[PPC] Press Release - Peercoin is the official crypto for Trek Con Springfield

[Hazard]

I think this is dumb. You should promote Bitcoin at Trek Con and not an alt coin. It makes no good to people who never heard about crypto currency.

Considering one of the concerns of Bitcoin (to overcome trust based models for financial transactions; chapter "introduction" on page 1) I can't find anything bad with the Peercoin approach.
Bitcoin definitely took up the cudgels for nothing less than a possible start of a financial revolution. And I admire Bitcoin for that. It has not been the first attempt to do that, but it is the first quite successful attempt as far as I can tell. I like the concept of trusting the currency but no other entities.
There was a time when no one has heard about Bitcoin. And there still are legions of people who haven't heard up to now. So I don't knwo why I should prefer Bitcoin over Peercoin if they don't know anything about crypto currencies. And if the already know Bitcoin, they can learn something new
So why not promoting Peercoin then if it overcomes one of the greatest drawbacks of Bitcoins concept? Peercoin relys on Bitcoin. It has its strength, but doesn't share its weknesses in terms of wasting elecric energy. For sure the energy is not really wasted. The security and integrity of the block chain is ensured by the Proof-of-Work process.
But isn't it much more elegant to do so without using so much energy? That's why I consider it a waste - compared to Peercoin's Proof-of-Stake.
In this area Peercoin does better. That's why I'm more committed to Peercoin than to Bitcoin. I love Bitcoin for having started this. The evolution has not stopped at Bitcoin

PoS itself is highly flawed and opens the door to several vectors of attack. Double spending in particular becomes magnitudes easier. One can simply reuse their stake until the attack is successful.

Isn't PoS a good concept though?  The energy saving nature of it seems worthwhile.  If PoS has these issues can't they be addressed?

PoS is fine if you want to use it for interest generation / inflation purposes. But using it to secure the blockchain is a bad idea. A certain coin will run into this problem very soon...

The very nature of PoS means that coinstakes are reusable. It's not an easily addressable issue.

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[belltown]

I didn't want to start discussion what is better BTC or PPC.

My point was that people who never heard about cryptocurrency (like everybody in Trek Con) should be introduced to Bitcoin first, because that's the coin everybody's using. And only after they are comfortable with Bitcoin and know what it is, they should be introduced to an alt coin you like, because you think this alt coin is better then Bitcoin, but unfortunatelly nobody's using it.

Don't start with an alt coin, poeple will not be able to get it, you just create mess in people's heads.

This is just my opinion. It was probably dumb to use the word dumb:)

[masterOfDisaster]

PoS itself is highly flawed and opens the door to several vectors of attack. Double spending in particular becomes magnitudes easier. One can simply reuse their stake until the attack is successful.

I disagree. PoS makes attacks of the blockchain less attractive that PoW attacks because you need a large share of the coin to make a successful PoS attack. Gathering this large share is costly and a successful attack renders those coins worthless or at least much less valuable. So why would anyone start such an attack? If you want to suggest evil entities doing that just for the cause of undermining the trust and hence killing the coin, well, it's even easier (read: cheaper) with PoW based attacks.

The math for Bitcoin (partly based on assumptions, though):
current hash rate (by the time fo the writing) of the Bitcoin network is roughly 3300 TH/s. Current price of KNC's "Jupiter" (~500 GH/s November shipping is USD 4.995. So you can get 1 TH/s for roughly USD 10.000. Let's just assume (knowing that this is not possible) you could just perform a magic trick, buy the KNC miners and have them instantly. You only need roughly 6600 of them to have half of the network's hashing power.

Code:

3300000 GH/s / 500 GH/s / Device = 6600 Device

And at a price of roughly USD 5.000 per device this makes a total cost of USD 33.000.000
So you need roughly 33 milion dollars to finance the devices for a successful 51% attack.
To be fair: you need some more devices, because other people will buy devices and you need 51% at the time your devices are running.
Let's round it generously up to 100 million USD what you need to pay for the devices. That is less than 3% of the current market capitalization of Bitcoin (based on a BTC market cap of over 4 billion USD at a BTC exchange rate of USD 350).

The math for Peercoin (of PoS coins in general; once again partly based on assumptions):
a 51%-style PoS attack is even more costly than for Bitcoin. Calculating the cost is hard, because you need to know the effect on the price if someone tries aggressively to buy the coins needed for the attack. But even if the price did not rise because of the rising demand, it is quite obvious that you have to pay roughly 50% of the market cap to get hold of 50% of the coins to execute a successful 51% attack.
You will in fact have to hold less than 50% of the coins because you can safely assume that not any and every coin is involved in PoS minting. You need only 51% of the actively PoS minting Peercoins for a 51% attack.
Although I don't know the percentage of Peercoins being involved in the PoS process and I don't know the total price you have to pay if you want to gather that lot of Peercoins, I expect the total cost of such an attack being higher than the 3% we found out for Bitcoin.

So my conclusion is:
PoS makes attacks of the blockchain less attractive that PoW because you need a large share of the coin to make a successful PoS attack. Gathering this large share is costly and a successful attack renders those coins worthless or at least much less valuable. What makes such an attack even worse for the attacker: Peercoins that are involved in stake-minting are put into the status "immature" after having used them successfully for making a PoS block. The mature after 520 blocks, which is at an average block space of 10 minutes more than 3 days. I bet 3 days after executing a successful attack those coins have lost in value dramatically

[Hazard]

You operate under the flawed assumption that you need a massive amount of coins to perform an attack using PoS mechanics. You don't.

And since your stake is infinitely reuseable, you can keep repeating the attack until it succeeds.

Balthazar made a great post about this, but I can't find it right now.

[masterOfDisaster]

You operate under the flawed assumption that you need a massive amount of coins to perform an attack using PoS mechanics. You don't.

And since your stake is infinitely reuseable, you can keep repeating the attack until it succeeds.

Balthazar made a great post about this, but I can't find it right now.

Please elaborate how you do it without a massive amount of coins? As the PoS process can be compared with a raffle where the coin age put at stake is related to the number of raffle tickets, how can you expect to be successful enough without that massive amount of coins?
For sure is stake reusable. Like i said: coins that were successfully used for stake-minting transition to a "generated" state. You have to wait for more than 3 days until they can be spent again. And it takes 30 days for them before the start gathering coin age, which is required for the PoS process.
What shall be the incentive for that attack? Why not attacking a coin that can be attacked for a lesser share of the market cap? I don't say that PoW or PoS can be perfectly safe. But I still consider PoS conceptually safer.
I'd really like to read that post from Balthazar. Maybe i get something wrong. But I still see no easy to accomplish 51%-style attack vector for PoS and can't think of any other...
Do you know of a different attack vector?

[Hazard]

Please elaborate how you do it without a massive amount of coins? As the PoS process can be compared with a raffle where the coin age put at stake is related to the number of raffle tickets, how can you expect to be successful enough without that massive amount of coins?

For sure is stake reusable. Like i said: coins that were successfully used for stake-minting transition to a "generated" state. You have to wait for more than 3 days until they can be spent again. And it takes 30 days for them before the start gathering coin age, which is required for the PoS process.

False. If the attack is unsuccessful, the coin age is not consumed. It is therefore instantly reusable to attempt the attack again. So even if you have only a 1% chance of succeeding, you WILL succeed eventually. That is also why you do not need an excessively large amount of coins to do this.

What shall be the incentive for that attack? Why not attacking a coin that can be attacked for a lesser share of the market cap? I don't say that PoW or PoS can be perfectly safe. But I still consider PoS conceptually safer.

Security by obscurity is not security.

[coolbeans94]

You operate under the flawed assumption that you need a massive amount of coins to perform an attack using PoS mechanics. You don't.

And since your stake is infinitely reuseable, you can keep repeating the attack until it succeeds.

Balthazar made a great post about this, but I can't find it right now.

But is it really so easy? Let's assume you had enough coin age to do this successfully. Just because you have enough coin age to succeed still does not mean it will succeed.  There is more to it than simply that. Peercoin can detect duplicate stakes and so it may only take the first block. Yes, you could try and try and try and try again and again, but if it is just not possible to get on multiple forks, then it is just not possible. If it is really so easy, then why hasn't it been done before? I haven't seen any example of this actually being able to be pulled off, just a lot of talk, mathematical probabilities, saying it is possible, yet no actual proof. I could be wrong, but I think peercoin is a lot more secure than people give it credit for. The way I see it, if you were to compare the networks to scale, giving peercoin the market cap of bitcoin, peercoin is more secure. Bitcoin just has such a further head start, but this could wane over time.

[masterOfDisaster]

Please elaborate how you do it without a massive amount of coins? As the PoS process can be compared with a raffle where the coin age put at stake is related to the number of raffle tickets, how can you expect to be successful enough without that massive amount of coins?

For sure is stake reusable. Like i said: coins that were successfully used for stake-minting transition to a "generated" state. You have to wait for more than 3 days until they can be spent again. And it takes 30 days for them before the start gathering coin age, which is required for the PoS process.

False. If the attack is unsuccessful, the coin age is not consumed. It is therefore instantly reusable to attempt the attack again. So even if you have only a 1% chance of succeeding, you WILL succeed eventually. That is also why you do not need an excessively large amount of coins to do this.

Maybe i need to be more precisely to get this sorted out. Let me begin with:
False.
What kind of success do you expect? You want so spend coins. That will be entirely possible. You want to double-spend coins? So you need to put a transaction with these coins into the block chain after they have been spent in another transaction. The problem for successfully double-spending those coins are in the Peercoin protocol.
Let me cite the Peercoin paper here:

Code:

Block Signatures and Duplicate: Stake Protocol Each block must be signed by its owner to prevent the same proof-of-stake from being copied and used by attackers. A duplicate-stake protocol is designed to defend against an attacker using a single proof-of-stake to generate a multitude of blocks as a denial-of-service attack. Each node collects the (kernel, timestamp) pair of all coinstake transactions it has seen. If a received block contains a duplicate pair as another previously received block, we ignore such duplicate-stake block until a successor block is received as an orphan block. 

So if you don't have enough coin-age to reliably create successor blocks, you will rather sooner than later end in an orphaned chain. So no successful double-spending of coins this way, sorry. The more confirmations the receivers are waiting for until they consider the the transactions successful, the better for them. If they only wait for one confirmation, they are at risk at PoW as well.
Lets try to compare it with the numbers for a successful 51% attack of Bitcoin from one of my previous posts. And let's assume you would have approximately 3% of the coins which are involved in the PoS process (reminder: this is the percentage of the Bitcoin market capitalization which allows you (currently) buy enough hardware to have 51% of the network hash rate).
Let's assume you need 6 confirmations  until the transaction is considered valid.
You spread the coins (or to be more precisely: the coin-age) evenly for trying to create those 6 blocks in a row so each of your "attacker stake" is 0.5% or 0.005. If you want to get 6 in a row the chance for getting this done is 0.005^6 which equals 1.5625*10^(-14). That is by all means a bad chance.
And what makes the chance even worse: if you chain gets overtaken (in length) by the non-fraudulent chain, the attack fails, too.
...but it might be good to have no big chance for declining the value of your 3% of the market cap by executing such an attack

Maybe I should loosen up this serious matter a bit; there's so many numbers...
[jester]
There are easier ways to waste money! You could send those Peercoins to me; want an address? I ensure you to make nothing wise with them. I will not keep them and I will not stake-mint with them.
[/jester]

Oh, I almost forgot: you need even more coins; if you successfully create those fraudulent blocks (with 3% of the market cap), those coins are locked (need to mature for 520 blocks) for over 3 days until they can be spent again.

What shall be the incentive for that attack? Why not attacking a coin that can be attacked for a lesser share of the market cap? I don't say that PoW or PoS can be perfectly safe. But I still consider PoS conceptually safer.

Security by obscurity is not security.

What exactly do you consider "obscure" if the source code of Peercoin is available and the PoS is part of the code?