emotionally derived beliefs.  For those of you who are American, crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you.  May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

Slightly off-topic, but while some people may be tempted to admire little city-states like Singapore for their tough laws and low crime rates, let's not forget that there is a flip side to that coin:


(Excerpted from http://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2011/12/15/wozniak-apple-couldnt-emerge-in-singapore/)

cryptovpn.com is $25/month.  It wasn't clear to me that you were referring to cryptovpn.me.

However, on the subject of VPN prices, you might want to check out https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/  They charge only $6.95 per month for a monthly subscription and accept bitcoin.  I haven't used them myself, but they come recommended by a friend.  I may give them a try when my current VPN subscription runs out.

You might try http://www.purevpn.com/order/

I don't have very fast internet here, but they were able to saturate my 25 Mbps bandwidth (both up and down) when I did a test a couple of weeks ago to one of their European nodes.  Since they allow you to choose from a couple of dozen countries for your VPN host, you should expect different results depending on which country you connect through.

The have a special going on right now for $8.95 per month.  Seems a lot cheaper than the $25/month cryptovpn wants.

The jammer you reference above won't work on most drones.  Many (most?) consumer-type drones operate in the 2.4 GHz band, which is far above where that jammer operates.  Instead, you'll want to grab one of the cheap Chinese jammers for the wifi band and use it.  If you are based in the US beware that the US government is starting to crack down on RF jammers imported into the country and is even talking about going after consumers:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/fcc-levels-record-fine-against-chinese-maker-of-cellphone-jammers-1403205812

Still, the legal risks are probably much lower than the risk of firing a gun at one of these unless you live in a rural area where discharge of firearms is not prohibited.

I believe core bitcoin developer Peter Todd had a couple of ideas here:  http://redd.it/281ftd

I don't have much to add, except that a crazy thought just occurred to me where we add a PoS layer to the blockchain so that we have two layers of distributed consensus, one PoW and the other PoS.  Then the PoS layer can be used to regulate the PoW layer.  In other words, those of us who hold bitcoins can actively assign or remove trust from mining nodes (which could be pools or individual miners).  The trust could in theory limit the number of blocks they were able to submit on the PoW side.

I admit I haven't "thought this through" very far and it may not be viable at all.  However, the idea popped into my head after reading one of Danny Hamilton's last posts and I thought I should mention it as I haven't seen it discussed before.

Assuming that the ~15% drop in recent bitcoin valuation was due to GHash exceeding 50% of the total hash rate (and who knows how much further it may have dropped if that abuse were not terminated), then you would need to lose 15% of your payouts in order for it to hurt you more than performing the attack.  A drop in mining revenue well below that number would already cause a huge number of miners to switch pools, which would accomplish the objective of reducing the hash rate at the offending pool.

I did not mean to suggest that the individual miner could pull of a successful attack single-handed (with a couple of notable exceptions).  But rather that community action of this nature would have a large enough effect in aggregate to get the job done.  If the community reaction to this abuse by GHash is anything to go by, it seems plausible that a large number of miners might participate in such an attack if it were easy to do.

There are some legitimate and worthwhile reasons for performing a block withholding attack.  Let's say that you have a substantial percentage of your net worth in bitcoins and a pool operator is approaching 50% of the net mining rate, threatening the value of your bitcoins.  Might it not make sense for you (and others in a similar situation) to mine at the offending pool operator's site with your miners configured to do a block withholding attack?  Until the pool's luck is adversely affected, you would still receive nearly the same payout you would otherwise receive, but at the same time you would be negatively impacting the luck of the offending pool which would lead other miner's to switch to a different pool once they noticed their earnings began to decline.

I understand GHash is presently mining at 29% -- considerably down from the 51% they were mining at earlier.  Did this large decline in mining rate come about as a result of them voluntarily cutting back on their mining operations (or redirecting them elsewhere)?  Or, as I understand, were they a direct result of some actors within the community taking directed actions against GHash?  If the latter, then it seems that there is already an emergent mechanism in place for protecting the market against rogue operators.  I would be tempted to hold long enough to ascertain whether or not this mechanism can be relied upon in the future to take the necessary action should this happen again.  Presumably the threshold for going into action will be lower the next time (40% is already excessive).

Someone over on Reddit posted a patch to Luke's latest BFGminer which provides a command line option to turn on block withholding attacks.

The post is in the "I'm selfish mining at ghashio" thread.  Here's the link they posted for convenience:  http://pastebin.com/d1ptqDFv

I can think of several incentives to use such an attack:

• To prevent a pool like GHash from cornering the mining market (and thus causing prices to fall) by negatively impacting their luck.  This should providing incentive for miners to switch to another pool
• To attack pools other than one's own in order to entice their users to come to your own pool

The second incentive seems like it would only work for individuals/groups in direct control of a large amount of hashing power -- such as GHash/CEX.

Perhaps this will turn out to be just the sort of tool the Bitcoin community needs to keep mining pools from gaining too much market share?  Or perhaps it will usher in a new stage of mining wars.  Either way, it seems like it has the potential to alter the balance of power by giving the mining community some power to punish misbehaving pools.

What about something like this:


In fact, when they point their own miners at other pools, they could (as you suggest) even be employing block withholding attacks to induce miners there to switch pools when the miners notice the luck is running below average or to force the pool operators to raise their rates in the case of PPS pools.

Out of curiosity, has anyone produced a chart showing the share of the cryptocurrency market represented by Bitcoin versus a basket of other cryptocurrencies (say, the top 10 or 20 of them)?  It would be interesting to know whether this number was relatively constant, or changing up or down with time.  I think it would be somewhat labor intensive to produce such a chart due to the volatility of the altcoin markets, but I've been surprised before by the data sets people here have put together.

We are not talking about denying anyone the ability to mine here.  We are talking about ways the community can proactively take action in order to reduce the risk of another market crash.  Arguing that taking an action which some people might consider unethical in response to a credible threat to billions of dollars of market capitalization just to protect the interest of a few, mostly anonymous individuals at GHash.io doesn't make any business sense at all.  The community has already appealed to GHash.io to voluntarily restrict their mining (as did BTCGuild before them) in order to avoid going over 40%.  They made their intentions very clear by their actions and so it is time to consider other options.

Here's another potentially likely GHash scenario:

• GHash sells most of its available bitcoins for fiat
• GHash achieves 51+% on purpose knowing it will trigger a selloff
• GHash buys back the bitcoins at a greatly reduced price
• GHash points its miners to other pools to alleviate the threat
• Bitcoin price rises again and GHash realizes a large profit from market manipulation

This seems like a low-risk strategy, generates a tidy profit for GHash, and can probably be done several times before the community catches on so long as they wait long enough between runups.

If you believe that they are so beneficent that they would never try anything like this, then perhaps you'd like to buy some shares I have in the Golden Gate bridge for sale?

One of the biggest innovations Bitcoin brings to the world is a way to conduct commerce without the need to trust other human beings.  By passing 50% (one could argue even 40% is too much), ghash.io changes this equation and now requires that we trust the person(s) running them -- whoever they are.  Apologists for ghash.io claim that it is not in their best interest to do anything to compromise the network, but it does not take much imagination to see that there are many scenarios in which this supposed conflict of interest does not prevent malicious mischief from taking place.  This flies in the face of everything that Bitcoin once stood for.

I believe I read recently that some of the core developers (including Gavin) are of the belief that there are no proactive measures they can take (as developers) to effectively stop a 51% attack and must instead wait until it occurs before introducing defensive changes to the code.  While there may be many technical reasons which support such a viewpoint, this should not make anyone who is s stakeholder in Bitcoin feel confident.  One can only imagine the selling frenzy and resulting price drop when the first significant double spends are confirmed.  Bitcoin has enjoyed a first mover advantage since the first altcoins appeared on the scene many years ago, but this is exactly the sort of thing that could erode its lead.

There are other ways to mitigate the problem.  One that has been already tried but appears to be ineffective is to appeal to the community to move their mining power to other pools.  Certainly there are other measures which I haven't seen discussed yet.  In the past, I have seen pools, even large ones, shut down for days at a time by large DDOS attacks.  Perhaps watching their mining revenue drop to near-zero for a couple of days might influence the owners of ghash.io to modify their ways.  Billions of dollars of market value are potentially at stake here compared with a much smaller loss in revenue for ghash.io of they are forced to limit themselves to less than 40% of mining.