SC2 Diff drop related to the recent attacks on Bitcoin pools?

[Lolcust]

More like coinspiracy 

[Ten98]

No, the diff drop is related to the fact that a large portion of mining power went offline.

Over the past few days you're right, someone with the miner id "8======D". We don't really know why, but they certainly seemed to have amassed quite a few coins, more than 100'000 at any rate.

Working theory is that it's someone who tried to 51% solidcoin and failed, so the only "attack" they could pull off was to legitimately mine Solidcoins. We didn't want to stop dickguy from mining, after all he was keeping the hash rate high and the coins flowing, and I doubt we could have even if we wanted to, even trolls are free to mine Solidcoin

We guess they got bored, or maybe their Amazon EC2 bill came in and they couldn't pay it so they got disconnected? Maybe their botnet wasn't actually a botnet but a group of paid volunteers whose paid time had come to an end? Who knows. What we do know is that they seem to have gone away... For now. If dickguy wants to come and invest more CPU power to Solidcoin we will welcome him back.

Hashrate drops dont bother us. Unlike pretty much every other coin, our difficulty retarget can easily handle a drop of 99% hashrate and the coin will keep going nicely, without a Namecoin-type scenario of waiting months for the next retarget.

Solidcoin now has a working GPU miner now which is working quite well, so as it happens the space left by the failed troll attempt can be filled by all those guys with multiple GPUs. Even Nvidia owners have a fair shot at getting some Solidcoin now. CPU remains the most efficient way to mine, but the extra power afforded by the GPU miner is also good.

[Lolcust]

Or maybe it just changed its embarrassing miner id ...

[stryker]

oh cmon u virgin pie fekr.... cmon lolcust.... I give u the most credit out of the arse-sputum that is the dregs of the bitcoin pool as you actually seemed to create a CPU chain... once you were given the idea that is..... cmon tough guy speak up an leave your german slurs at the door eh?

why is it that someone should invest in a "hackers" play-thing.... also.... how goes the experiment? you were meant to report back to the bitcoin core on your findings.... well? share!

[Nachtwind]

No, the diff drop is related to the fact that a large portion of mining power went offline.
....

Thats exactly what i said... strange is just that it correlates with the Attacks on Bitcoin Pools. "mine for us" has (had?) nice statistics on network speed and diff (though the scales were off..) - and those drops very much overlapped the pools DDOSes..
Strange thing though is the scales that were talked about above.. but when i think about it, it makes sense not to put everything into solidcoin that such a strong botnet should have: If i had several hundred thousand computers to put on SC2 i would skyrocket diff and eventually run out of blocks to get whereas while i have a portion on sc2 i could still mine BTC - with the occasional ddos trying to manipulate Diff, which i dont need on SC2 when i have the majority of network speed anyway.

Are there any numbers of the total has power of the dick available? Looking at the block explorer it looked like it had 20 out of 25 blocks from time to time.. and thta is MASSVE mining power compared to the network as a whole.

[Snapman]

z0mg, granny is playin triphop :O

[Lolcust]

oh cmon u virgin pie fekr.... cmon lolcust.... I give u the most credit out of the arse-sputum that is the dregs of the bitcoin pool as you actually seemed to create a CPU chain... once you were given the idea that is..... cmon tough guy speak up an leave your german slurs at the door eh?

why is it that someone should invest in a "hackers" play-thing.... also.... how goes the experiment? you were meant to report back to the bitcoin core on your findings.... well? share!

Errrr... are you having a stroke ? Please seek medical attention

[DeathAndTaxes]

Strange thing though is the scales that were talked about above.. but when i think about it, it makes sense not to put everything into solidcoin that such a strong botnet should have: If i had several hundred thousand computers to put on SC2 i would skyrocket diff and eventually run out of blocks to get whereas while i have a portion on sc2 i could still mine BTC - with the occasional ddos trying to manipulate Diff, which i dont need on SC2 when i have the majority of network speed anyway.

If you had that much hashing power you could manipulate difficulty to maximize reward (assumming you had other use for botnet).

At start of new difficulty hit the network with massive hashing power gain 99% of blocks mined.  When the difficulty adjusts it will adjust upwards to max difficulty.  Leave the network.  Rest of network will struggle at reduced reward rate (which should influence prices upward) until next reset when difficulty drops.  At that point hit network w/ max hashpower.

Essentially you are getting 99% (or large %) of the low difficulty blocks and none of the high difficulty ones.  Difficulty seesaws back and forth and you avoid a situation where you hashpower drive difficulty up continually.

[Lolcust]

That would require working on custom miner code (or some very contrived workaround), which in case of SC2 would mean either reverse engineering or convincing CH to provide source.

[Nachtwind]

Strange thing though is the scales that were talked about above.. but when i think about it, it makes sense not to put everything into solidcoin that such a strong botnet should have: If i had several hundred thousand computers to put on SC2 i would skyrocket diff and eventually run out of blocks to get whereas while i have a portion on sc2 i could still mine BTC - with the occasional ddos trying to manipulate Diff, which i dont need on SC2 when i have the majority of network speed anyway.

If you had that much hashing power you could manipulate difficulty to maximize reward (assumming you had other use for botnet).

At start of new difficulty hit the network with massive hashing power gain 99% of blocks mined.  When the difficulty adjusts it will adjust upwards to max difficulty.  Leave the network.  Rest of network will struggle at reduced reward rate (which should influence prices upward) until next reset when difficulty drops.  At that point hit network w/ max hashpower.

Essentially you are getting 99% (or large %) of the low difficulty blocks and none of the high difficulty ones.  Difficulty seesaws back and forth and you avoid a situation where you hashpower drive difficulty up continually.

Which is pretty much what happened. you see several drops in Diff with a steeep climb afterwards.. always related to the dick.

[Ten98]

I doubt it is a "botnet", rather someone with some money to burn at Amazon.

Either way, the supposed "crisis" of someone mining lots of SolidCoin while at the same time trying but failing to DDOS any of the pools is over. No harm done, project still going strong.

Thanks as always for your continued interest in SolidCoin, it's what keeps us motivated!

[sadpandatech]

  And on that note, for everyone else. Max packet size for IPv4 is roughly 65k. Divide that just into the 5GB/s that just one pool had on it to die and you come up with atleast the number of zombies at that one time, at that one pool.  Or roughly 80,000 zombies at just that one point...  

  Was just going to leave this, but the numbers are obviously wrong... 80k zombies at 65k per packet to fill 5GB/s assumes only one packet per zombie per second. While it would take some research into what the average upstream rate is for Average Joe internet user, it may be more than 65KBs.

  For instance if all the infected computers were on ATT dsl 7meg(Thats their Extreme edition which is the most popular one), their upstream bandwidth would be about 768Kb(Kilobit, ISP's use it instead of KiloByte so they can show you a bigger number) per second. Or ~96KBs, allowing them 1 and a half max size packets for second...


  Since we can't say everyone is at a certain upload speed it adds another variable to the equation of calculating the estimated botnet size. I.e., Satellite connections like HughesNet's basic package offers about 200kbs up. Their high end package generously allowing 300kbs up. Then you have cable internet, which I am not familiar with the end-user upstreams of these days. I would assume they have lowered them like the DSL providors have. And, then most of your metropolitan areas have fiber access which offers a hugely varying array of speeds. The one closest to me offers basic internet service up to 150Mbs down, and 35Mbs up!  So yea, some averaging calculations need to be done to measure what we could assume is the 'average' upload speed for all end-user types and divide it by 65KB to figure how many max size packets can be sent per second from the zombies. And then divide that number into 5GB/s...

  Just wanted to correct my numbers a bit incase anyone here is short sited enough to take anything that I present here as gospel.. Please don't ever do that, for your own sanity... ;p

[Nachtwind]

I doubt it is a "botnet", rather someone with some money to burn at Amazon.

Either way, the supposed "crisis" of someone mining lots of SolidCoin while at the same time trying but failing to DDOS any of the pools is over. No harm done, project still going strong.

Thanks as always for your continued interest in SolidCoin, it's what keeps us motivated!

I doubt it. If it was EC2 machines someone really would have had burned money.. but what for? The dick should have now so many coins that he could tank the market at any time - the very reason why trusted nodes exist. Someone with a reasonable share of the community's wealth wont break it. The more reason i wonder whats going on.
As i said it is just strange to me that SC allows a single entity to get so many coins that could as well be used to raise the community. Especially since the coins were not spend on the obvious platforms (assumption since the normal volume is quite low). So who would have interest in accumulating so many coins and playing the diff without spending it. Might be it was a 51% went wrong, but if it was a malicious yet failed attempt that i had done i would have tanked the markets in return - just for the laughs. So whatever the dick is, it's nothing that is going to harm the SC network anytime soon - so it must either be a trusted entity under false flag - or someone toying with the crypto currency just for fun, which i also dont think.

I think RS himself could say a few words on it. Not that i accuse him, but i think he could clarify what the dick is/was or what is assumed it is. It all just looks too strange from my point ov view.

[Raoul Duke]

A dick is a dick is a dick...

[johnj]

Speaking of the SC diff drop...

Why is SC still at ~50s/blk?  I thought it was 120s, or I've even heard 90s.  But after what, 2 weeks the block generation still hasn't caught back up? What gives?

[Nachtwind]

Seen all those freaking 1s blocks.. no way thats due to a few GPU miners.. there is MASSIVE hasing power behind that... and no, i dont mean those blocks for trusted000...