Devcoin

[Unthinkingbit]

..
I'm just saying, you might want to be prepared.

The first defense I will personally use is to not buy more devcoins on vircurex right when merged mining starts so that an attacker has less incentive to takeover the network and double spend coins. I had planned on placing more buy orders shortly after merged mining started, but instead I'll wait until there are at least a few hundred Ghash before placing large orders.

As far as whether there will be an attack or not, namecoin has a good reputation and was not attacked. Hopefully devcoin, which gives a large proportion of the coins to bitcoin developers:
https://github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/blob/master/bitcoinshare.html

will also have a good reputation and not be attacked.

Why can't we all just get along

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[cablepair]

isnt Luke-Jr on the damn share list?

doublec where do you get all this information about Luke-Jr?

i am going to ask him directly about this right now

btw: i thought there was a type of protection against double spend? why did bitcoin not get attacked in this way, Tycho definitely had over half the total network speed at one time, is he just a nicer guy? I thought Luke-JR was a Christian,

I must ask him

what would Jesus do? would he double spend, or would he encourage all alt coins to love one another

lol ok ok ok

but seriously

Unthinkingbit, I encourage you to go with your original plan to increase your buy orders, and its not for me - I wont even sell any devcoins - i dont care, I think people are going to be looking closely at us when merged mining takes off, they will be looking for metrics to measure us by and if the value increases directly after merged mining happens it will be very good for DVC

Also I think it is very important to keep at the forefront of all of this what exactly devcoins do, the fact they serve a greater purpose is what draws me to them, and why I think they will ultimately succeed, you have all these alt coins but essentially they are just another rip off of Bitcoin, this is why Namecoin succeeded it served a greater purpose than to just buy and sell and send money back and forth. We dont need another Bitcoin but there is room for coins that serve some greater purpose.

edit:

just saw this post, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56486.0
illustrates my point very nicely

edit:

wow I just realized something

this is probably what was happening yesterday
duh I just realized it.

I woke up in the morning
and the devcoin network was like 17Ghash

luckily I got 8 ghash in my office so I said alright lets go and moved all my mining power to my pool

then that 17ghash has went away

i thought it was excited miners getting ready for merged

but your probably right this is what was happening

in any case this demonstrates we can fight back against this

as long as we have money we can get hashing power, I have friends with big rigs, and my rig isnt tiny it self

if this attack happens in any kind of real way - I need to know who has the funds to support a defense initiative

I know the right people to call to get a 100ghash real quick.

I will let you guys know whats going on with Luke-JR and Devcoin as soon as I ask him

I have mined about 300 bitcoins with his pool.

[doublec]

isnt Luke-Jr on the damn share list?

doublec where do you get all this information about Luke-Jr?

Which information exactly? You can read the curledcoin thread for details on what happened there.

[cablepair]

double c read my edit about yesterday morning and tell me your thoughts

[cablepair]

also check this out

http://64.244.102.88:2750/chain/Devcoin?count=500&hi=24724

start at block 24582

and go up

look at all those transactions and the difficulty sky rocket

do you think all those transactions are some kind of malicious attack?

at around block 24645

I moved my 8 ghash to the devcoin network
and the mysterious 17 ghash went away

[cablepair]

My Open Letter to Luke-JR about accusations and Devcoin

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56830.0

[doublec]

look at all those transactions and the difficulty sky rocket

do you think all those transactions are some kind of malicious attack?

No, they are normal transactions. It looks like a lot due to the amounts being smallish but coming from addresses with large amounts and the change being the remaining large amount. As far as I'm aware Luke hasn't attacked devcoin.

[cablepair]

so why do you think he will attack it?

[cablepair]

btw: gentleman - on a happier note I am promoting Devcoin today via FeedZeBirds.com

the compaign can be found at

http://www.feedzebirds.com/dw2j2

I have personally funded it with some Bitcoin if you would like to donate to the campaign and help promote Devcoin please check it out
and consider sending a coin or two to the address:

17WqpCdhU7QkwgHg8H2sJDzUz5exNKDXv6

thanks!

[doublec]

so why do you think he will attack it?

Because he warned me he would. By attack I mean mine the chain with a huge hashrate, dump the coins and drive the price down as is happening with i0/ixcoin. Whether he still plans to or not I don't know. Since it's actually happening on other chains it's important to be prepared for it. My warning about 51% attacks is due to what happen to coiled coin. I don't know if he plans to do the same with devcoin but since it's happened to an existing chain it's important to have a plan for dealing with it. You don't want to find 2 hours into merge mining enabled that your chain is dead. Even if the plan is to ask him if he'll please not do it.

[markm]

Maybe this is the kind of thing markets are supposed to automagically correct?

If the majority of self-interested rational economic entities prefer to hand over all their potential merged-mining gains to Luke, that is their market-given right, maybe? While similarly if they prefer to collect their potential merged mining gains themselves by mining at other pools that too is their decision?

Presumably though that logic should lead to everyone joining one pool that doesn't process anyone else's transactions and pays its miners a larger share of the merged mining proceeds than other pools? Hmm.

This maybe should be quite feasible to do with bitcoin too if people really will flock to the pool that does the best effort at preventing anyone else from mining effectively?

Why hasn't it? Maybe its not as cut and dry simple.

Some large pools hardly merged mine at all yet, maybe that is indication their users prefer their pool operator to use merged mining behind the scenes for any purpose the operator chooses thus are perfectly happy not to have the operator offer to merged mine openly giving shares of the proceeds to the members? Maybe Luke's actions are an interesting sociological experiment that might bring out info about how the members of other pools that aren't offering their members the benefits of merged mining more chains feel about such matters.

-MarkM-

[cablepair]

I believe we are a good team and we are equipped to deal with this.

4 reasons why everything will be ok
(a) We have drawn public attention to the situation making it uncomfortable for him to do (if he even wants to do it which I am not convinced of yet)
(b) I can personally summon enough mining power to compete at least to the level that if he (or anyone else) wants to really screw the network over they are going to have to invest a lot of resources in doing so. This is a Network that is backed by developers and miners, if someone wants to take it down - its going to be a fight.
(c) the value is already astronomically low, it can only go up from here
(d) I really believe the nature of the devcoin network and the way the difficulty changes so fast will protect us, I mean think about it if someone wants to drive the difficulty up they are going to have to spend their resources to keep it up - someone would really have to hate devcoin to invest this type of money in it. As soon as they stop it will go back down. Problem solved.
(e) im not scared

have a great day gentleman

[doublec]

Below I'm explaining what an attacker could do with an attack similar to what happen with coiledcoin. I'm not suggesting this will actually happen.

(b) I can personally summon enough mining power to compete at least to the level that if he (or anyone else) wants to really screw the network over they are going to have to invest a lot of resources in doing so. This is a Network that is backed by developers and miners, if someone wants to take it down - its going to be a fight.

Assume it's a pool with 350 or more Ghash. You can personally summon that much mining power to complete? You'd actually need to exceed what they have.

(d) I really believe the nature of the devcoin network and the way the difficulty changes so fast will protect us, I mean think about it if someone wants to drive the difficulty up they are going to have to spend their resources to keep it up - someone would really have to hate devcoin to invest this type of money in it. As soon as they stop it will go back down. Problem solved.

They don't need to invest money - it's free by merge mining bitcoins at the same time. There is no additional cost for a large miner to attack it. Changing difficulty doesn't matter. If they have >51% they then stop accepting other peoples blocks and continue to publish their chain containing only their blocks. Now they control what transactions can be included. If they stop allowing any transactions the chain is dead. No blocks and no transactions. And it's not costing the attacker anything - they're still earning bitcoins/namecoins/whatever while doing it. The only defence is to exceed their hash rate. Or to somehow identify and stop their blocks.

The coiled coin attack has shown how hard it will be for alt chains to survive without the good will of existing pools.

[cablepair]

Luke-jr isn't going to have near 350 ghash by the end of the day
And if he attacks devcoin he wont have half that

As far as summoning mining power as long as we as a team don't mind spending a little money I can summon whatever we need, I have friends with big rigs my man , it might take some coinage to get them moving but if we want to protect devcoin and it comes down to it - we can fight back.

[markm]

I would rather we invested in FPGA mining hardware than pay others to mine for us with possibly more energy-consumptive technology.

Sure it would be slower but so what? It seems there are advantages to being an ignored, even hardly-even-heard-of, chain. In a way its a shame devcoin has found its way into the limelight. Well hopefully the limelight too might have its advantages. Lets hope so.

-MarkM-

[cablepair]

cablepair, regarding Devcoin, I don't see any reason to treat it as different from any other scamcoin. I will at least discuss it with you on IRC before doing anything other than mining it with the almost-unmodified (zero txn fee, zero post-maturity delay) Devcoin client.

This is the statement from Luke-JR regarding his plans to attack Devcoin

at least he is giving me a chance to talk with him before he moves forward with it.

If anyone has any brilliant reasons why he should let Devcoin live - please PM me with them and I will add them to my list of things I want to point out to him about Devcoin

thanks!

[Unthinkingbit]

By attack I mean mine the chain with a huge hashrate, dump the coins and drive the price down as is happening with i0/ixcoin. Whether he still plans to or not I don't know.

If that is the extent of the attack, then that is not an issue. Once merged mining is active, I expected that most miners would sell their devcoins, which the majority of miners have not yet heard of, to pay for their rigs. Because of that, I was already planning on buying devcoins for the first few months after merged mining is working, until devcoin is widely known and can stand on its own.

[markm]

Supposedly how he attacked coiledcoin was not just simply mining it, but also rejecting all other blocks and transactions.

On the face of it this would just mean no other miners ever get any blocks, and the receivers continue receiving. Unless he can strike out somehow against the receivers too?

If he cannot, maybe it doesn't matter that he is the only miner?

Uh, except for no transactions being able to be recorded in the blockchain during the duration of his attack. I guess we can trade dDVC on Open Transactions though, and settle up on the blockchain at some future date, when/if the attack ends or is overpowered. (Maybe we can spend a few years gradually building up a devoted-to-DeVCoin collection of FPGAs until they add up to more hash power than he is willing to continue devoting to his mission of hatred?)

Not actually using the blockchain for the duration will simply put DeVCoin in the same boat as many other blockchains that are currently looking to use Open Transactions or somesuch as a stopgap due to blockchain technology not yet being quite ready for general use/deployment despite the hope that the idea of merged mining had briefly seemed to hold out.

Maybe we should re-consider the "approved miners" concept?

-MarkM-

[Unthinkingbit]

This is the statement from Luke-JR regarding his plans to attack Devcoin

at least he is giving me a chance to talk with him before he moves forward with it.

If anyone has any brilliant reasons why he should let Devcoin live - please PM me with them and I will add them to my list of things I want to point out to him about Devcoin

thanks!

Thanks for taking the time to explain devcoin.

Here's the history behind devcoin. I offered bounties for the creation of a charity pool which would give 1% of the mining to bitcoin developers:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20455.0

I ended up paying about 37 BTC in bounties to two people. Shamen made a pool but then abandoned it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25022

AnnihilaT made the Mainframe Mining Cooperative, and it was successful for a while. I believe at its peak it donated a bit less than 10 BTC/month to the people on the bitcoin share list. The donation list has around 20 people on it, so that worked out to less than 0.5 BTC/month per developer. However, it was shut down by the threat of a DDOS attack:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24650.msg585867#msg585867

so now the people on the bitcoin share list are not getting any bitcoins at all. They are only getting devcoins. No one else has tried to start up a bitcoin donation pool.

The reason devcoin was made was that even when the Mainframe Mining Cooperative was doing well, because it only donated around 1% of the mining, the developers ended up getting only a tiny amount. Charity is typically 1% of an economy and for all the talk of donations, charity is simply not enough to give open source developers a reasonable income. Devcoin gives 90% to developers, it is the only thing which is giving open source developers an income at all right now, and once it gets known that income will be a reasonable amount.

[Unthinkingbit]

Supposedly how he attacked coiledcoin was not just simply mining it, but also rejecting all other blocks and transactions.
..

I've also read that the problems were simply because of the transition to merged mining. I don't know what happened and I'd prefer not to speculate further until I know for sure what happened. In any case, even without an attack, there are sometimes problems in the transition to merged mining, and looking at the block count:
http://107.20.193.62:2750/chain/Devcoin

it look like the transition will be on Saturday or Sunday.

Everyone,

please do not make any devcoin transactions between Saturday, 7 January and Tuesday, 10 January, inclusive. Hopefully transactions will be going through the network by Wednesday, if they are or aren't that will be posted on this thread. Do not make any transactions until someone sends through some small test transactions and they get through without problems.

I guess we can trade dDVC on Open Transactions though, and settle up on the blockchain at some future date, when/if the attack ends or is overpowered. (Maybe we can spend a few years gradually building up a devoted-to-DeVCoin collection of FPGAs until they add up to more hash power than he is willing to continue devoting to his mission of hatred?

Not actually using the blockchain for the duration will simply put DeVCoin in the same boat as many other blockchains that are currently looking to use Open Transactions or somesuch as a stopgap due to blockchain technology not yet being quite ready for general use/deployment despite the hope that the idea of merged mining had briefly seemed to hold out.

The key devcoin concept is that 90% of the generation goes to a useful cause. It doesn't matter if it uses a blockchain or Open Transaction. The development was made with a blockchain because at the time I thought that was a secure backend. If it turns out a blockchain is not secure, we'll have to go to an Open Transaction backend.

In any case, it is good to have a backup, so from now on Open Transaction development shall be funded by devcoin as bitcoin development was. If there are any other people helping to develop Open Transaction who are not already on the bitcoin share list, please ask them to post on this thread or message me, and they'll go on the bitcoin share list and get a generation share. You can give a reasonable number of bounties for informative post or setting up Open Transaction as devcoin did. In other words, 1/5 of a generation share for an informative post on the Open Transaction thread, 2/5 of a generation share for setting up a server or something. For bigger specific bounties, please post them on this thread and we'll work out the size and specification.

Maybe we should re-consider the "approved miners" concept?

Hopefully, transactions will eventually get through, if they don't then we'll have to look at other ways of stopping attacks.