[ANN][AUR] Auroracoin - a cryptocurrency for Iceland

[Bimmerhead]

The earth is spinning with 1675 km/h but the auroracoin virtual block chain is stand and still for 10hours already.
What can we do? I burned my spared voodoo puppet, long time ago. No prayers, no magic left around?

Here is the offending block: http://insight.auroracoin.io/block/24e5e48704d70dde5ebae52a31a5430f1fcad726d4680bb723fddb3c70215160

Can anyone explain what is going on when we have a situation like this?

[1714860205]

1714860205

[1714860205]

1714860205

[molecular]

The earth is spinning with 1675 km/h but the auroracoin virtual block chain is stand and still for 10hours already.
What can we do? I burned my spared voodoo puppet, long time ago. No prayers, no magic left around?

Here is the offending block: http://insight.auroracoin.io/block/24e5e48704d70dde5ebae52a31a5430f1fcad726d4680bb723fddb3c70215160

Can anyone explain what is going on when we have a situation like this?

I don't have a clue. Mining looks erratic. At least the timestamps on the blocks. There are these intermittent breaks and in between many blocks are mined per minute.

I'm guessing this might be an attack on the kimoto gravity well difficulty adjustment algorithm?

Another explanation might've been pool miners hopping away due to market price decrease. Couldn't find any coincidences of a decrease in market price with one of these "pauses", though.

[molecular]

block 101266 found

EDIT: and difficulty skyrocketet to 545 (from ~90 at 101265, the "blocking block")

[molecular]

asked around on irc:

<molec> hey guys. does anyone know stuff about kimoto gravity well difficulty adjustment and how an attack would look like?
<kittan_> If blaksmith were around, he could probably talk about that a bit.
<kittan_> I haven't looked into that sort of math, but the last time I heard the term was in conversation with him over PID diff calculations.
<molec> some strange stuff going on with auroracoin chain. http://blockexplorer.auroracoin.eu/chain/AuroraCoin?count=500&hi=101266 difficulty just jumped from 96 to 545 after no block was found for 2.5 hours.
<molec> I don't know what to make of this.
<molec> and right before that, block were found way too quickly without the diff adjusting in a meaningful way... at least that's the story the timestamps on the block tell.
<molec> s/block/blocks
<Blaksmith> don't know what an attack would look like, but I know KGW has the possibilty of a time-warp exploit
<Blaksmith> where blocks are generated in the future, and then submitted back to back
<Blaksmith> reading more, yes, that sounds like someone is using the time-warp exploit
<Blaksmith> that's why most that have used KGW have moved on to Dark Gravity Wave 3 (DGW) which closes the hole on the time-warp exploit
<Blaksmith> molec, ^^
<molec> thanks a lot, blaksmith. that's valuable info.
<Blaksmith> np

here's info on DGW, developed by Evan Duffield: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=522235.msg5931948#msg5931948

it's an adaption of KGW (used by AUR) that fixes some exploits.

not sure how easy it would be to use as drop-in replacement. But when we need to hard-fork anyway to burn the premine, it could maybe be done in one swoop. Or go merge-mining? Thoughts?

[Bimmerhead]

not sure how easy it would be to use as drop-in replacement. But when we need to hard-fork anyway to burn the premine, it could maybe be done in one swoop. Or go merge-mining? Thoughts?

Good grief. KGW was to fix one problem and just opens up another.

I say we merge-mine with BTC and be done with this issue.

[molecular]

not sure how easy it would be to use as drop-in replacement. But when we need to hard-fork anyway to burn the premine, it could maybe be done in one swoop. Or go merge-mining? Thoughts?

Good grief. KGW was to fix one problem and just opens up another.

I say we merge-mine with BTC and be done with this issue.

We don't know an attack on our KGW is actually happening. And if it is, it might be mitigated with a higher hashrate?

Does anybody have the means to record take an aur node and record the local system time of block arrivals? This would probably give us a good idea as to wether we're being attacked or if we have some other problem.

Hmm, actually I just had an idea of how to do this in a hackish, but probably effective way...

[jnada]

I say we merge-mine with BTC and be done with this issue.

What would be advantage of merge mining with BTC? Do we have to find some agreement with majority of BTC miners or there is no need for agreement, as any coin (if majority decide) may go for merge mining with bitcoin? Just curious.

[Skarfur]

I say we merge-mine with BTC and be done with this issue.

What would be advantage of merge mining with BTC? Do we have to find some agreement with majority of BTC miners or there is no need for agreement, as any coin (if majority decide) may go for merge mining with Bitcoin? Just curious.

We have been in contact with Ghash.io to get them to merge mine Auroracoin with Bitcoin. That would not require any changes to any core code nor would you need anyone to agree on it as it does not affect the Bitcoin mining for anyone, they would just get the mined aur as extra and I can't really see why anyone would object to getting any coin extra without any extra cost. Ghash has done this with a couple of other coins before and this only requires Ghash to change the miners on their end.

We have not gotten any definite answer but the response from them has been positive.

This of course goes hand in hand with us updating the Auroracoin core to the latest Bitcoin core and that is well on it's way already and will be launched regardless if we mine with Ghash or what algorithm we would choose for the coin (if not merge mined with Ghash).

On a side note the exchange should see the day of light in just over a month. The project is finally coming quite well along now after some long delays in the beginning. I will update you guys later when we have a launch date which we should have in 2-3 weeks.

Then for anyone that was wondering about the foundation then it has been delayed a bit. I've been doing most of the necessary work go get it established but recently I had platoon of the flu parading through my home lately so I've been away from work lately. I'm back now and I will continue this work as soon as I get my workload down at my work.

So for those who are wondering, things are still moving forward. 

[rocanonz]

I say we merge-mine with BTC and be done with this issue.

What would be advantage of merge mining with BTC? Do we have to find some agreement with majority of BTC miners or there is no need for agreement, as any coin (if majority decide) may go for merge mining with Bitcoin? Just curious.

We have been in contact with Ghash.io to get them to merge mine Auroracoin with Bitcoin. That would not require any changes to any core code nor would you need anyone to agree on it as it does not affect the Bitcoin mining for anyone, they would just get the mined aur as extra and I can't really see why anyone would object to getting any coin extra without any extra cost. Ghash has done this with a couple of other coins before and this only requires Ghash to change the miners on their end.

Ghash is allready mining the most of auroracoin, and they have a big mining facility in Iceland.
This is a very good idea!

[Edkemper]

ouch, so long without reading about aurora, is this project still working?

[rocanonz]

ouch, so long without reading about aurora, is this project still working?

Yes,
The airdrop is in progress. One more month and this stage it's over.

[halalaieec]

is there any aur working faucet?

[molecular]

is there any aur working faucet?

Yes. You can get 636 AUR. You must be from iceland, though.

[halalaieec]

is there any aur working faucet?

Yes. You can get 636 AUR. You must be from iceland, though.

And for those who don't line in iceland?

[Bimmerhead]

is there any aur working faucet?

Yes. You can get 636 AUR. You must be from iceland, though.

And for those who don't line in iceland?

There's this promotion at spurt.is: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=446062.msg10482171#msg10482171

[molecular]

not sure how easy it would be to use as drop-in replacement. But when we need to hard-fork anyway to burn the premine, it could maybe be done in one swoop. Or go merge-mining? Thoughts?

Good grief. KGW was to fix one problem and just opens up another.

I say we merge-mine with BTC and be done with this issue.

We don't know an attack on our KGW is actually happening. And if it is, it might be mitigated with a higher hashrate?

Does anybody have the means to record take an aur node and record the local system time of block arrivals? This would probably give us a good idea as to wether we're being attacked or if we have some other problem.

Hmm, actually I just had an idea of how to do this in a hackish, but probably effective way...

I tried this, but when I started analyzing the data I noticed I screwed up the marking of block with arrival time and had to reset the data collection process. I was accidentally marking the blocks in 0:30 second intervals, which is not fine enough for this purpose. I had set arrival time marking to a 1 second interval but forgot that the bitcoin-abe block insertion process interval was 30 seconds ;(.

While doing that I determined the orphan rate to be ~1% recently (last 10000 blocks). I'm not sure if the way I do this is reliable, though.

I think that's an indication against an attack. I'm assuming a timewarp attack would generate quite a few orphans.

[Bimmerhead]

The Twitter tipbot is now live: http://auroratip.auroracoin.io/#/.

Test it out with some small amounts of Auroracoin and let me know what you think on the support forum.

[silvermetal]

Just for information for the Auroracoin supporters.

I did some research of one accountname at bitcointalk:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=299308.msg10667896#msg10667896

By accident I noticed that all those accountnames posted in the Aurora thread for accusing AUR being a scam. Therefore I share my information with you, as it would not surprise me if he has lots and lots of other accountnames than the ones I discovered:
venlo
balu2
gustav
voluntarist500
v500
kkoin
forlackofabettername

Good luck with aurora!

[rocanonz]

Airdrop coins in circulation, 50%

[molecular]

Airdrop coins in circulation, 50%

Can you be more specific as to what exactly you are saying?