Acedemic paper on an objective look into blockchain forks due to bad actors

[TheMage]

So my paper has been finally released, after ~1.5 months of work. At the title implies, it is an objective look into forking of blockchains due to malicious actors.


When I started working on the concept for this, the 20MB discussions had just started to gain some serious traction within the communities. And now, with the recent forks and some other issues with Bitcoin I believe this academic piece holds more value then before I started on it.

http://www.digitalcurrencycouncil.com/professional/an-objective-look-into-the-impacts-of-forking-blockchains-due-to-malicious-actors/


It's long, but its well worth the read. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated as well!



Andrew Vegetabile, Litecoin Association Director

[Crestington]

I really enjoyed the read and thought it did a great job of trying to be impartial on the subject. I liked how it looks at examples in a constructive way and makes the information easy to understand for people who are less computer literate. Great job!

I think it would be cool if you had some kind of wiki for forking and extend the subject, maybe with some up or down voting?

[TheMage]

Thank you for the compliments!


Maybe someone who reads this who also updates the Bitcoin/Litcoin wiki's would be so kind as to insert this into them . I would love to see more discussions around topics such as this that may become taboo, because we can only grow as a community when we have logical and objective discussions devoid of emotions. We also need more academic papers as well, personally im sick of hearing the term "white paper" .

[Crestington]

Thank you for the compliments!


Maybe someone who reads this who also updates the Bitcoin/Litcoin wiki's would be so kind as to insert this into them . I would love to see more discussions around topics such as this that may become taboo, because we can only grow as a community when we have logical and objective discussions devoid of emotions. We also need more academic papers as well, personally im sick of hearing the term "white paper" .

Oh man tell me about it, most "white papers" actually say nothing about the tech itself and how it functions and nothing more than glorified adverts. I've seen maybe under 10 papers but they are also hard to grasp in some areas so lots of people would not want to read a 30 page long whitepaper and not understand it.

If you can change the rules along the way, then why bother with something complex? If it's a clone then the whitepapers of the underlying tech could be referenced. I think you can just change the rules if you have consensus such as if the most active people in the Litecoin community would get together and recommend a change.

As far as I know, in order to block addresses you just need over 51% of the hashing but also updates to exchanges as well??

[TheMage]

Thank you for the compliments!


Maybe someone who reads this who also updates the Bitcoin/Litcoin wiki's would be so kind as to insert this into them . I would love to see more discussions around topics such as this that may become taboo, because we can only grow as a community when we have logical and objective discussions devoid of emotions. We also need more academic papers as well, personally im sick of hearing the term "white paper" .

Oh man tell me about it, most "white papers" actually say nothing about the tech itself and how it functions and nothing more than glorified adverts. I've seen maybe under 10 papers but they are also hard to grasp in some areas so lots of people would not want to read a 30 page long whitepaper and not understand it.

If you can change the rules along the way, then why bother with something complex? If it's a clone then the whitepapers of the underlying tech could be referenced. I think you can just change the rules if you have consensus such as if the most active people in the Litecoin community would get together and recommend a change.

As far as I know, in order to block addresses you just need over 51% of the hashing but also updates to exchanges as well??

You know its funny, originally I also had blacklisted addresses in this paper as well. But towards the end I realized it was way to long and I cut it out.


There are ways to blacklist an address without a hard fork, but there are complications in that as well (such as blacklisting the address before that person can move to another address). Of course, that is the "hard fork" way of doing it. There are other ways such as the Luke Jr code (which I mentioned before I removed it) that you can download and refuse to propagate those TX's (I believe this can still be done today if you included his fixes, which refuses to TX gambling sites and other things that he considered blockchain bloat).

[Kprawn]

Wow that took a while to read, but it's very informative. Thank you OP.

I think my biggest gripe about this, is the failed consensus principle.. Well "failed" is a bit strong.. but it helps me to make my point.

I would want to see more involvement from the broad range of "users" of the coin, in the decisions being made, before a fork situation is even considered. At this stage you have to run a node or be one of the developers, to have a input, in this desicion.

It's a very complex and technical subject, but it's result impact every user of the currency, and most of them have zero say in the matter. 

[Crestington]

Wow that took a while to read, but it's very informative. Thank you OP.

I think my biggest gripe about this, is the failed consensus principle.. Well "failed" is a bit strong.. but it helps me to make my point.

I would want to see more involvement from the broad range of "users" of the coin, in the decisions being made, before a fork situation is even considered. At this stage you have to run a node or be one of the developers, to have a input, in this desicion.

It's a very complex and technical subject, but it's result impact every user of the currency, and most of them have zero say in the matter.  

In order to fork a Coin you need a majority of the people, you also need all exchanges and services to run on the new fork as well and allow time for everyone to move onto the new fork. You also need to talk and discuss openly but also need to come to a conclusion and know why it's being done. It also depends on how established a Coin is, if it were a small Coin just starting out then it wouldn't be much trouble to gain consensus from a handful of holders and one exchange.

I hardforked PayCon in 5 days but had all exchanges and services updated and more than 70% of users move to the new fork in 24 hours. I was able to do this by creating a new OP, having the hardfork ready, having the wallets and any fallbacks in place, then contacting everyone through either private message or talking to all exchanges directly. I said "This is the new OP, this is the new Github, these are your new wallets, this is a hardfork that will fix the difficulty problem, give you more Coins and has some nicer aesthetics."

http://www.presstab.pw/phpexplorer/paycon/charts.php?type=annualrate

That was a bit of circumstance though because if you have a problem of the guy running the show is leaving and you have a Blockchain problem and someone else come in to fix the problem and change the rewards to be higher for everyone, then most would just take the chance and even be thrilled about it because suddenly getting more for what you already paid for and have no alternative anyways.

What would be your choice then?

Option 1



Option 2




The thing is that people want someone to make the hard decisions for them and serve it on a silver platter and probably doesn't really matter how you fork a Coin as long as it's purpose is for the betterment of investors.

In the case of reverting and reversing transactions, that would come down to circumstance. Neither the reversal of Vericoin or the non-reversal of NXT was wrong, in both cases a decision was made. There are incidents of Blocking addresses you should add as well, CommunityCoin blocked a premine address, MaryJanecoin blocked the C-Cex burn address, and SaturnCoin2 once blocked Cryptsy when they released a wallet that blocked an address they thought was a bad actor (oops) but never told anyone about it.