What about a double spend attack?

[toer]

Just making this topic to talk about a double spend attack. I read about several times, and just wondered why, with the small hashing power of the forks, it seems that no double spend attack were done.

That could give some information to the devs if one would happen, right?

For example, at btcguild, they are having largely more than 50% of the hashing power of Solidcoin, and could make such an attack...

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[jackjack]

If you forget that the pool will be forever seen as malicious, yeah great idea

[ohforf]

Just making this topic to talk about a double spend attack. I read about several times, and just wondered why, with the small hashing power of the forks, it seems that no double spend attack were done.

That could give some information to the devs if one would happen, right?

For example, at btcguild, they are having largely more than 50% of the hashing power of Solidcoin, and could make such an attack...

So you ask Elutheria to try some criminal activity ? Are you crazy ? 
This kind of Experiment could be done on experimental Bockchains, not on a Blockchain that is used for Payment.

[Lumpy]

He's not asking for it to happen, just wondering if it's possible. But think about it: Would the operator of the second largest BTC pool really ruin his reputation for such a little thing? Pffft!

[toer]

Yeah I'm not asking anyone to do anything, I was just wondering. My thinking was if it was never tested, how could a protection be effective?

The example of btcguild was just to scale things, just like deepbit and bitcoins, but posting in alternate currency, i chose a solidcoin example

I'd like to know about the future of a chain who suffered such an attack too


edit: also, if a trusted member would do that "criminal things", and posting about the results etc, that would be much more informative than a bruce

[eleuthria]

I know for I0C we could've easily executed a double spend.  I'm not sure what actual protections were put into SC that may or may not prevent a doublespend.  I know looking at moonco.in they only need 1 confirm for your coins, so we could probably have done it before I posted the shutdown notice.  But I'm not going to rip off the people that spent time like I did to setup services to work with forkcoins.  I think we're under 50% (or really close to it now), so at this point it doesn't seem possible.

However, if SC continues to decline, I would definitely be wary of accepting SC when there are single miners out there with enough power to attempt doublespends.  There are more than a few out there with 30-50 GH/s of their own.

[ElectricMucus]

Yeah i0coin could be ripped apart just by a single big miner at some moments but, I don't exactly get the point, do it because it's doable?

[johnj]

Yeah i0coin could be ripped apart just by a single big miner at some moments but, I don't exactly get the point, do it because it's doable?

I can imagine a live doublespend attack would greatly hinder further forks.  I think that'd be a good thing, as a new fork would have to be monumentally innovative to get past the mistrust.

[Isepick]

It might be good as a learning experience. I don't think anybody has actually executed a successful double spend attack yet. Doing so might yield some valuable data on how to protect the main block chain in the future. You don't know how good your security is until others have tested it, it might be good to see one of these in action, get data from it and try to prevent it in the future. It is unfeasible to do this to Bitcoin, but a smaller *coin is well within a pool's grasp. Much could be learned. For science, of course