WARNING scammer r0ach now shilling for the Monero hoax

[ArticMine]

...
It only requires a very short duration to send the difficulty permanently into the stratosphere. Only a fork can revert it. The attacker doesn't have any ongoing cost. The rental cost is cheap. All your CAPEX arguments fail because you forgot about renting.
...

Incorrect. This is mounting a 51% attack for approximately one day in order to double the blocktime for approximately two days. I do find it interesting though when people suggest attacks that are way more expensive than a 51% attack and have relatively insignificant impact.

[iamnotback]

...
It only requires a very short duration to send the difficulty permanently into the stratosphere. Only a fork can revert it. The attacker doesn't have any ongoing cost. The rental cost is cheap. All your CAPEX arguments fail because you forgot about renting.
...

Incorrect. This is mounting a 51% attack for approximately one day in order to double the blocktime for approximately two days. I do find it interesting though when people suggest attacks that are way more expensive than a 51% attack and have relatively insignificant impact.

Incorrect. This is mounting a 99.9% attack for a fraction of a years in order to increase the block period by 100X for a period of years.

Please get the math correct.

[Spoetnik]

off-topic much guys ?

..as long as it ain't ETH being shilled then so what !

Go Nuts guys 

[MySecondCunt]

Cometh the halvening, and lo! ... all them Chinese chicken coops full'a insta-obsoleted SHA-256 gear
Gonna be glorious!

https://s32.postimg.org/ag0hs94p1/opt.jpg

>99.9% attack for a fraction of a years in order to increase the block period by 100X for a period of years.
(all the GPUs currently mining a coin) * 999?

[ArticMine]

...
It only requires a very short duration to send the difficulty permanently into the stratosphere. Only a fork can revert it. The attacker doesn't have any ongoing cost. The rental cost is cheap. All your CAPEX arguments fail because you forgot about renting.
...

Incorrect. This is mounting a 51% attack for approximately one day in order to double the blocktime for approximately two days. I do find it interesting though when people suggest attacks that are way more expensive than a 51% attack and have relatively insignificant impact.

Incorrect. This is mounting a 99.9% attack for a fraction of a years in order to increase the block period by 100X for a period of years.

Please get the math correct.

For how long do you want to keep up your 99.9% attack for? Like for how many blocks?

[iCEBREAKER]

...
It only requires a very short duration to send the difficulty permanently into the stratosphere. Only a fork can revert it. The attacker doesn't have any ongoing cost. The rental cost is cheap. All your CAPEX arguments fail because you forgot about renting.
...

Incorrect. This is mounting a 51% attack for approximately one day in order to double the blocktime for approximately two days. I do find it interesting though when people suggest attacks that are way more expensive than a 51% attack and have relatively insignificant impact.

That's not how it works these days.  Modern difficulty adjustment algos have sanity checks to prevent, or blunt the impact of, that class of attacks.

Why don't you get a blog, spend some time to structure your ideas properly and so on ?   

[ArticMine]

I do not want sound sarcastic, but this is starting to sound to me as attempting to find the most inefficient way to attack a POW coin.

[iamnotback]

You guys are welcome to provide a succinct pseudo-code for your difficulty adjustment algorithm and then I will explain how it is broken in those more specifics.

Just like I did to ArticMine when he explained the precise equation and algorithm of Monero automatic block size adjustment algorithm (c.f. the "Satoshi did not solve the Byzantine General's Problem" thread), I showed him how it is broken. Recently he tried to speak some nonsense about CounterParty and Rootstock and I also explained to him how he was wrong. Before that it was some nonsense about CopyLeft licenses and I explained how he was wrong. A clear pattern has developed. And ArticMine I also don't want to sound disrespectful, but sorry I don't have time for all your mistakes.

Of course you guys will deny it, so how about you stop wasting my time.

iCEBREAKER, you don't know what you think you know, as I showed you last time you tried to belittle me about my work on programming language design. Go find another tree stump to hump. Your nonsense is so banal and repetitive.

We can't have a technical proof in a forum post. Both of you guys know that. So stop fooling the readers.

[Spoetnik]

Who is smart ?

and i quote.. "WARNING scammer r0ach now shilling for the Monero hoax"

Now go read the comments here..  

Do cocky opinionated assholes always think every venue is a soap box for their "musings" ?

Hard to come off smart when you fail miserably at basic stuff like "internet'ing"

PS:
I support my fellow Satanist here..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Satan

The Church of Satan describes its structural basis as a cabal that is "an underground cell-system of individuals who share the basis of [our] philosophy"

The church does not believe in or worship the Devil or a Christian notion of Satan.[4] High priest Peter Gilmore describes its members as "skeptical atheists", embracing the Hebrew root of the word "Satan" as "adversary". The church views Satan as a positive archetype who represents pride, individualism, and enlightenment, and as a symbol of defiance against the Abrahamic faiths which LaVey criticized for what he saw as the suppression of humanity's natural instincts

The Church does not espouse a belief in Satan as an entity who literally exists,[10] and LaVey did not encourage the worship of Satan as a deity.[11] In an interview with David Shankbone, High Priest Peter Gilmore stated "My real feeling is that anybody who believes in supernatural entities on some level is insane. Whether they believe in the Devil or God, they are abdicating reason".[12] Gilmore defines the word "Satan" as "a model or a mode of behavior", noting that in Hebrew the word means "adversary" or "opposer", which can be regarded as "one who questions".[12] Gilmore describes Satanism as beginning with atheism, and taking the view that the universe is indifferent: "There’s no God, there’s no Devil. No one cares!"[12]

[ArticMine]

You guys are welcome to provide a succinct pseudo-code for your difficulty adjustment algorithm and then I will explain how it is broken in those more specifics.

Just like I did to ArticMine when he explained the precise equation and algorithm of Monero automatic block size adjustment algorithm (c.f. the "Satoshi did not solve the Byzantine General's Problem" thread), I showed him how it is broken. Recently he tried to speak some nonsense about CounterParty and Rootstock and I also explained to him how he was wrong. Before that it was some nonsense about CopyLeft licenses and I explained how he was wrong. A clear pattern has developed. And ArticMine I also don't want to sound disrespectful, but sorry I don't have time for all your mistakes.

Of course you guys will deny it, so how about you stop wasting my time.

iCEBREAKER, you don't know what you think you know, as I showed you last time you tried to belittle me about my work on programming language design. Go find another tree stump to hump. Your nonsense is so banal and repetitive.

We can't have a technical proof in a forum post. Both of you guys know that. So stop fooling the readers.

In the adaptive blocksize limit case as in this case the attacks you formulated required a greater hashpower than the hashpower required to mount a 51% attack on the coin; however I must say than in the blocksize limit case the attack you proposed did not require 100x the hashpower of the coin. Can the difficulty adjustment algorithm in Monero be improved? Of course it can but that does not give any validity to an attack requiring 100x the hashpower of the coin since with a small fraction of such hashpower one can fork the coin and replace the difficulty adjustment algorithm by one that is completely broken by design.

As for our differences on the relative merits of proprietary vs free libre open source software development or between copyleft and non copyleft FLOSS licenses it is best to simply agree to disagree.

Edit: In 2001 Steve Ballmer the then CEO of Microsoft called Linux a cancer because of the Copyleft GPL 2 license. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ It is fair to say that 15 years later this slow growing cancer is having an impact.

[iamnotback]

You guys are welcome to provide a succinct pseudo-code for your difficulty adjustment algorithm and then I will explain how it is broken in those more specifics.

Just like I did to ArticMine when he explained the precise equation and algorithm of Monero automatic block size adjustment algorithm (c.f. the "Satoshi did not solve the Byzantine General's Problem" thread), I showed him how it is broken. Recently he tried to speak some nonsense about CounterParty and Rootstock and I also explained to him how he was wrong. Before that it was some nonsense about CopyLeft licenses and I explained how he was wrong. A clear pattern has developed. And ArticMine I also don't want to sound disrespectful, but sorry I don't have time for all your mistakes.

Of course you guys will deny it, so how about you stop wasting my time.

iCEBREAKER, you don't know what you think you know, as I showed you last time you tried to belittle me about my work on programming language design. Go find another tree stump to hump. Your nonsense is so banal and repetitive.

We can't have a technical proof in a forum post. Both of you guys know that. So stop fooling the readers.

In the adaptive blocksize limit case as in this case the attacks you formulated required a greater hashpower than the hashpower required to mount a 51% attack on the coin; however I must say than in the blocksize limit case the attack you proposed did not require 100x the hashpower of the coin. Can the difficulty adjustment algorithm in Monero be improved? Of course it can but that does not give any validity to an attack requiring 100x the hashpower of the coin since with a small fraction of such hashpower one can fork the coin and replace the difficulty adjustment algorithm by one that is completely broken by design.

As for our differences on the relative merits of proprietary vs free libre open source software development or between copyleft and non copyleft FLOSS licenses it is best to simply agree to disagree on licenses philosophy.

No you've forgotten smooth's point, because the 51% attack requires ongoing hashrate expended by the attacker indefinitely. The network eventually heals when the attacker stops.

The 100X attack is death star. The chain doesn't heal (even after the attacker has stopped mining) without external intervention of a fork, because the difficulty is in the stratosphere so thus no block is ever created again (or not for a long, long time such as years).

I must admit I am most frustrated with iCEBREAKER, because he is intellectually dishonest (probably because of ignorance but I am not sure). You can fiddle with the difficulty algorithm to try to auto correct from the 100X attack, but you open other security flaw holes by doing so.

Agreed you and I, can agree to disagree on the philosophy of licenses.

[ArticMine]

...

No you've forgotten smooth's point, because the 51% attack requires ongoing hashrate expended by the attacker indefinitely. The network eventually heals when the attacker stops.

The 100X attack is death star. The chain doesn't heal (even after the attacker has stopped mining) without external intervention of a fork, because the difficulty is in the stratosphere so thus no block is ever created again (or not for a long, long time such as years).

I must admit I am most frustrated with iCEBREAKER, because he is intellectually dishonest (probably because of ignorance but I am not sure). You can fiddle with the difficulty algorithm to try to auto correct from the 100X attack, but you open other security flaw holes by doing so.

Agreed you and I, can agree to disagree.

So does the 100x attack since the attacker has to maintain the attack for a period longer than the number to blocks used by the difficulty algorithm to calculate the change in difficulty. So my point is why would the attacker not just fork the coin and set the difficulty to some insane high value?

Edit: I am still waiting for the answer to: For how many blocks do you want to maintain the 100x attack for?

[iamnotback]

...

No you've forgotten smooth's point, because the 51% attack requires ongoing hashrate expended by the attacker indefinitely. The network eventually heals when the attacker stops.

The 100X attack is death star. The chain doesn't heal (even after the attacker has stopped mining) without external intervention of a fork, because the difficulty is in the stratosphere so thus no block is ever created again (or not for a long, long time such as years).

So does the 100x attack since the attacker has to maintain the attack for a period longer than the number to blocks used by the difficulty algorithm to calculate the change in difficulty. So my point is why would the attacker not just fork the coin and set the difficulty to some insane high value?

There is a huge difference between forking the protocol with 51% hashrate and adhering to the protocol with 100X hashrate (both being ways to set a stratospheric difficulty level).

In the former case, honest miners will ignore the fork. In the latter case, they can't do anything.

ArticMine you are a physicist and I am a programmer for 37 years. I will be more skilled at my field and you will be more expert at yours.

[smooth]

The "attacker" can rent 1000X more botnets than you can. That was the entire point of the "attacker's" blog article.

'NotBack you are going of the deep end a bit here.

The difficulty stratosphere attack you've described doesn't work very well against Monero if you work out actual numbers.

If you wanted to drive up the difficulty 1000x then you would need something approaching a billion typical (old, insecure, low powered) botnet nodes. If you wanted to use higher performance computers say from cloud computing you'd need 10 million or so, which is good portion of the capacity of the big cloud computing vendors. To rent that you would have to displace most or all of their other paying customers (or in the case of vendors such as Amazon or Google, their own usage). That won't happen.

Now lets say you did manage to, somehow, drive the difficulty up 1000x. You would drive the average block time from 2 minutes to 2000 minutes which is around a day and a half. The chain would not completely stall, it would continue to generate blocks at this slow rate. Those blocks would feed into the difficulty adjustment and after a few days the block time would rapidly begin to come down. It would still be slow for quite a while, but the severity would subside. Meanwhile, the blocks would be full of high-paying transactions and the block size would increase. The network would hobble along until it self-healed.

If you tried the possibly more plausible 100x version instead of the ridiculous 1000x version, then the block time only goes to 200 minutes, which hardly slower than Bitcoin on a bad day (I've personally waited over an hour for a block). Again, block size adjustment would start to kick in and clear the transaction backlog. Over time (hours to days, not years) the block time would start to come back down pretty fast anyway.

This ignores that Monero with a billion market cap would probably have a much higher baseline hash rate, meaning not only is 1000x implausible but 100x would probably be as well. And a 10x difficulty attack is just purely money for basically no purpose.

Nothing about this is specific to Monero's algorithm, which probably isn't even all that good. This sort of attack won't work against any current alts with faster base block times and difficulty adjustment algorithms that have been battle-tested not only by malicious parties but by auto-switching pools which do this form of "attack" automatically and routinely by rapidly moving massive amounts of hash rate between coins.

The attack works much better against Bitcoin-style coins (1st gen alts mostly) that start with a higher block time and that maintain a fixed difficulty for a (reasonably long) cycle. You drive up the difficulty during one cycle and the difficulty never adjusts at all until the end of the next cycle so there is an unacceptable wait for the whole cycle (2016 blocks in the case of many early alts that just copied Bitcoin).

[ArticMine]

...

There is a huge difference between forking the protocol with 51% hashrate and adhering to the protocol with 100X hashrate (both being ways to set a stratospheric difficulty level).

In the former case, honest miners will ignore the fork. In the latter case, they can't do anything.

ArticMine you are a physicist and I am a programmer for 37 years. I will be more skilled at my field and you will be more expert at yours.

The attacker in the 51% case is mining otherwise perfectly valid blocks but at a higher attack difficulty rather than the correct optimal difficulty in the blocks. There is no actual change in the protocol. The trade-off is that the 51% attack blocks could be easily detected by the network in exchange for a much lower cost of attack. In either case once the attack ends the difficulty starts to fall since time ticks by with no blocks being mined. There is a key difference between Bitcoin or a Bitcoin clone and Monero in that in Bitcoin the difficulty adjustment is discrete approximately every 2 weeks while in Monero it is continuous, This means that by timing the end of the attack correctly the attacker could keep the difficulty constant in Bitcoin for 2 weeks, while in Monero the difficulty starts to fall approximately 2 min after the end of the attack.

http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-time/
http://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/monero-difficulty-chart

Collusion between honest miners and devs could mitigate the attack but in both cases it involves ignoring the difficulty in the blocks in some way, effectively a hard fork. One can mitigate against this attack by having the difficulty algorithm drop the difficulty at a faster rate if no blocks are found after a given amount of time, where this time is statistically much larger than the normal block time.

Still I do not see the economics here. One can do a lot more damage with a 51% attack than this.

[iamnotback]

Please stop trying to pretend that Monero's measily hashrate is secure! You are both lying.

The "attacker" can rent 1000X more botnets than you can. That was the entire point of the "attacker's" blog article.

'NotBack you are going of the deep end a bit here.

The difficulty stratosphere attack you've described doesn't work very well against Monero if you work out actual numbers.

If you wanted to drive up the difficulty 1000x then you would need something approaching a billion typical (old, insecure, low powered) botnet nodes. If you wanted to use higher performance computers say from cloud computing you'd need 10 million or so, which is good portion of the capacity of the big cloud computing vendors. To rent that you would have to displace most or all of their other paying customers (or in the case of vendors such as Amazon or Google, their own usage). That won't happen.

Or a combination of both. Don't say what will happen when China can easily build that computer power if you threaten their Bitcoin mining cartel. If you think the computer power mining Monero is a significant fraction of world computing power, you have a few screws loose in your head.

I don't appreciate your insult. Should I return the insult or will you be a little be more circumspect from here on?

Now lets say you did manage to, somehow, drive the difficulty up 1000x. You would drive the average block time from 2 minutes to 2000 minutes which is around a day and a half. The chain would not completely stall, it would continue to generate blocks at this slow rate.

Incorrect. The attacker would with a much lower level of hashrate than the initial attack be able to win a block every 2000 minutes and thus block all transactions except his, so he can exit the coin with his mining rewards. With Monero he can even hide his coins, so no one knows! Doubly-fucked because of the anonymity.

Those blocks would feed into the difficulty adjustment and after a few days the block time would rapidly begin to come down. It would still be slow for quite a while, but the severity would subside.

Look there are tradeoffs on security when you have the adjustment fast or slow and the attacker can game which ever weakness you enable. If too fast, he can fire up his hashrate again for only a very short period of time to start another period of 2000 minute block periods.

Meanwhile, the blocks would be full of high-paying transactions and the block size would increase. The network would hobble along until it self-healed.

Fucking wrong as wrong can be.

Please stop fucking with me.


I asked you Monerotards to stop wasting my time.

[ArticMine]

...
I asked you Monerotards to stop wasting my time.
...

If you do not want to waste your time may I suggest:
1) Stop proposing attacks that make zero economic sense
2) Stop insulting people.

[iamnotback]

...
I asked you Monerotards to stop wasting my time.
...

If you do not want to waste your time may I suggest:
1) Stop proposing attacks that make zero economic sense
2) Stop insulting people.

You are a liar (or incredibly ignorant of the technology).

And you are insulting me. I asked you to stop being intellectually dishonest and wasting my time.

Now you send smooth here to insult me and lie.

smooth, ArticMine, and iCEBREAKER ganging up on me and lying.

[ArticMine]

...
I asked you Monerotards to stop wasting my time.
...

If you do not want to waste your time may I suggest:
1) Stop proposing attacks that make zero economic sense
2) Stop insulting people.

You are a liar.

And you are insulting me. I asked you to stop being intellectually dishonest and wasting my time.

Now you send smooth here to insult me and lie.

Quoted for posterity. I will deal with this later.

Edit:

Please stop trying to pretend that Monero's measily hashrate is secure! You are both lying.
...

...

You are a liar (or incredibly ignorant of the technology).

And you are insulting me. I asked you to stop being intellectually dishonest and wasting my time.

Now you send smooth here to insult me and lie.

smooth, ArticMine, and iCEBREAKER ganging up on me and lying.

[iamnotback]

...

There is a huge difference between forking the protocol with 51% hashrate and adhering to the protocol with 100X hashrate (both being ways to set a stratospheric difficulty level).

In the former case, honest miners will ignore the fork. In the latter case, they can't do anything.

ArticMine you are a physicist and I am a programmer for 37 years. I will be more skilled at my field and you will be more expert at yours.

The attacker in the 51% case is mining otherwise perfectly valid blocks but at a higher attack difficulty rather than the correct optimal difficulty in the blocks. There is no actual change in the protocol. The trade-off is that the 51% attack blocks could be easily detected by the network in exchange for a much lower cost of attack. In either case once the attack ends the difficulty starts to fall since time ticks by with no blocks being mined. There is a key difference between Bitcoin or a Bitcoin clone and Monero in that in Bitcoin the difficulty adjustment is discrete approximately every 2 weeks while in Monero it is continuous, This means that by timing the end of the attack correctly the attacker could keep the difficulty constant in Bitcoin for 2 weeks, while in Monero the difficulty starts to fall approximately 2 min after the end of the attack.

This is gibberish. It reads like you are drunk.

Yes a 51% attacker is mining valid blocks so when he stops mining, the difficulty is not very high, so that is not the same as attacking the network with 1000X the hashrate and driving the difficulty skyhigh. In your prior message, it seemed you proposed to fork the protocol to change the difficulty using only a 51% attack. I explained that honest miners would ignore the fork. Now you seem to imply the attacker can do a 51% attack, but mine with 1000X the hashrate so they don't need to change the protocol. Well then that isn't a 51% attack, it is the 1000X attack. So you've made no point at all. But it is difficult to understand what you mean, because the above just doesn't make any sense.

So what the hell are you trying to say here?

Please stop wasting my time. Write coherently and correctly at one post. Put your entire point in one post and expend the effort to make your post coherent. This back and forth is very wasteful.


On the continuous sliding adjustment window, this doesn't impact anything w.r.t. to this issue. It is just equivalent to a smoothing filter.

W.r.t. to detecting attack blocks, this is nonsense. All blocks looks the same. There is no way to identify which blocks are coming from the attacker unless all the honest nodes are colluding. But that defeats the entire point of decentralization and trustless. The attacker could Sybil attack your trust for example.

ArcticMine you always drag me into the long nonsense debates and then I win at the end. Please be more respectful of my time.