TERRACOIN ATTACK OVER 1.2TH ATTACK CONFIRMD

[360SECONDS]

Yeah even the gimmicky "we use a different proof of work" coins seem to be losing value, which shouldn't be a surprise since all the gimmicky proofs of work are less efficient than SHA256 so its like hey not only do we have a silly gimmick we are also less efficient, isn't that great, buy us!

-MarkM-

all we need is sumore SHA256 tribe coins to muddy the waters imho whoop whoop

[crazyearner]

Some good comments on this thread, should archive it for future reference since new coins are so common

Hardly  a new coins been here for a while.

And for others talking about devs. I wish they would get their acts together and provide more support to their miners seems their never active anywhere.

Aren't most scamcoins past the insta-mine, pump and dump phase.  You didn't really think most of these have a future do you?

Nope not all will have a future some but not all. Most of all the new ones are just nothing but pump and dump. TRC, PPC I do not see much of a future with them unless theirs company's taking them on like bitcoin and have something new to offer. If they don't then all I can see for them both is yet another pump dump

[roy7]

Looks like literally thousands of blocks dumped on the chain from the attacker simultaneously.

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/chain/Terracoin?count=2016&hi=168576

[hanzac]

The timing is not ticking. So the attacker can continue mining at the low difficulty because he fake a special timestamps set. Extremely clever and know the implementation of the diff algorithm.

Maybe the same group that attacked the FTC.

[coinotron]

I decided to suspend TRC mining on Coinotron.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49182.msg2806162#msg2806162

[roy7]

Yeah we just watched a number of the high diff blocks real miners found get washed out by another huge load of 5K difficulty blocks from the attacker.

Basically he can mine blocks faster at 5K than anyone else can possibly compete with, so he has longer block chains to inject into the network at any time.

I can't believe BTC-E still has trading open on TRC right now.

[CoinHoarder]

Poor Terracoin... SHA256 ALTs are going to be seeing some troubling times as ASICs become more widespread.

However, I think over time that this will decrease. As less power efficient ASICs become unprofitable on Bitcoin, ASIC owners will be looking for another way to use their machines other than as a paper weight. I predict most of these people will switch to SHA256 ALTs, which will greatly increase the network speed and help to fight off attacks such as this.

The above mentioned movement is akin to the Bitcoin ASICs moving the GPU power over to Scrypt coins. It is just another inevitable step in the evolution of mining hardware and crypto currencies.

It will be interesting to find out if I am right, but I predict at least one SHA256 ALT to really become popular like Litecoin once certain ASICs start becoming unprofitable on Bitcoin. Which one will be the lucky winner? That's anyone guess, I am thinking a new SHA256 coin will come out in the next year or so that will blow all the others out of the water. Hopefully it is one that is innovative and brings something positive to the world of ALT coins. All the current SHA-256 ALTs are not very innovative IMO.

[roy7]

TRC has multiple real ASIC miners on it already. This isn't an issue of an ASIC coming in and rocking the boat. It's some sort of timewarp attack where the attacker gets to use a 5K difficulty but the rest of us use a far higher one and can't possibly compete...

[CoinHoarder]

TRC has multiple real ASIC miners on it already. This isn't an issue of an ASIC coming in and rocking the boat. It's some sort of timewarp attack where the attacker gets to use a 5K difficulty but the rest of us use a far higher one and can't possibly compete...

Ah, I haven't been keeping up with this attack. I just assumed it was a standard 51% attack.

I should probably read the thread before posting.  

[Schleicher]

I just installed Terracoin 0.1.3-42 here.
Now the download bar jumps back and forth between 18 and 19 hours behind.
Block 168940 and counting (10-20 seconds per block).
I guess this has to do with the currect problem discussed here.

[Mavy]

I see they rejected the checkpoint someone did a pull request on earlier. The "current chain" the exchanges are relying on are, I assume, the one full of the blocks from the attacker...

So the devs are active but either not aware of the problem or actively working against a fix?  Not making me feel any better...

That pull request was actually merged and not rejected (https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/pull/11).

[gr0bi42]

I see they rejected the checkpoint someone did a pull request on earlier. The "current chain" the exchanges are relying on are, I assume, the one full of the blocks from the attacker...

So the devs are active but either not aware of the problem or actively working against a fix?  Not making me feel any better...

That pull request was actually merged and not rejected (https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/pull/11).

The change was merged and later removed. And the time travel bug is still present...

[crazyearner]

24 hours and seems they was an update but for something else. I wonder if devs are even aware of this and are going to hard fork. I know if its not hard forked then this coin is forked for good.

[Mavy]

Just realised the checkpoint was part of the "corrupted" blocks aswell.
I have to agree that its getting hard to recover from this tho.

[twobits]

The timing is not ticking. So the attacker can continue mining at the low difficulty because he fake a special timestamps set. Extremely clever and know the implementation of the diff algorithm.

Maybe the same group that attacked the FTC.

Sounds like the time warp attack.   What was TRC forked from?

[intelliminer]

24 hours and seems they was an update but for something else. I wonder if devs are even aware of this and are going to hard fork. I know if its not hard forked then this coin is forked for good.

The dev did say in the issue though his fix was for this issue.

[Arbitrageur]

there seems to be an update:

https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/issues/12

and a new client update

http://terracoin.org/news/

Terracoin update 0.1.3-42 is now available for download at our sourceforge mirror and github repository.

This build addresses the difficulty manipulation issue currently seen on the live chain, and will be mandatory on block 175000.

The code allowing such difficulty manipulations was added to the client prior to the ema difficulty adjustment implementation, it should have been removed from the client long ago to prevent this.

Once most network nodes are updated, and block 175000 is reached, the capped ema implementation should take care of abnormally forged blocks ; as usual, this is supposing the network gets more hashing power than the attacker(s).

With the current artificially decreased difficulty, and the network hashing power way higher than the 'awaited' rate, network will generate a lot of orphan blocks until this issue is addressed.

[turtle83]

there seems to be an update:

https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/issues/12

and a new client update

http://terracoin.org/news/

Terracoin update 0.1.3-42 is now available for download at our sourceforge mirror and github repository.

This build addresses the difficulty manipulation issue currently seen on the live chain, and will be mandatory on block 175000.

The code allowing such difficulty manipulations was added to the client prior to the ema difficulty adjustment implementation, it should have been removed from the client long ago to prevent this.

Once most network nodes are updated, and block 175000 is reached, the capped ema implementation should take care of abnormally forged blocks ; as usual, this is supposing the network gets more hashing power than the attacker(s).

With the current artificially decreased difficulty, and the network hashing power way higher than the 'awaited' rate, network will generate a lot of orphan blocks until this issue is addressed.

yeah i rebuilt last night and there have been no commits since... still about 4500 more blocks for the patch to kick in... so i guess 90k TRC more to our attackers before the fix may or maynot work... probably we see some chain forking then. Anyone know if the exchanges will upgrade their clients before 175000 ?

[Arbitrageur]

I wrote to btc-e to advise the update.

[Arbitrageur]

yeah i rebuilt last night and there have been no commits since... still about 4500 more blocks for the patch to kick in... so i guess 90k TRC more to our attackers before the fix may or maynot work... probably we see some chain forking then. Anyone know if the exchanges will upgrade their clients before 175000 ?

what's happening to the coins that have been moved since last night? they didn't hit the destination address (I'm waiting them on my btc-e account, but not even showing as pending) even after 100 confirmations required, are they lost? will be deposited anytime? what's your opinion on this issue?