Is Bitcoin currently under attack?

[ianbakewell]

I just noticed this thread in the mining section:

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (http://www.ethz.ch/) has started to mine with large power:

http://blockchain.info/blocks/82.130.102.160

http://bgp.he.net/ip/82.130.102.160

EDIT: they wrote a paper about Bitcoin some days ago maybe they are now very interested to dive in:

http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ethlife.ethz.ch%2Farchive_articles%2F120924_Neuer_Globe_Bitcoin_fw%2Findex&act=url

Crossposting for awareness and further discussion.

[cypherdoc]

if it were an attack why would they have contacted the devs ahead of time?

[cypherdoc]

It is a university, so I figured they were not hostile.
Did not see any mention of contact with the devs.

Still, 10% of the network is a hell of a lot to just "turn on" suddenly
Wonder how much more they have up the sleeve.

this is actually old news from a few weeks back when they published the paper.  at that time, they said they had contacted the devs. 

what is new is that they've actually demonstrated, with evidence, their theory in action.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Zurich? Is it where a lot of bankers live? 

[lakeluke]

Can someone pls post a link to their paper; thanks

[Ivica]

Can someone pls post a link to their paper; thanks

This one http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248 ?

[Stephen Gornick]

what is new is that they've actually demonstrated, with evidence, their theory in action.

Well, new back in May when their results were first shared.

This is for the race attack (on 0/unconfirmed transctions), and not a 51% attack which could reverse confirmed transactions.

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Double-spending


They describe how they could connect to their "test vendor", which means that vendor's node wasn't configured according to the recommendations (i.e., no incoming connections, explicitly connect outgoing to hub nodes):

 - http://blockchain.info/hub-nodes

[Dansker]

About time a university started researching Bitcoin seriously.

Stress testing the network and protocol by a neutral party is something we should be grateful for, regardless of the immediate consequences.

If they can disrupt the network, so can others. And then I prefer this uni to do it, so we can learn from it rather than die from it.

[Severian]

Stress testing the network and protocol by a neutral party is something we should be grateful for, regardless of the immediate consequences.

Well said. Just quoting you for reinforcement.

[Cdecker]

Well I was wondering how long it would take for people to notice. It's me

And no I am not putting lots of hashing power to the network, notice that it just says "relayed by" and not "mined by". I'm performing some measurements, paper is due in a few weeks.

[Gyrsur]

About time a university started researching Bitcoin seriously.

Stress testing the network and protocol by a neutral party is something we should be grateful for, regardless of the immediate consequences.

If they can disrupt the network, so can others. And then I prefer this uni to do it, so we can learn from it rather than die from it.

the whole mining process has to be inspected. all the involved parties which producing no really value have to be sorted out!

[allthingsluxury]

Will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.

[Dansker]

Well I was wondering how long it would take for people to notice. It's me

And no I am not putting lots of hashing power to the network, notice that it just says "relayed by" and not "mined by". I'm performing some measurements, paper is due in a few weeks.

Can you somehow prove this is you doing this?

Also, what you are doing, care to "explain it like I'm 5"?

[Gyrsur]

Well I was wondering how long it would take for people to notice. It's me

And no I am not putting lots of hashing power to the network, notice that it just says "relayed by" and not "mined by". I'm performing some measurements, paper is due in a few weeks.

thank you! due your work I came under attack of some moderators and some pool operators (which I really like!)

[Cdecker]

Well I was wondering how long it would take for people to notice. It's me

And no I am not putting lots of hashing power to the network, notice that it just says "relayed by" and not "mined by". I'm performing some measurements, paper is due in a few weeks.

thank you! due your work I came under attack of some moderators and some pool operators (which I really like!)

Hm? What do you mean?

I can't give you the exact details of what I'm doing until it gets published. I can tell you that I participate in the network as any other node does, I'm just a very big node (5'000 connections open), and am thus considered a Hub in Blockchain.info's vocabulary

[Akka]

Well I was wondering how long it would take for people to notice. It's me

And no I am not putting lots of hashing power to the network, notice that it just says "relayed by" and not "mined by". I'm performing some measurements, paper is due in a few weeks.

Can you somehow prove this is you doing this?

Also, what you are doing, care to "explain it like I'm 5"?

Its really him: http://www.disco.ethz.ch/members/cdecker.html

[Cdecker]

I'm not the only one working with such large nodes btw. There seems to be someone from the university of Munich that is doing something similar:

• http://blockchain.info/blocks/131.159.18.37
• http://bgp.he.net/ip/131.159.18.37

I wonder what they are doing :-)

[Gyrsur]

Well I was wondering how long it would take for people to notice. It's me

And no I am not putting lots of hashing power to the network, notice that it just says "relayed by" and not "mined by". I'm performing some measurements, paper is due in a few weeks.

thank you! due your work I came under attack of some moderators and some pool operators (which I really like!)

Hm? What do you mean?

I can't give you the exact details of what I'm doing until it gets published. I can tell you that I participate in the network as any other node does, I'm just a very big node (5'000 connections open), and am thus considered a Hub in Blockchain.info's vocabulary

please read this here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113654.0

[elux]

Well I was wondering how long it would take for people to notice. It's me
And no I am not putting lots of hashing power to the network, notice that it just says "relayed by" and not "mined by". I'm performing some measurements, paper is due in a few weeks.

Cool. Well, today I learned a bunch of arcana about relaying versus mining blocks.
What, exactly, are you measuring? How many people are grappling with Bitcoin at ETH Zürich?

thank you! due your work I came under attack of some moderators and some pool operators (which I really like!)

Well that's a weird way to look at it. They happened to be right, and we happened to be wrong.
There is not much honor in being a fool, but there can be some merit in admitting the mistake.

Now, what we should do is learn from the experience, and only then feel good about ourselves.

[Cdecker]

please read this here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113654.0

Sorry about that mate. The Paper is from another group (System Security) in the University, I'm in Distributed Computing.
As far as I can tell we don't have any relevant computational power working on Bitcoin, I'm just relaying the blocks faster than others in the network.