20 articles on 'Bitcoin is broken', researchers warn' doesn;t move price? why?

[bitwhizz]

Researchers are claiming a fundamental flaw in bitcoin which leaves this 2 billion dollar currency vulnerable to take over, yet we're still going up,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24818975

some one make sense to me?

As this doesn;t make sense?

SUrely panic selling should happen, unless theirs market manipulation



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Academics Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer say this group could stay ahead of the competition, which would be stuck solving cryptographical challenges that have already yielded bitcoins, losing time, effort and money.

“The key insight behind the selfish mining strategy is to force the honest miners into performing wasted computations on the stale public [blockchain] branch. Specifically, selfish mining forces the honest miners to spend their cycles on blocks that are destined to not be part of the blockchain,” explained the researchers.

In time, rational miners would prefer to join the selfish miners in order to maximise their profits, and the selfish group would increase its influence until it becomes a majority. At this point, Bitcoin would stop being decentralised, losing one of its most attractive properties. Control by a single entity could even lead to the complete collapse of the digital currency.

Researchers say that selfish mining is feasible for any group size of colluding miners, as long as they have enough hardware at their disposal. Indeed groups capable of such projects already exist.

Eyal  and Sirer propose a modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects against selfish mining pools that command less than a quarter of the overall mining resources. But they say that the virual currency will never be completely safe against this type of attack.

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[wobber]

Researchers are claiming a fundamental flaw in bitcoin which leaves this 2 billion dollar currency vulnerable to take over, yet we're still going up,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24818975

some one make sense to me?

As this doesn;t make sense?

SUrely panic selling should happen, unless theirs market manipulation

My paranoia tells me that there is some manipulation, maybe people realized the self-healing power of bitcoin regarding the price? Hmm.. I might turn bull now...

[rocks]

Researchers are claiming a fundamental flaw in bitcoin which leaves this 2 billion dollar currency vulnerable to take over, yet we're still going up,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24818975

some one make sense to me?

As this doesn;t make sense?

SUrely panic selling should happen, unless theirs market manipulation

Simple, people who easily buy into such articles without understanding them and the same type of people who casually glance at bitcoin and say it is a scam. People who know bitcoin well are the ones who trade/purchase at these pricees and they easily see through the FUD.

What this means is the Bitcoin market is mostly comprised of people who have investigated the concept enough to understand it well and not be scared off random to FUD. It is a very healthy sign that the price did not even blink in response to 100 MSM FUD articles.

Also, as usual I found it most informative to skip the articles and go to the comment sections. Great explaintions there on what the issue was, what was discussed about it in 2010, and why that attack avenue does not matter. MSM journalists are a joke

[bitwhizz]

sure you can call it fud, but it can;t be ignored............. and even if it can be patched, their should be a drop in price


WHen an exchanged was hacked in the first bubble, a huge price drop was caused


when gox lagged/ got ddos's  in the second bubble their was a huge price drop

we are in a bubble and this is the most serous news of all the bubbles combined,even if it can be fixed/patched, their should be a price drop until it is certain it can be patched

 people are still rallying, i mean why?

[DeathAndTaxes]

It isn't serious news, it doesn't need to be patched and this new "research" was known and debated on this forum ..... in 2010.

Maybe that is why it hasn't moved the price.

This isn't to say there won't be a correction a 30% move in a week is excessive but any drop will have more to do with profit taking then a "researchers" FUD.

[Chalkbot]

sure you can call it fud, but it can;t be ignored............. and even if it can be patched, their should be a drop in price


WHen an exchanged was hacked in the first bubble, a huge price drop was caused


when gox lagged/ got ddos's  in the second bubble their was a huge price drop

we are in a bubble and this is the most serous news of all the bubbles combined,even if it can be fixed/patched, their should be a price drop until it is certain it can be patched

 people are still rallying, i mean why?

No, as he was trying to explain, this is not a serious issue at all, and the people who understand bitcoin can plainly see that, thus they continue to trade. There is no patch required.

[solex]

sure you can call it fud, but it can;t be ignored............. and even if it can be patched, their should be a drop in price

when gox lagged/ got ddos's  in the last bubble their was a huge price drop

this is serous news, and people are still rallying, i mean why?

It is the research paper which is "broken" not bitcoin. The market knows this because all it got out of core dev was a yawn.

Also the gox problems were not significant to the market during the April peak/crash. Gox was even closed for 8 hours and the market continued its prior trend. Also gox was shut for a week in 2011 when it had nearly all the bitcoin market - and still the market just continued on from the prior level as if the gox outage never happened.

[dnaleor]

Did not have time to check it myself, but I guess the market already found out that bitcoin isnt broken. I would be surprised if it is the opposite case

[Mageant]

It should be obvious to everyone now that there is a concerted effort by established institutions to discredit and spread fear about Bitcoin.

[bitwhizz]

My point isn;t really  whether it can be achieved or not, and whether its a flaw or not,

I;ve read up on this subject matter......


My point is that if you type bitcoin into google news, you will see a ton of these articles, which is very bad news, enough to cause a price drop despite whether it can be achieved or not,

Plus its not very comforting to know that all it requires is lots of cash in hardware in order to take down something like bitcoin, which can easily be done by single/group of  high net worth individuals (not that i am personaly perticuarly worried, i'm pro bitcoin and sure a problem will be fixed if it does occur)

Therefore my query is not so much as to whether the flaw is a problem, however why the negative PR being induced by the media hasn't  cuased panic selling too occur, especially based on the outcome of past events of negative press

[ArticMine]

To the informed Bitcoin holder yes, but to the uninformed holder this kind of thing will induce panic. I suspect as in the SilkRoad case that there is a massive institutional demand, that more than compensates for the panic these kind of news would normally create. Just take a look at this thread on Second Market. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=326558.0. If the Winklevoss twins get SEC approval for their ETF. Watch out.

[SheHadMANHands]

ITT, OP shorted BTC immediately after the "big news".  Got left holding the bag and is steaming in the Speculation sub-forum.

 

[TERA]

By 20 articles do you mean 20 copies of one article? Greedy mining pools? Its not an issue yet and developers are probably already working on a patch. They have proven themselves very skillful and in control of these kinds of things in the past.

[Chalkbot]

ITT, OP shorted BTC immediately after the "big news".  Got left holding the bag and is steaming in the Speculation sub-forum.

 

Heh, This might be the case, as it's been explained at least 3 times in here that this is not actually a problem, and OP still talks as if it is a serious threat to bitcoin.

Even from the angle that it's a "top story" when searching for bitcoin news, it wouldn't have any effect. When has the top story NOT been some negative and uninformed media FUD? Like, maybe 2 times in all of bitcoin history?

[mvidetto]

Bad press may exist for bitcoin, but in my opinion this isn't a bad thing.  Whether or not this is truly an attack on bitcoin does not matter, people will read this article and if interested delve farther into the bitcoin atmosphere.  In time, they may understand that it is incorrect, or the many advantages of bitcoin will shine through. Just check google trends on bitcoin searches its spiking up again.

[dnaleor]

oh well, I will do a mid night read of the paper now... I forgot that I will meet my promoter (who "helps" me with my bitcoin thesis) tomorrow. He will probably ask about it. Might as well give him a very well documented answer

[darkmule]

Researchers are claiming a fundamental flaw in bitcoin which leaves this 2 billion dollar currency vulnerable to take over, yet we're still going up,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24818975

some one make sense to me?

As this doesn;t make sense?

SUrely panic selling should happen, unless theirs market manipulation

Because the media hype is a bunch of bullshit and everyone can see that.  It also completely blows the claims of the researchers out of proportion.  It also says nothing about Bitcoin that was not already widely known, i.e. that an attacker with control over a large part of the network can do bad things.  For everyone to panic about something that isn't even news would be sort of like suddenly discovering the 51% attack is possible and panicking.

Yes, someone with a vast amount of computing power could squander it for little or negative profit solely to harm the network.  The same can be said of any network.  Actually, worse can be said of most, i.e. many networks are so porous a random script kiddie could fuck them up for little to no effort just for the hell of it.

[dnaleor]

So this is my response:

This one was already found in the article:

"No honest (or semi-honest) miner would want to join a selfish pool," he suggested. "Even if they do have a small incentive to [join], they have an even greater incentive to not break the Bitcoin network to preserve the value of their own Bitcoins and mining hardware."

And than there is just this argument: "what does it matter that there is a selfish attack?"
When such an attack occurs, what will those guys do? They just continue to confirm all the transactions... (ok, their is no incentive for other people to mine, but hey, They are doing all the work, that deserves a reward )
They do not have the power to change the protocol. When they do that, we get a hard fork and all regular miners will just continue on the "normal blockchain". Let those selfish people mine on their selfish fork
If they like to exclude some transactions from the confirmation process, they reveal themselves and we would probably get a new "selfish" fork (or just a regular non-selfish fork) wich includes all transactions.

I dont really see the problem.

[kokojie]

Because it's obviously false, anyone with half a brain can figure it out.

[theonewhowaskazu]

I don't claim to know the technical details of why the article in the OP doesn't work, although I've seen lots of people talking about that in the past.

Can somebody shed some light? Why won't that "selfish miner" strategy work?