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[BitcoinEXpress]

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[Sekioh]

It doesn't really matter value-wise to let the difficulty stagnate, it's just like trickle blocks and then getting payday at the end of the month for a few days. In the end the same amount of coins should be averaged out, it does seem silly that there's no 'agreement' by the clients that "hey, difficulty won't be hit in two weeks at this rate, after two weeks retarget" I mean it's obviously easier to agree on a block number based on math of +2016 blocks or whatever, instead of an arbitrary time, but there's got to be some way to retarget sooner.

I'm no professional on the subject, but if you doublespend and not really use the spendings to cash out profit from it, it won't really be harming anything in the long run. Especially if you do it to two homemade wallets for yourself in a VM or another pc. You'd be able to test it and not harm anyone then.

In that case you could have tested with a much smaller amount of power on like bitcoin testnet anyway, so my guess is you're intending to profit off the attack which I can't condone or help you with.

Already registered .bit names shouldn't get hurt, you only pay the fee when you register a name, the rest is just swapping amount around, if you're not using register commands in the attack, you'll be only attacking the currency part of the coins themselves, it would only have an effect on exchanges if there was an absurd amount of coins hitting the market, obviously you'd be able to sell off at any price and still be profiting so you could crash all the bid orders.

[memvola]

If I were the Namecoin leadership I would immediately adopt an i0coin style re-targeting to get the difficulty down asap and bring in some miners to raise network speed. I defies all logic as to why they have let it stagnate in this position for several months. Don't they realize that in about 6 months when the difficulty drops, the huge miners will once again send the difficulty back to the 100K range in about 3-4 days?

Namecoin is more of a service than a cryptocurrency, and more about developing technology than making money. Since the development continues, it's not extremely important to get the difficulty down "ASAP". They developed the merged mining technology, which will almost certainly solve the problem without mangling with the retargeting scheme.

I haven't thought about what you can do with that kind of attack in Namecoin. You shouldn't be able to register two names with the same coins. You could probably skin an exchange though...

[memvola]

The merged mining isn't supposed to happen for another 6000+ blocks which will easily be a year from now at the current rate.

It will happen 276 blocks later (@19200).

[MaGNeT]

The merged mining isn't supposed to happen for another 6000+ blocks which will easily be a year from now at the current rate.

It will happen 276 blocks later (@19200).

hmmm, don't know why I thought it was 25,000.

At first implementation of "merged mining" was planned at block 24,000 if I recall correctly.
Later it was changed to 19,200.

[Bitcoin Oz]

You could probably stop anyone else registering domains. In effect you would be the icann of .bit because no one could send registrations without your say.

[doublec]

1) What effect would this have on exchanges especially Bitparking, DoubleC has been really cool and don't want to cause undue trouble for him.

I have shutdown the namecoin exchange while this attack is in process. I'll bring it up shortly with trading disabled to enable withdrawal of funds and reduce the danger of double spend issues.

[Mousepotato]

BitcoinEXpress, are you the guy who makes the BitcoinExpress iPhone app?

[doublec]

I'll give you warning first, I'm more interested in the results than actual double spending.

Thanks, I've disabled trading in the meantime since I currently have poor network connectivity due to traveling which makes it difficult to fix issues. One thing to test would be to withdraw namecoins from the exchange and try to reverse it.

[phelix]

In this currency you gotta get the Giga Hashes, you get the Giga Hashes you get the power, you get the power you get the network

Tony Montanaminer from the movie  Scarcoin

hu?

If I were the Namecoin leadership I would immediately adopt an i0coin style re-targeting to get the difficulty down asap and bring in some miners to raise network speed. I defies all logic as to why they have let it stagnate in this position for several months. Don't they realize that in about 6 months when the difficulty drops, the huge miners will once again send the difficulty back to the 100K range in about 3-4 days?

+1
it may be difficult to implement without vulnerabilities for Art to game

merged mining is a big horror.


I like the experiment you want to run but please do not hurt namecoin too much - it is by far the best fork.

[phelix]

In this currency you gotta get the Giga Hashes, you get the Giga Hashes you get the power, you get the power you get the network

Tony Montanaminer from the movie  Scarcoin

hu?

It's a play on Scarface, an American Movie Cult Film

If I were the Namecoin leadership I would immediately adopt an i0coin style re-targeting to get the difficulty down asap and bring in some miners to raise network speed. I defies all logic as to why they have let it stagnate in this position for several months. Don't they realize that in about 6 months when the difficulty drops, the huge miners will once again send the difficulty back to the 100K range in about 3-4 days?

+1
it may be difficult to implement without vulnerabilities for Art to game

merged mining is a big horror.

I like the experiment you want to run but please do not hurt namecoin too much - it is by far the best fork.

LOL  

All chains say they are the best, just ask Coinhunter from SC, Thomas from Ixcoin and "The Unknown Programmer" from I0coin.

Nothing personal but with this pool we are amassing, we plan on creating forks, double spend and controlling domain registration. It was foolish and reckless for the NMC leadership to leave this wide open for so long. If I were them I would be on launching some i0coin style re targeting like pronto.

If the 51% attack is successful, you won't have to worry about merged mining as it won't happen.

imho it is because it is unique. unlike the other forks namecoin offers completely new features. it is not a bitcoin clone it is something completely different. namecoins having a value at all is only a side effect.

>If I were them I would be on launching some i0coin style re targeting like pronto.
I really hope they will. But I have discussed this already on the dot-bit forum to no avail.

>If the 51% attack is successful, you won't have to worry about merged mining as it won't happen.
I would hate merged mining to happen. From a bitcoin point of view AND from a namecoin point. But I still hope namecoin will live simply because it is a good idea.

You have already send the namecoin price down. I guess I should have bailed out earlier. You should announce attacks on the other forks as well.

[thirdlight]

Say you start your attack at block 18950, build your chain to 18970, then release it. Everything that anyone did - transfer coins, change / create .bit names, etc - between those 2 blocks will unhappen.

So if I transfer 200 mnc to an exchange in block 18951, the exchange waits until 18957 to confirm, I exchange for x btc & withdraw. After your chain is released, my 200 nmc appear back in my wallet. I still have the x btc, and the 200 nmc. The exchange is down by x btc.

To mitigate the effects of the attack, people only have to cease trading, as DoubleC has done.

Mining the minority chain is also a waste of effort.

Threatening an attack, credibly, is a DoS on the chain - until people are confident that the attack is over, noone will use it or mine it.

To truly test this, you will need to ensure that some of your hashpower remains on the minority (existing) chain, to process the transactions that will "disappear" when the new chain is released. A malicious attack relies on the minority chain continuing, so that the malicious transfers can be processed.

Interesting to see it in action....

[jtimon]

Nothing personal but with this pool we are amassing, we plan on creating forks, double spend and controlling domain registration. It was foolish and reckless for the NMC leadership to leave this wide open for so long. If I were them I would be on launching some i0coin style re targeting like pronto.

If the 51% attack is successful, you won't have to worry about merged mining as it won't happen.

So you want to destroy namecoin and the first serious attempt (in testing chains it works) to launch merged mining to improve bitcoin?
Merged mining is a great idea (by Satoshi, by the way) and both currencies will gain from it.
It seems you're in a hurry to attack namecoin because you won't be able to do it in the future. Can't you simulate the attack on you own fork?
Why do you have to attack other people's efforts and investments?
I think it is a very bad idea.
Please don't do it. Let us trade and register domains in peace. I only ask you to wait 272 more blocks. There's many people waiting to see it happen.
Please, DoubleC reopen the trade. Some people think namecoins will drop severely after merged mining comes in and I want to profit from that. I want to bet the opposite.

[DavinciJ15]

Bad people like BitcoinEXpress exist in our society most them work for governments but the rest that where too evil even for government exists in the public.  This attack will show the world the power of bitcoin if namecoin survives it.

I'm feel like selling 40K of gold to kick this ass hole to the curb.   But I must be clever and out smart instead of out spend.

So sad people are destructive not productive even sadder is some destroy for sport.

Ah well Like I said it's part of life we (good people) need to deal with it.

[MaGNeT]

Nothing personal but with this pool we are amassing, we plan on creating forks, double spend and controlling domain registration. It was foolish and reckless for the NMC leadership to leave this wide open for so long. If I were them I would be on launching some i0coin style re targeting like pronto.

If the 51% attack is successful, you won't have to worry about merged mining as it won't happen.

So you want to destroy namecoin and the first serious attempt (in testing chains it works) to launch merged mining to improve bitcoin?
Merged mining is a great idea (by Satoshi, by the way) and both currencies will gain from it.
It seems you're in a hurry to attack namecoin because you won't be able to do it in the future. Can't you simulate the attack on you own fork?
Why do you have to attack other people's efforts and investments?
I think it is a very bad idea.
Please don't do it. Let us trade and register domains in peace. I only ask you to wait 272 more blocks. There's many people waiting to see it happen.
Please, DoubleC reopen the trade. Some people think namecoins will drop severely after merged mining comes in and I want to profit from that. I want to bet the opposite.

I think he just wants to prove Namecoin is vurnerable to Double Spending when network strength is low.
If he doesn't do it, someone else can.
Difficulty retargeting should be changed to solve it.

[memvola]

Difficulty retargeting should be changed to solve it.

How does difficulty retargeting affect network strength? Hashing power is hashing power. I'm probably missing something here...

[memvola]

Because difficulty is well above where it needs to be in order to entice miners to jump on board to mine and keep the good guys stronger than the bad guys.  Since it is so low right now and the difficulty is so high it is very unrealistic for honest miners to mine profitably there and that invites someone to come along and do bad things.

Yeah, sure, but that's as directly linked to network strength as calling everyone an idiot and changing your license. Nothing a guaranteed increase and improved stability in hashing power can't fix.

[MaGNeT]

There's one easy way to stop the attack; everyone start mining Namecoins.

[Gavin Andresen]

The testnet has suffered rewrite-the-block-chain-with-more-hashing-power attacks.

It does bad things to your wallet, if your wallet contains transactions that depend on previously mined but now-no-longer-valid blocks. I suspect it will cause lots of heartburn for exchanges; this patch from sipa (which hasn't been extensively tested because long block-chain re-orgs on the main chain are not an issue) might help:
  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/195

Alternatively, removing all the wtx wallet transactions stored in the wallet and then running with -rescan should get back to a sane state.  Although an exchange may very well find customers end up with negative balances after doing that, and customers will likely be upset that their balances are likely to change from what they think they have if they've deposited invalid-under-the-new-chain transactions.

Successfully bootstrapping an alternative chain starting from a low difficulty, given that there are people with lots of potential hashing power and the willingness to mess around with the chain "just because they can," seems like a hard problem to me, although if people were willing to accept some centralization until hashing power got to a "safe" level it could be solved by a central authority publishing block-chain checkpoints every X blocks.

[phelix]

[...]
One of our "super coders" has actually (in theory) found a way to go back in the chain and start from there, thus invalidating everything in front of that block. We will test that also.
[...]

you can only go back to the last checkpoint. are there any in namecoin?