Litecoiners: Idea to make Litecoin importance skyrocket in Bitcoin ecosystem

[str4wm4n]

fine silver coins with a big Ł on them would be awesome!!!

[smoothie]

I am a fan of KISS? keep it simple stupid. Adding more complexity just for this does not seem necessary. Let bitcoin suceed or fail on its own merits. Litecoin does not need bitcoin.

Okay you had your say. Now the masses (free market) will decide.

free market? more like someone who understands this well enough has to program it, debug it, test it, help deploy it, etc...
the free market better pony up some moolah if they want to see this happen.

unless i missed the post in this thread where a capable dev said he would do it for free.

Coblee, Laseek. Yeah they have enough incentive to want to try the idea.

Chill man lol you sound like a butthurt previous LTC investor that has seller's remorse. 

[aspect]

I am curious to see what Bitcoin development team would say to this.  Gavin?  Comments?

[casascius]

I am curious to see what Bitcoin development team would say to this.  Gavin?  Comments?

I'm interested in his opinion too, once the idea gets refined.  The best part is that no Bitcoin dev involvement is needed.  It remains a take-it-or-leave-it option.  It could be canvassed by Litecoin devs testing and submitting pull requests to the Satoshi client, which will probably never get incorporated, but which remain a viable option just in case.

Either way, it will force Bitcoin devs to think about the possibility of making sure the mining algorithm can be changed with minimal effort if the need arises... something already possibly valuable if mining power ends up in the hands of very few as a result of the way the Bitcoin ASIC market plays out.

I don't think anyone can seriously propose "Let's switch Bitcoin to scrypt because it's better" and expect everyone to just leap to it on a boring day, because the entire mining community would be up in arms over the loss of their investment in SHA256.  But do everything you can do to be the salvation in the case SHA256 mining cannot continue, and you'll have many Bitcoin miners become enthusiastic Litecoin miners as well, today.

[tgsrge]

I dont seem to be able to make up my mind on this one... On one hand, this, if executed, coordinated and handled properly COULD be highly beneficial to all involved, on the other, (atleast as i understand it) not only would it take an insane amount of coordination to pull this off properly, but also (and this is from me being somewhat of a hardline supporter/proponent of KISS as well) i dont know that i inherently like the idea and the possible consequences of effectively tying both networks together, or for that matter all the additional complication/overhead and possible FUD that this might bring in.

Personally, i've always been expecting someone to come up with some sort of optional overlay network that would run on top of bitcoin and provide mechanisms to possibly help with making successful 51% attacks harder but also provide for easier mitigation if one indeed happened, but so far it seems that doesnt seem to be happening, at all.... maybe this is, in it's own sort of convoluted, abstracted way it ? i'm not too sure.

[gmaxwell]

A few people seem to be getting thrown by the mistaken belief that Litecoin's SCRYPT is ASIC incompatible— it's true scrypt itself was designed to flatten the playing field between specialized hardware an general purpose hardware by being memory-hard— but because litecoin uses only 128k (instead of the 8mb - 40mb discussed in the scrypt paper)  it's not really all that memory hard, I wouldn't be surprised to see LTC ASICs with _more_ efficiency gain simply because LTC-scrypt runs fairly poorly on GPUs.

But none of this is what Mike is talking about in this thread, his argument doesn't depend on the qualities of scrypt vs sha256 as a POW.  What Mike is basically saying is that if you have to make 10 chip-types rather than 1 chip type you don't get as much manufacturing scaling (e.g. you get 10x the mask costs).

Sadly, I don't think it works out this way. If you know that to be successful you'll need 10 POW implementations you'll just make a single chip that implements all ten. You'll need more of the since you're using up more area but you're back into the realm of good manufacturing scaling.   Ultimately, what counts is that the attacker isn't outspending the honest users... how you dice up the spending doesn't matter much.

Beyond that— some surprise is useful. If the attacker didn't _know_ that he was going to need 10 POWs at first, but after he sunk his costs and began his attack the honest users switched then he could indeed be caught with a useless weapon.  But now you've told him, so he knows. Good job!

There is an advantage in pooling resources so that the honest users aren't divided among multiple things— thats why merged mining was created after all.  It's a shame LTC went on the failed anti-GPU lark instead of using it.  Should such an attack happen, we could do as mike suggests— merge Bitcoin onto litecoin in order to undo LTC's mistake of dividing the resources of the honest user and making them choose... I don't see any particular advantage in doing anything in advance, however.  Public preparation would only better equip the attacker.

[Simran]

Although this is a great idea, it makes Litecoin viewed as an even more lesser coin to Bitcoin. Just seems to benefit Bitcoin in the long run and just a few extra resources needed in Litecoin.

[casascius]

But none of this is what Mike is talking about in this thread, his argument doesn't depend on the qualities of scrypt vs sha256 as a POW.  What Mike is basically saying is that if you have to make 10 chip-types rather than 1 chip type you don't get as much manufacturing scaling (e.g. you get 10x the mask costs).

There's a couple of other things as well, that don't depend on PoW algorithm at all, whether it's one chip, ten chips, or more.  Allowing Bitcoin clients to subscribe to Litecoin as an optional backup source of data validation brings a whole lot of adaptability to Bitcoin in the face of problems with PoW, without ever having to implement the solution to those problems in Bitcoin itself.

First, Litecoin is, by its nature, going to be more adaptable to change than Bitcoin is, particularly in the area of trying new block validation ideas as backups to PoW.  Litecoin is still a solution in search of a problem, and its supporters would seemingly be willing to do things to alter Litecoin to make sure it fits the vision of "silver to Bitcoin's gold", or Bitcoin's sidekick if you will, while it's still useless for buying goods and services on the market, and while the news media doesn't care about it.  It's possible to tweak Litecoin and experiment with it, with far less of a disaster risk than if those experiments were to be done on Bitcoin.  

One of the most valuable experiments to try, that Bitcoin can't really afford to try, is to incorporate signature validation from trusted parties in the event of a failure or attack on the PoW system.  By this, I mean allowing trusted users to publish digital signatures either endorsing or condemning blocks for whatever subjective reason they decide.  This, of course, is antithetical to Bitcoin's entire nature, as all centralization is frowned upon.  For the purpose of this, the question of how to decide who is trustworthy or whose signatures are worth giving weight to is outside the scope of this idea.

However, if Litecoin were willing to give a more hybrid approach to block validation a shake, AND it turned out to work reasonably well, AND Bitcoin experienced a 51% attack, AND circumstances arose where Litecoin became the only/best source of valid Bitcoin blockchain information available, then the Bitcoin community would have the option to decide whether to subscribe to it, essentially allowing the Bitcoin user community the option of voting in Litecoin trustees to be the temporary custodians of the Bitcoin block chain at a time when it unexpectedly needed it most.  That would give Bitcoin rapid uptime while the Bitcoin community worked to decentralize the power suddenly bestowed on these visionary Litecoiners, possibly to replace the 100% reliance on SHA256 PoW mining with something else entirely or a hybrid combination as needed, while Litecoin infrastructure provided "life support" to keep the blockchain humming along while that replacement implementation was chosen, tested, and rolled out.

[Notanon]

Considering the fate of other coins that were merged mined with Bitcoin, I believe that it would end up tanking Litecoin's value. So based on that, no way.

[tacotime]

^^  That wasn't my interpretation of it...

If I'm understanding correctly, the mechanism described works like this:
1) Attacker with 51% of hash rate begins mining a fork 7 blocks long in secret while submitting his coins to an exchange (or where ever)
2) The attacker's coins get 6 confirmations and he dumps them for something valuable at the exchange, runs off with it
3) Attacker now dumps his 7 block fork onto the network.  Normally, because it's longer than 6 blocks, the attacker would get his coins back because he would invalidate all 6 previous honestly mined blocks because the network can not tell which blocks are valid or are not valid and just accepts whatever chain is longest,
HOWEVER,
The Litecoin chain for the last hour has included block hashes for the block headers of the previous honest 6 blocks for Bitcoin.  The Bitcoin clients could be alerted to this (and the fact that a reorg of length 6, an exceedingly unlikely event, has just taken place), look at the Litecoin chain where the hashes of the honest blocks' headers are stored, and reject the fork that suddenly appeared on the network out of nowhere because they know the hashes on the Litecoin chain reveal the honest chain (the one that reported blocks as soon as it found them rather than hiding them).

There are some issues with this.  
1) Inevitably bitcoin orphan blocks will appear in the LTC chain.
2) Miners on the Litecoin network can make up any block hash they want and submit it, since there's no easy way of telling whether the hash they give actually exists over some portion of bitcoin network.
3) Because of 2), forking the BTC chain may be made easier in some instances if the BTC network actually pays attention to what the LTC network is saying and the LTC mining nodes are dishonest.

What's being discussed here has nothing really to do with merged mining, it's just a way to lend temporal stability to the Bitcoin network via an independent network (Litecoin)

[casascius]

^^  That wasn't my interpretation of it...

If I'm understanding correctly, the mechanism described works like this:
1) Attacker with 51% of hash rate begins mining a fork 7 blocks long in secret while submitting his coins to an exchange (or where ever)
2) The attacker's coins get 6 confirmations and he dumps them for something valuable at the exchange, runs off with it
3) Attacker now dumps his 7 block fork onto the network.  Normally, because it's longer than 6 blocks, the attacker would get his coins back because he would invalidate all 6 previous honestly mined blocks because the network can not tell which blocks are valid or are not valid,
HOWEVER,
The Litecoin chain for the last hour has included block hashes for the block headers of the previous honest 6 blocks for Bitcoin.  The Bitcoin clients could be alerted to this (and the fact that a reorg of length 6, an exceedingly unlikely event, has just taken place), look at the Litecoin chain where the hashes of the honest blocks' headers are stored, and reject the fork that suddenly appeared on the network out of nowhere.

If this happened, the double-spend would succeed.  BUt afterwards, the entire bitcoin community would be, "Holy shit, someone is attacking us, and pulled off some serious double spends!  What are we gonna do?" while BTC value tanks.  LTC enthusiasts will wake up and get excited knowing their day has come.

If the attacker is not believed to have hash power to 51% attack LTC, LTC enthusiasts will simply say, configure your BTC client to subscribe to our chain, query it before executing a reorg, and don't accept big reorgs replacing lots of data we've seen with lots of data we've never seen.

If the attacker demonstrates an ability to attack LTC and BTC together, LTC enthusiasts will simply say:  "We're signing our new LTC blocks with coinbase keys we've used in early LTC blocks so you know we're the same guys who have always been here.  We are now assigning low weight to unsigned blocks, and negative weight to blocks signed by keys that have been used to sign other blocks we've deemed disruptive.  So, we're now back in control of our chain and it's free of garbage.  Configure your BTC client to subscribe to our chain, query it, show favor to the BTC blocks we endorse."

[drawingthesun]

A Litecoin ASIC is possible, if a billionaire wanted to build enough ASIC for both Bitcoin and Litecoin 51% attacks they could. Be careful thinking that Litecoin is immune to ASIC, its immune to Bitcoin ASIC of course.

How much money did it cost to build a ASIC? A order of magnitude cheaper than Intel spends on its new Fabs.

Avalon and ASICminer designed and created ASIC's for under $50 million.

I'm not sure about the situation here, with ASIC in general existing and being so much more powerful than conventional chips.

A superior long term crypto-currency will one that requires a exponential amount of power to attack the system. The fact that Bitcoin and Litecoin attack vectors require a liner increase in power in regards to current network power presents a problem.

Even though there are ways to recover from a  51% attack, A bad actor could sustain the attack until confidence in the currency was destroyed, remember the only real reason anything has value is because of confidence.

You have confidence in Gold and that people are quite likely to always buy it from you, you might have less confidence in USD but at least the USA will honour it (This is why a government default is so dangerous, destruction of confidence in a nations currency would destroy that government or even the nation itself) and Bitcoin and Litecoin have value because the people have decided they have value. I believe that crypto-currency confidence, even though it can cause bubbles, is the one of the most powerful types of confidence, a type of network confidence)

However if someone sustained a 51% attack against Litecoin and Bitcoin, it would kill this confidence.

If a solution is found, a network that requires a exponential attack to gain enough power, then either a competing currency would use this and overtake Bitcoin, or Bitcoin would adopt it as a superior system of security.

This is the true holy grail of crypto-currencies, if you are very smart and reading this, I beg you to help find a solution.

Take the attack against the wallet address, it requires so much computation that it is not feasible. If the network was that difficult to attack, then we have winner. 51% is too easy, until it requires a hundred thousands ASIC devices running the network. Then we might be able to say its a little secure.

Don't believe me? Run the numbers, ASIC exist and they cost no where near a billion to make. Think about it.

[tacotime]

You neglect the part of the scheme above that's moronic because you spent tens of millions of dollars to attack a chain with less than that much immediate liquidity on any exchange.  If you were to spend tens of millions of dollars making lots of ASICs, why not just mine with them like everyone who has made ASICs so far is doing?

edit:
For instance, your net profit per day right now mining Bitcoins with 80 TH/s (enough to attack the network) is $530,445.73 (after power given a mildly inefficient ASIC).  Why would anyone in their right mind perform a 51% attack when they're making that much per day off their hardware?

[casascius]

You neglect the part of the scheme above that's moronic because you spent tens of millions of dollars to attack a chain with less than that much immediate liquidity on any exchange.  If you were to spend tens of millions of dollars making lots of ASICs, why not just mine with them like everyone who has made ASICs so far is doing?

If you attack it because you're a state actor who wants to get people to use your fiat money instead of leaving it for cryptocurrency, the liquidity on the exchange is irrelevant.

[tacotime]

That's true.

[peacefulmind]

Litecoin is fine.

It is the first successful currency that has built in protection against ASICS.  

Litecoin is the people's money.

It is people like the OP who have prevented Litecoin from getting its own Wikipedia page.  Something that is ridiculous at this stage.  Litecoin cannot be found on Wiki because of the fears of BTC fanboys who get every mention of it deleted by swarming any mention of Litecoin.

Let every currency stand on its own two feet - LTC will be just fine.

Pure SHA256 - not so much, see TRC, BTE as great examples why.  

[aspect]

Litecoin is fine.

It is the first successful currency that has built in protection against ASICS.  

Litecoin is the people's money.

It is people like the OP who have prevented Litecoin from getting its own Wikipedia page.  Something that is ridiculous at this stage.  Litecoin cannot be found on Wiki because of the fears of BTC fanboys who get every mention of it deleted by swarming any mention of Litecoin.

Let every currency stand on its own two feet - LTC will be just fine.

Pure SHA256 - not so much, see TRC, BTE as great examples why.  

It would be best if this discussion is kept purely technical on-topic and not filled with BTC vs. LTC arguments.

[drawingthesun]

You neglect the part of the scheme above that's moronic because you spent tens of millions of dollars to attack a chain with less than that much immediate liquidity on any exchange.  If you were to spend tens of millions of dollars making lots of ASICs, why not just mine with them like everyone who has made ASICs so far is doing?

edit:
For instance, your net profit per day right now mining Bitcoins with 80 TH/s (enough to attack the network) is $530,445.73 (after power given a mildly inefficient ASIC).  Why would anyone in their right mind perform a 51% attack when they're making that much per day off their hardware?

If someone has a net worth of 50 million to 100 million, then attacking Bitcoin is stupid! They can make much more mining!

That's not the person I am talking about.

If someone has a net worth of a billion and they can make a lot shorting the entire Bitcoin system, they might spend 50 million to enable this, or maybe a bank or government that doesn't care about making several million more a day when they can make more in fees for moving money around once Bitcoin is destroyed.

The 51% attack is a real viable issue and for 50 million you most likely could destroy all Litecoin and Bitcoin confidence. That's not a lot of money to destroy a billion dollar economy or a rising competitor.

The linear 51% attack is a expensive but viable attack vector.

Until there exist hundreds of thousands of ASIC run by good actors we are in a dangerous era of crypto-currency.

To put it in perspective, the profits of a large bank in one month could easily lay waste to Bitcoin, the profits of Apple in one day would be enough to build ASIC for both Litecoin and Bitcoin and erode all confidence.

Exponential attack vector for the network is required at some point, someone smart please figure it out.

[peacefulmind]

It would be best if this discussion is kept purely technical on-topic and not filled with BTC vs. LTC arguments.

The proposal made would ONLY be for the benefit of BITCOIN and would make LTC subservient for all time.

LTC will step out on its own and stand alone, separately successful from BTC.  The purpose of Litecoin is not to prop up the failings of BTC.

[peacefulmind]

Although this is a great idea, it makes Litecoin viewed as an even more lesser coin to Bitcoin. Just seems to benefit Bitcoin in the long run and just a few extra resources needed in Litecoin.

Exactly.  This does nothing to benefit Litecoin and just is an attempt to deal with the insecurities the BTC community are now facing that do not really affect LTC.