Pool Ops are now the Alt Currency Police

[bitlane]

As a precedent has been set by Luke Dash Jr, now every pool operator can be an Alt Chain police officer and attack any new Alt that they see fit, using their entire pool to do so, with or without the knowledge of the miners that belong to their pools.

Luke took it upon himself to 'Police' an Alt Chain and kill it, by using the hashing power of his pool to 51% attack it.

Should we all look forward to these types of attacks on new projects if/when a self-richeous pool op get's his panties in a bunch ?

How do pool miners feel about having NO SAY or CONTROL over what an Op does with YOUR HASHING POWER ?

Just to be clear.... Luke Dash Jr is an idiot.

[1714925517]

1714925517

[1714925517]

1714925517

[1714925517]

1714925517

[1714925517]

1714925517

[bitlane]

I would love to hear (or read) from a miner at Eligius pool and how THEY feel about having their hashing power used for something they didn't consent to or agree with ?

[Luke-Jr]

Why do you assume the pool miners had anything to do with this?

[ssateneth]

Why do you assume the pool miners had anything to do with this?

Probably something along the lines of merged mining. In any case, I don't care, as long as I get my bitcoins.

[koin]

As a precedent has been set by Luke Dash Jr,

link?

[abbeytim]

come and seee him talk about it on btc-e.com

[MacT]

 Wow. I happened to follow this from the start. I was showing a new-to-mining friend how things work by havingthem mine the brand new CoiledCoin. They only got 7 before Luke brute forced the plug to be pulled for "being a scamcoin".  Allchains.info has delisted Eligius and I suspect there will be other fallout as well. What a Krunky way for my friend to learn about mining 

[bitlane]

 Wow. I happened to follow this from the start. I was showing a new-to-mining friend how things work by havingthem mine the brand new CoiledCoin. They only got 7 before Luke brute forced the plug to be pulled for "being a scamcoin".  Allchains.info has delisted Eligius and I suspect there will be other fallout as well. What a Krunky way for my friend to learn about mining 

A great way to introduce new users to Cryptocurrencies and instil faith.

Good job Luke.....IDIOT.

[gmaxwell]

A great way to introduce new users to Cryptocurrencies and instil faith.

So we should instill false and unjustified faith in random cryptocoin ponzi schemes?    Since you won't provide the link as facts are an antidote for FUD: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56675.0

They only got 7 before Luke brute forced the plug to be pulled for "being a scamcoin".

So— You're mad that your 'friend' only got to mine seven blocks before someone with a lot more hash-power dominated the chain? Sounds kinda petty.

[bitlane]

A great way to introduce new users to Cryptocurrencies and instil faith.

So we should instill false and unjustified faith in random cryptocoin ponzi schemes?    Since you won't provide the link as facts are an antidote for FUD: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56675.0

They only got 7 before Luke brute forced the plug to be pulled for "being a scamcoin".

So— You're mad that your 'friend' only got to mine seven blocks before someone with a lot more hash-power dominated the chain? Sounds kinda petty.

Pointless.....another lukedashjr clone......
You guys must go to church together.

[koin]

They only got 7 before Luke brute forced the plug to be pulled for "being a scamcoin".

brute forcing and getting a longer chain doesn't "break" the currency does it?  sure, luke or whomever gets the generated coins that other miners originally assumed they got but the currency itself could keep on going after, right?

was it that bitcoin was only able to sneak through this phase because at the time there was no familiarity/fear of proof-of-work crypto currencies, no competitors to knock it down and no 100s of ghash/s excess capacity?

[makomk]

brute forcing and getting a longer chain doesn't "break" the currency does it?  sure, luke or whomever gets the generated coins that other miners originally assumed they got but the currency itself could keep on going after, right?

He's preventing anyone from getting blocks or performing transactions and has no incentive to stop, so it's kind of dead. He was also hinting in IRC that he might do the same to I0coin and Ixcoin and has more than enough hash power to do so, but it's possible he was joking.

was it that bitcoin was only able to sneak through this phase because at the time there was no familiarity/fear of proof-of-work crypto currencies, no competitors to knock it down and no 100s of ghash/s excess capacity?

No-one had the required financial incentive to attack it in this way.

[El Cabron]

link to some evidence he was involved in this??

[makomk]

link to some evidence he was involved in this??

Link. There are others, plus his messages in IRC though he's been pressuring people into not quoting those.

[El Cabron]

This has got to be a hoax. I highly doubt someone could be so much fail. It makes no sense at all, why just toss away all respect he ever had and his whole pool? I don't know but if he did do it I bet he was drunk or on drugs. No one would any compassion or apathy would be so abusive.

[DeathAndTaxes]

They only got 7 before Luke brute forced the plug to be pulled for "being a scamcoin".

brute forcing and getting a longer chain doesn't "break" the currency does it?  sure, luke or whomever gets the generated coins that other miners originally assumed they got but the currency itself could keep on going after, right?

was it that bitcoin was only able to sneak through this phase because at the time there was no familiarity/fear of proof-of-work crypto currencies, no competitors to knock it down and no 100s of ghash/s excess capacity?

Exactly.  Is there some rule that large miners can't merge mine alt-coins?

Bitcoin did have first mover advantage.  Hashing power grew organically and slowly and by the time large amounts of hashing power was available it was past that critical "early phase".

A large amount of hashing power didn't break the chain.  Miners and exchanges who stupidly believed a short lock period on a new chain was sufficient broke it.

On edit:  A useful countermeasure would be to replace the static locking time (120 blocks) for new coins w/ a variable one based on block chain length.  Maybe starting out with a lock of 1000 (not much use for alt-coins on day 0 anyways) declining wot 120 blocks based on block length over say the first year.

[bitlane]

Miners and exchanges who stupidly believed a short lock period on a new chain was sufficient broke it.

...and Pool Ops that abuse hashing power that doesn't belong to them to attack the competition, only to refuse transaction processing, orphaning everyone in the process.
Exactly....nothing wrong with that.

I honestly wish that I could reach through my screen and poke everyone in the forehead and scream WAKE UP, that uses the 'Merged Mining' excuse to help Luke's cause. IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH MERGED MINING OTHER THAN MERGED MINING ITSELF BEING USED MALICIOUSLY.

In this case, Merged Mining was not a tool, BUT A WEAPON that served the purpose that the Pool Op intended to use it for.....AS HE EXCLAIMED WITH JOY ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION, yet posting logs here to prove it would only result in the removal of said logs due to protest by Luke himself.
Go figure....

[doublec]

brute forcing and getting a longer chain doesn't "break" the currency does it?  sure, luke or whomever gets the generated coins that other miners originally assumed they got but the currency itself could keep on going after, right?

it can "break" the currency if the miner has greater than 51% and refuses to accept other miners blocks and refuses to include any transactions. Because they have >51% they always have the longest chain. No one else gets blocks, no transactions are allowed, so the chain is effectively dead. It's a pretty nifty example of the power of >51% hash rate.

[markm]

But looking at the listed hash rates of the top ten pools, it seems a very easy 51% to fix?

Or are all the pool operators akin to the lukester?

-MarkM-

[DeathAndTaxes]

But looking at the listed hash rates of the top ten pools, it seems a very easy 51% to fix?

How?  51% "vulnerability" is inherent in blockchains.

One way to look at it is that the block chain needs consensus (any dispute in validity need to be resolved).
In an election we use 1 person = 1 vote.
In a stock vote we use 1 share = 1 vote.

However block chains are psuedo anonymous so we use 1 hash = 1 vote.  It works perfectly as long as the "bad guys" never have more hashes than all the good guys combined.  They will simply be outvoted.

[DeathAndTaxes]

In this case, Merged Mining was not a tool, BUT A WEAPON that served the purpose that the Pool Op intended to use it for.....AS HE EXCLAIMED WITH JOY ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION, yet posting logs here to prove it would only result in the removal of said logs due to protest by Luke himself.
Go figure....

Why not just post the logs.  I doubt mods would remove it.  If anything it *may* (not that I speak for mods or admins) lead to a scammer tag and/or banning if they prove what you say they prove.

[bitlane]

In this case, Merged Mining was not a tool, BUT A WEAPON that served the purpose that the Pool Op intended to use it for.....AS HE EXCLAIMED WITH JOY ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION, yet posting logs here to prove it would only result in the removal of said logs due to protest by Luke himself.
Go figure....

Why not just post the logs.  I doubt mods would remove it.  If anything it *may* (not that I speak for mods or admins) lead to a scammer tag and/or banning if they prove what you say they prove.

Luke already protested previously posted IRC chat logs and had them removed earlier. Any further posting of similar at this point would only serve to entertain the masses while possibly jeopardizing some of our own standings on this forum.
I am actively trying to obtain more chat logs as I write this, for my own amusement, if nothing else.

[markm]

But looking at the listed hash rates of the top ten pools, it seems a very easy 51% to fix?

How?  51% "vulnerability" is inherent in blockchains.

Luke's pool has far less than 51% of the hashing power of the top ten pools combined, and is not even the largest of the top ten pools. There are a number of pools that could all by themself "fix" Luke's attack.


They might not even have to use their member's hashing power without prior consent either; they could openly offer their members the option of merged mining more chains. We haven't yet even discovered how many chains is the practical limit for a pool to merged-mine at once.

-MarkM-

[bitlane]

The funny thing about this all is, it took the power of Luke's pool to pull this off, because without it, he's essentially NOTHING and a threat to nobody.

I've spent enough time at BTC-e Exchange chat, reading his dribble about how Litecoin is also a scam coin, but the sad fact of the matter is, he's powerless to do anything about it, as it's a CPU mined Alt.

With his personal vendetta against CLC, I0X and I0C...he was able to leverage the power of the pool that he admins to do them damage.
He essentially has NOTHING of his own to use in his battle against GPU-mined Scam Coins (as he calls them) that would be even marginally effective and with CPU Alts still thriving, it seems he has even less resources at his disposal to cause any significant disruptions for them.

I would hope that once his pool miners wake up a bit, they all leave his pool in a mass exodus and take their resources elsewhere, to be under the management of another, more HONEST pool Op that will not abuse his/her status, using other's hashing power to fuel their personal ego trips and/or conquests against other Alts in the future.

Absolute power corrupts....absolutely.

[makomk]

Luke's pool has far less than 51% of the hashing power of the top ten pools combined, and is not even the largest of the top ten pools. There are a number of pools that could all by themself "fix" Luke's attack.

Judging from his comments in #bitcoin, I think that Tycho is basically in agreement with Luke's actions here, and since Deepbit makes up 40-50% of the total Bitcoin mining power by itself...

[bulanula]

I congratulate people like gmaxwell ( responsible for the LTC TX spam attack ) and Luke-Jr.

Screw the alt chain scammers and their pump and dump schemes. Luke-Jr is morally sound and I am really glad scams like CoiledChain are dead and stop staining the name of Bitcoin with the pump and dumping that goes on.

Well done to you both ! Screw the scammers and pump & dumpers.

Just like he said : All scamchains like SolidCoin, LiteCoin, CoiledCoin are a plot to steal BTC from the fools.

Now CoiledCrap is dead, what will be the next scamchain of the week ? 419coin ?

[terrytibbs]

gmaxwell ( responsible for the LTC TX spam attack )

Right!

[Schwede65]

Luke's pool has far less than 51% of the hashing power of the top ten pools combined, and is not even the largest of the top ten pools. There are a number of pools that could all by themself "fix" Luke's attack.

Judging from his comments in #bitcoin, I think that Tycho is basically in agreement with Luke's actions here, and since Deepbit makes up 40-50% of the total Bitcoin mining power by itself...

at the moment deepbit makes ~30 % of btc-mining (3341 of 11714)

this percentage is enough

there have been periods in the past where he had ~ 50 % and a bit more some time...

but the acceptance of destroying alt-coins is not transferable to btc, because the king-coin makes his days!

[casascius]

You know, I am surprised we don't just code into Bitcoin to shut down if faced with a need to reorg more than 5 blocks, rather than accepting an attack chain. Then all an attacker can do is temporarily DoS a chain - far less disruptive than rolling back transactions.

[Turbor]

Code:

[10:31]	luke-jr	coblee: I didn't orphan anything mature
[10:31]	coblee	luke-jr: oh ok
[10:32]	luke-jr	I intentionally avoided anyone actually losing money
[10:32]	coblee	so just mining, not including transactions, and dumping?
[10:33]	luke-jr	coblee: actually, I decided it was better not to dump
[10:33]	luke-jr	coblee: I've also asked BTC-e to reverse the dumping I did earlier
[10:33]	coblee	how would they reverse the dumping?
[10:33]	gmaxwell	presumably the counterparties would rather have their btc back.
[10:34]	gmaxwell	So they could just undo the trades, luke didn't withdraw the bitcoin he got.
[10:34]	luke-jr	coblee: well, presuming by dumping, we mean "selling"
[10:34]	TuxBlackEdo	what happen?
[10:34]	TuxBlackEdo	and why are we still awake?
[10:35]	coblee	this is pretty funny
[10:35]	luke-jr	TuxBlackEdo: I effectively disabled the latest scamcoin
[10:35]	gmaxwell	TuxBlackEdo: a new altcoin showed up out of nowhere.. complete with an exchange and a bunch of eager ponzi pumpers.
[10:35]	_W_	TuxBlackEdo, it's morning here
[10:35]	gmaxwell	TuxBlackEdo: and look took charge of the chain.
[10:35]	TuxBlackEdo	coilcoin, right?
[10:35]	luke-jr	Coiled*
[10:36]	gmaxwell	And some people who were planing to make money fast, are none too happy that they can't get any blocks or txn in, and that luke crashed the price on the market.
[10:36]	luke-jr	why is artforz helping them workaround it?
[10:36]	gmaxwell	Awesome. The race is on.
[10:36]	luke-jr	gmaxwell: well, he's just encouraging them to get BTCGuild onboard "next time" -.-
[10:36]	luke-jr	nothing fancy
[10:37]	TuxBlackEdo	instead of crashing the price of a alt chain we should try to somehow make the price of namecoin go through the roof
[10:37]	gmaxwell	oh. meh, well fine. Its true— but since the cost of setting up more merged chains is still high— good luck with that.
[10:37]	coblee	they are bashing you on btc-e luke-jr lol
[10:37]	TuxBlackEdo	that's pretty cool though, props luke-jr
[10:37]	luke-jr	TuxBlackEdo: pfft, you abuse namecoin anyway
[10:38]	gmaxwell	coblee: it's a little beyond bashing. At least earlier is was pretty scarry.
[10:38]	TuxBlackEdo	how
[10:38]	luke-jr	TuxBlackEdo: you just sell them
[10:38]	TuxBlackEdo	explain how i "abuse" namecoins?
[10:38]	coblee	scary how?
[10:38]	TuxBlackEdo	I never sold a namecoin
[10:38]	TuxBlackEdo	actually i do the opposite
[10:39]	TuxBlackEdo	while everyone was selling i was setting up big buy orders
[10:39]	luke-jr	TuxBlackEdo: then why do you want price up?
[10:39]	TuxBlackEdo	i own a ton of namecoins
[10:40]	TuxBlackEdo	ill move some namecoins right now to prove
[10:40]	gmaxwell	TuxBlackEdo: I'll give you an address to move them to.
[10:40]	TuxBlackEdo	hehe
[10:40]	TuxBlackEdo	ill move them to
[10:40]	luke-jr	lol
[10:41]	TuxBlackEdo	MxbmJyLDcqTmuzcQoGjPen4fW3AdkNLqBP
[10:41]	TuxBlackEdo	done
[10:42]	TuxBlackEdo	a412edf5e41529582f138cbc4bd3991203150fab4797fc472853dedd730b5ca9
[10:43]	gmaxwell	hahah
[10:43]	gmaxwell	castonbtce: so what can we say CLC stands for?
[10:43]	gmaxwell	castonbtce: crazy loser coin?
[10:43]	gmaxwell	k65onyx: catastrophic loss of coins?
[10:43]	gmaxwell	artforz: lol
[10:43]	gmaxwell	castonbtce: cunt luke coin
[10:44]	luke-jr	hmm
[10:44]	luke-jr	just in case I accidentally orphaned some non-generation, I just let them all through a few blocks ago
[10:44]	luke-jr	bet they don't notice <.<
[10:45]	doublec	I saw them
[10:45]	gmaxwell	well they were saying that you'd stopped earlier, so who knows.
[10:47]	TuxBlackEdo	how long is namecoin going to take to generate a block...
[10:48]	JFK911	;;bc,stats
[10:48]	gribble	Current Blocks: 160874 | Current Difficulty: 1159929.4972244 | Next Difficulty At Block: 161279 | Next Difficulty In: 405 blocks | Next Difficulty In About: 2 days, 14 hours, 46 minutes, and 30 seconds | Next Difficulty Estimate: 1221673.16179828 | Estimated Percent Change: 5.32305323054
[10:51]	luke-jr	reckon I should leave it on overnight?
[10:51]	TuxBlackEdo	luke-jr, http://explorer.dot-bit.org/a/MxbmJyLDcqTmuzcQoGjPen4fW3AdkNLqBP

[jake262144]

...A useful countermeasure would be to replace the static locking time (120 blocks) for new coins w/ a variable one based on block chain length.  Maybe starting out with a lock of 1000 (not much use for alt-coins on day 0 anyways) declining wot 120 blocks based on block length over say the first year.

Precisely. Chain length, recent block generation speed, with some tweaking any algorithmic approach would beat a hard-coded value.

I would love to hear (or read) from a miner at Eligius pool and how THEY feel about having their hashing power used for something they didn't consent to or agree with ?

I'm here
Obviously, I'm not overjoyed about Luke's alleged endeavor. That's a breach of agreement between Luke and his miners.
Surely, my hashing power will be put to better use than shooting up alt-chain currencies, right Luke, old chap?
I'm not moving my miners just yet but a yellow flag has been raised.

I congratulate people like gmaxwell ( responsible for the LTC TX spam attack ) and Luke-Jr.
Well done to you both ! Screw the scammers and pump & dumpers.

How about "screw them" by just staying away and never touching their chains?

[bitlane]

So Luke didn't intend for anyone to lose anything ?

I lost 20+ blocks from my wallet, all with 200+ confirmations as well as a 6 block transfer after that. Does that mean I didn't lose anything ?

[DeathAndTaxes]

You know, I am surprised we don't just code into Bitcoin to shut down if faced with a need to reorg more than 5 blocks, rather than accepting an attack chain. Then all an attacker can do is temporarily DoS a chain - far less disruptive than rolling back transactions.

Shutdown and do what?

How do your resolve the fact that some % of the network believes chain A is valid and some % believes chain B is valid.  Never re-org?  If you re-org and the longest chain wins then you are back where you started from.

[DeathAndTaxes]

So Luke didn't intend for anyone to lose anything ?

I lost 20+ blocks from my wallet, all with 200+ confirmations as well as a 6 block transfer after that. Does that mean I didn't lose anything ?

Given they were worthless scam coins?  No you didn't lose anything.

[casascius]

You know, I am surprised we don't just code into Bitcoin to shut down if faced with a need to reorg more than 5 blocks, rather than accepting an attack chain. Then all an attacker can do is temporarily DoS a chain - far less disruptive than rolling back transactions.

Shutdown and do what?

How do your resolve the fact that some % of the network believes chain A is valid and some % believes chain B is valid.  Never re-org?  If you re-org and the longest chain wins then you are back where you started from.

Shut down and refuse transactions.

It would require human consensus/interaction to figure out what went wrong - typically by adding a block checkpoint - and start the network back up.  Those in a position to patch the checkpoint into their client would do so. Those who cannot would simply force connect to a node advertised by its owner as "connect to me" and whose chain version they agree with, which would effectively censor out the unwanted chain from their view.

[bulanula]

So Luke didn't intend for anyone to lose anything ?

I lost 20+ blocks from my wallet, all with 200+ confirmations as well as a 6 block transfer after that. Does that mean I didn't lose anything ?

Given they were worthless scam coins?  No you didn't lose anything.

LOL. Exactly what I was going to say !

You only lost some electricity because you were naive enough to think this typical pump & dump - open exchange in 5 hours after launch scheme was going to work.

Luckily a moral Christian like Luke stopped this BS. I hope he kills crap like DVC, IXC, I0C next etc.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Shut down and refuse transactions.

It would require human consensus/interaction to figure out what went wrong - typically by adding a block checkpoint - and start the network back up.  Those in a position to patch the checkpoint into their client would do so. Those who cannot would simply force connect to a node advertised by it's owner as "connect to me" and whose position they agree with, which would effectively censor out the unwanted chain from their view.

So centralized human control of a distributed network?   If security is the ultimate goal then just make it a central authority which validated and prevents double spends and eliminate the massive cost and overhead of the blockchain and distributed work.  

A single low end server could handle all the Bitcoin transaction processing. 


I think there are ways to provide 51% protection but human control isn't something I would ever support.  Human control is fallible.  Humans can be bribed, beaten, extorted, killed, etc.

The block chain protocol could be improved to detect and invalidate a 51% attack (hint: a 51% attack involves a re-org AND doubling of hashpower).  Yeah there may be some side effects but they would be part of the network outside of human control/manipulation.

[casascius]

Shut down and refuse transactions.

It would require human consensus/interaction to figure out what went wrong - typically by adding a block checkpoint - and start the network back up.  Those in a position to patch the checkpoint into their client would do so. Those who cannot would simply force connect to a node advertised by it's owner as "connect to me" and whose position they agree with, which would effectively censor out the unwanted chain from their view.

So centralized human control of a distributed network?   If security is the ultimate goal then just make it a central authority which validated and prevents double spends and eliminate the massive cost and overhead of the blockchain and distributed work. 

A single low end server could handle all the Bitcoin transaction processing.

It's not centralized. It's democratic.

In the case of Luke's attack, there is no doubt which is the attack chain and which is not. The consensus is unanimous. So if this were bitcoin, we would be check pointing the last good block and moving on with life. In case of a threat of a repeat attack, implementation of an algorithm that performs simple spot checks to detect a bogus chain (discussed in other threads, Gavin contributed a few potential criteria), many bogus attack chains could be auto rejected with no human interaction.

[bulanula]

Shut down and refuse transactions.

It would require human consensus/interaction to figure out what went wrong - typically by adding a block checkpoint - and start the network back up.  Those in a position to patch the checkpoint into their client would do so. Those who cannot would simply force connect to a node advertised by it's owner as "connect to me" and whose position they agree with, which would effectively censor out the unwanted chain from their view.

So centralized human control of a distributed network?   If security is the ultimate goal then just make it a central authority which validated and prevents double spends and eliminate the massive cost and overhead of the blockchain and distributed work.  

A single low end server could handle all the Bitcoin transaction processing.  


I think there are ways to provide 51% protection but human control isn't something I would ever support.  Human control is fallible.  Humans can be bribed, beaten, extorted, killed, etc.

The block chain protocol could be improved to detect and invalidate a 51% attack (hint: a 51% attack involves a re-org AND doubling of hashpower).  Yeah there may be some side effects but they would be part of the network outside of human control/manipulation.

Yeah just like BTC can't be 51% or economic manipulated with just a couple of millions.

Funny to think that all the BTC value is worth $50 million when just $5 million or even less is needed to kill all this network. SolidScam is no good either.

Until issues like the potential for a 51%, price stability, early adopters having 100 000 of coins for $100 this whole system is a joke.

Arguably, the biggest joke compared to crap like CoiledCoin but still a joke.

If we want BTC to be valid we need to find a technological solution for the 51% problem. No more of this "it will never happen" or "the attacker would gain more by contributing" and other such excuses. BTC is just as vulnerable as CoiledCoin if the miners go away. Don't leave it to chance. Fix it while you can.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It's not centralized. It's democratic.

But it isn't democratic.  How do you vote?  How do you guarantee the vote is fair, accurate, and timely?  How do you ensure the people voting are informed?  How do you make sure the person who has the ACTUAL POWER to make the changes follows the will of "the people".

Even if it was perfectly democratic, humans fail.  The federal reserve is a great idea in theory.  Money supply SHOULD match economic expansion so that pricing power is always the same.  IF the Fed worked in actuality a dollar today would have the same pricing power as 1970s or 1920s or 1800s.  In reality it fails.  Humans fail.    Giving an elite group of humans control of Bitcoin is the day I stop mining forever (or support the alt which doesn't do that).

In the case of Luke's attack, there is no doubt which is the attack chain and which is not. The consensus is unanimous. So if this were bitcoin, we would be check pointing the last good block and moving on with life.

For example say Luke was the one who had the power to write and published the "right chain" patch.  Oops.  You now just guaranteed the attack chain has superiority.

In case of a threat of a repeat attack, implementation of an algorithm that performs simple spot checks to detect a bogus chain (discussed in other threads, Gavin contributed a few potential criteria), many bogus attack chains could be auto rejected with no human interaction.

This I have no problem with.   There are automatic methods which could make the blockchain smarter and more resilient to 51% attack without going down that slippery slope of human manipulation.

[ineededausername]

I would advise everyone to search these forums or the bitcoin related
IRC archives for Luke's past comments on things like religion and gay
people. It made me leave his pool in a hurry.

I've seen these comments... they make him look ignorant, bigoted, irrational and idiotic.  Despite this, I used to think luke was a good and intelligent person deluded by religion.  The latest attack proves that he is not only ignorant and bigoted, but also a despicable person in general.  He may be smart, but he is a worthless human being.

Once I even saw luke saying that he'd support murdering his own son if he had gay sex in a country where it was punished by the death penalty, because it would be in accordance with his religious views and the local secular laws.  A person who says that is not a normal human being, he lies among the scum of the earth.

This is the only public attack on someone's character I have ever posted on this forum.  Luke-jr seems like he deserves it.

[rjk]

I would advise everyone to search these forums or the bitcoin related
IRC archives for Luke's past comments on things like religion and gay
people. It made me leave his pool in a hurry.

I've seen these comments... they make him look ignorant, bigoted, irrational and idiotic.  Despite this, I used to think luke was a good and intelligent person deluded by religion.  The latest attack proves that he is not only ignorant and bigoted, but also a despicable person in general.  He may be smart, but he is a worthless human being.

Once I even saw luke saying that he'd support murdering his own son if he had gay sex in a country where it was punished by the death penalty, because it would be in accordance with his religious views and the local secular laws.  A person who says that is not a normal human being, he lies among the scum of the earth.

This is the only public attack on someone's character I have ever posted on this forum.  Luke-jr seems like he deserves it.

Its not a character attack, its just simple truth. I might even have logs laying around.

[Ahimoth]

I think there are ways to provide 51% protection but human control isn't something I would ever support.  Human control is fallible.  Humans can be bribed, beaten, extorted, killed, etc.

The block chain protocol could be improved to detect and invalidate a 51% attack (hint: a 51% attack involves a re-org AND doubling of hashpower).  Yeah there may be some side effects but they would be part of the network outside of human control/manipulation.

Hashing power can also be bought and sold, just as easily as humans can be. Either buy the hardware yourself, or consider someone offering the top two pool operators a large sum of money for control of their pools.

A 51% attack does not have to correspond with a doubling in the hashpower. An existing pool or large mining operation can turn, which would not show a change in the total hash power.

A 51% does not necessarily require a re-org beyond 1 block. If I want to double spend, then it requires a large re-org, but if I just want to shut down the network, no re-org is required.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Hashing power can also be bought and sold, just as easily as humans can be. Either buy the hardware yourself, or consider someone offering the top two pool operators a large sum of money for control of their pools.

A 51% attack does not have to correspond with a doubling in the hashpower. An existing pool or large mining operation can turn, which would not show a change in the total hash power.

A 51% does not necessarily require a re-org beyond 1 block. If I want to double spend, then it requires a large re-org, but if I just want to shut down the network, no re-org is required.

True there is no absolute protection beyond the "good guys" having 51% of hashing power.  Still making the blockchain "smarter" reduces the effectiveness of a 51% attack.

A 51% attack to perform a denial of service is utterly stupid use of resources.  Eventually it will be defeated and then network transaction will resume.

Using a pool for hashing power (or any public hashing power) to form a chain is easily detectable and likely will lead to a) people stop spending and b) people gaining more hashing power to fight off the attack.

The "nuclear" option for a 51% attack is one that is both massively destructive and undetecable until it happens.

Take private hashing power, build a chain in private, don't publish each block, fill the blocks w/ double spends, then publish the attack chain once it is longer than the "good chain" resulting in economic chaos, crashing bitcoin prices, and loss of confidence.


So you are right no protocol adjustment can make the network 51% "immune" but it doesn't have to be.  Bitcoin is already very hard to attack, and economical 51% attacks are likely impossible (cost of attack outweights direct profits from attack).   Adding block chain "smarts" would make it even harder to pull off large scale disruptive attacks.

[Luke-Jr]

I don't particularly have any incentive to respond to the scammers that I foiled, given the significant cost (in time) to do so. Nor do I have any financial loss or care particularly if people want to stop mining on Eligius because they were in on the scam (or any other reason). I will clarify that Eligius miners were not adversely impacted by this, and that the CLC mining involved only adding data that I hashed myself to my own transactions; and I was careful to ensure that nobody lost any confirmed CLC. If any Eligius miner wishes to inquire further, I will take the time to answer specific to-the-point questions which are signmessage'd with an active (ie, has mined in the past week) Eligius payout address that has earned at least 2000 TBC (5.36870912 BTC) over all time.

Eligius is a Bitcoin mining pool and I am, as always, committed to doing my best to contribute to and protect the Bitcoin ecosystem. Pyramid schemes built upon forks of the Bitcoin software ultimately discredit and harm Bitcoin's reputation. I hope CoiledCoin will be the last of such scams now that it is clear there are people (not just myself) willing to stand up to them. Namecoin alone demonstrates a legitimate, innovative use of Bitcoin technology, and while I don't personally agree with their ideals/goals, I see it as a good thing for Bitcoin and worth cooperating with.

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.

P.S. While the opposition seem to be very venemous and vocal, I have gotten a lot more positive support from a head-count perspective.

[drakahn]

it is not up to you to decide.

[bitlane]

I don't particularly have any incentive to respond to the scammers that I foiled, given the significant cost (in time) to do so. Nor do I have any financial loss or care particularly if people want to stop mining on Eligius because they were in on the scam (or any other reason). I will clarify that Eligius miners were not adversely impacted by this, and that the CLC mining involved only adding data that I hashed myself to my own transactions; and I was careful to ensure that nobody lost any confirmed CLC. If any Eligius miner wishes to inquire further, I will take the time to answer specific to-the-point questions which are signmessage'd with an active (ie, has mined in the past week) Eligius payout address that has earned at least 2000 TBC (5.36870912 BTC) over all time.

Eligius is a Bitcoin mining pool and I am, as always, committed to doing my best to contribute to and protect the Bitcoin ecosystem. Pyramid schemes built upon forks of the Bitcoin software ultimately discredit and harm Bitcoin's reputation. I hope CoiledCoin will be the last of such scams now that it is clear there are people (not just myself) willing to stand up to them. Namecoin alone demonstrates a legitimate, innovative use of Bitcoin technology, and while I don't personally agree with their ideals/goals, I see it as a good thing for Bitcoin and worth cooperating with.

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.

P.S. While the opposition seem to be very venemous and vocal, I have gotten a lot more positive support from a head-count perspective.

Expect to be reported to your ISP along with your local Police detachment. A Malicious attack with intent to disrupt another's service resulting in any form of vandalism in any way, shape or form will require investigating on their part with enough complaints and I know we will have enough.

You created this problem for yourself, so I would be prepared to suffer the backlash that comes along with it.

As a collective, enough of your personal information along with personal references have been obtained, which will also be contacted and informed of your exploits, so that they may judge for themselves, the measure of your resolve, especially as a so-called God-fearing boy.

This unfortunately is just the beginning. Expect to be under someone's microscope very soon and for what I can only hope, is a long, inconvenient while.

Your fan club.

[Stokkie]

it is not up to you to decide.

That exactly. In a free market anything should have a chance, supply and demand should decide whether it fails or not. Not someone like you who thinks, hmm well. I don't like this coin so lets shut it down. And to do so, you used resources from others and it doesn't matter whether they were affected by it or not. They didn't vote yes to it beforehand.

[casascius]

It's not centralized. It's democratic.

But it isn't democratic.  How do you vote?  How do you guarantee the vote is fair, accurate, and timely?  How do you ensure the people voting are informed?  How do you make sure the person who has the ACTUAL POWER to make the changes follows the will of "the people".

You vote by rejecting the chain you think is wrong.  You do this either by checkpointing the one you think is right, or allowing someone to do it on your behalf (e.g. by connecting to them).  You're motivated to checkpoint the one you think the rest of the world is likely to agree with, because if you're wrong, you've just made yourself a potential victim of double spending by anybody (who can spend their funds both in the majority chain, and the one you swallowed.)

Bottom line is, you always want to be with the majority opinion for your own security, and that alone will motivate people to come to a consensus on the basis of popularity alone.  A real attack chain that appears out of obscurity and rolls back a large number of blocks is going to have approximately 0% popularity and which is the right chain isn't going to be the subject of much debate.

Rejecting an attack chain isn't a battle of philosophical opinion.  It's not like right versus left, or Christians versus Muslims.  It's more like, what did we all observe.  If an attack happens, we'll know we observed an attack.  End of story.  It would be about as uncontroversial as asking the world whether the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11/2001.

They fell.  No serious percentage of the population disputes it.  No one is attempting to write a history book that says the original towers are still standing.

Unless some massive bandsaw slices the earth in half and splits the network and all the mining power in half for an extended period of time, a naturally occurring chain reorg 5+ blocks deep is statistically unlikely.  We should plan on that event being an attack, and have Bitcoin go into a safety mode, favoring an intact system that is temporarily unavailable over an available one that is useless because none of the information in it is accurate due to being under control of an attacker.

[Luke-Jr]

FWIW, I will prosecute any false reports to the full extent of law. And since I have not broken any laws, all such reports are false.

[2112]

I don't particularly have any incentive to respond to the scammers that I foiled, given the significant cost (in time) to do so. Nor do I have any financial loss or care particularly if people want to stop mining on Eligius because they were in on the scam (or any other reason). I will clarify that Eligius miners were not adversely impacted by this, and that the CLC mining involved only adding data that I hashed myself to my own transactions; and I was careful to ensure that nobody lost any confirmed CLC. If any Eligius miner wishes to inquire further, I will take the time to answer specific to-the-point questions which are signmessage'd with an active (ie, has mined in the past week) Eligius payout address that has earned at least 2000 TBC (5.36870912 BTC) over all time.

Eligius is a Bitcoin mining pool and I am, as always, committed to doing my best to contribute to and protect the Bitcoin ecosystem. Pyramid schemes built upon forks of the Bitcoin software ultimately discredit and harm Bitcoin's reputation. I hope CoiledCoin will be the last of such scams now that it is clear there are people (not just myself) willing to stand up to them. Namecoin alone demonstrates a legitimate, innovative use of Bitcoin technology, and while I don't personally agree with their ideals/goals, I see it as a good thing for Bitcoin and worth cooperating with.

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.

P.S. While the opposition seem to be very venemous and vocal, I have gotten a lot more positive support from a head-count perspective.

Godminer-Jr is warning you: if you have a nice little research chain it would be sad to see it unable to process transactions. It has been written on the tablets revealed on Mt.Sinai: Thou shalt have none other chains before mine (Deuteronomy 5:4-21).

[btc_artist]

So we should instill false and unjustified faith in random cryptocoin ponzi schemes?

Um, Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme as much as any other alt coin is.

[bitlane]

FWIW, I will prosecute any false reports to the full extent of law. And since I have not broken any laws, all such reports are false.

You obviously don't understand the law very well if you think that it stretches across country borders...LMAO.

Civil Law and Dogmatic Law are very different and not universal.

[2112]

FWIW, I will prosecute any false reports to the full extent of law. And since I have not broken any laws, all such reports are false.

Looking forward to it. More comedy gold will ensue. It will be like a mixture of Spanish Inquisition with Scientology's strategy of identifying and isolating Bitcoin-suppresives.

Instead of burning them at a stake the Bitcoin Inquisition will dessicate the apostates to death in the hot air coming out of the ATI graphic cards.

[casascius]

I am fine with it, not because I think it was morally right or wrong, but because I don't give a crap about alt coins.  No alt coins are serving any useful purpose other than as testnets for ideas that could be added to Bitcoin.  And attacking a testnet is not something I object to.  OP_EVAL is ultimately intended to protect against theft, but no one is trying to steal Coiled Coins.  The CPU mining coins are ultimately intended to solve a problem with GPU mining that I can't see even exists, otherwise we'd be discussing which Bitcoin block we should switch to CPU mining.

The natural consequence for the action though is that Luke will have less mining power at his disposal at the whim of those who disagree with him - an appropriate one under the circumstances.  It's democratic.

I am fine with the attack because I believe we need to work to beef up Bitcoin against 51% attacks.  I think we underestimate the likelihood of one being attempted, especially if Bitcoin surges in popularity, just like people underestimated the need to keep their wallets safe from malware and to avoid storing them on anonymous websites when bitcoins were only worth pennies.

Just the simple change having bitcoind shut down gracefully instead of accept a reorg over 5 blocks would make our network far more resilient.  I'm surprised few of us see that, but I'm glad Gavin does (afaik).  

[bulanula]

i don't think anyone should trust him with their hashing power

is it true its luke doing it to i0c and ixc now as well?

Seems like it and I hope he succeeds and gets rid of these crap scammer chains.

[drakahn]

how are they scams?

copycats sure, but it doesn't force anyone to buy them, if people do then that gives them value, if they do not then they do not, either way it doesn't hurt anyone outside of that.

[theymos]

it is not up to you to decide.

It's not up to him to decide what to put in his own transactions?

[DeathAndTaxes]

it is not up to you to decide.

It's not up to him to decide what to put in his own transactions?

It's not up to him to decide what chains are to live or die.

How is the chain dead?  Nobody can continue to mine it?  or nobody wants to mine it?

[exahash]

i don't think anyone should trust him with their hashing power

is it true its luke doing it to i0c and ixc now as well?

Seems like it and I hope he succeeds and gets rid of these crap scammer chains.

Alt chains are not necessarily scams!  They are first and foremost playgrounds for experimenting with new features.

If people assign value to them then so be it. 

If you don't see value in them, don't trade for them.

Attacking an alt chain just because you can attack it is not OK.

[markm]

I am not sure why this thread claims it is dead, maybe it just means the original post author has given up on it.

As far as I know the only pool to have so far included it in its roster of merged-mined chains is still slugging away at it and simply does not yet have enough hashing power to defeat the attack. If more people mine it, or join pools that are merged-mining it, at some point possibly honest miners will out-hash the attacker, who can then either be regarded as just a more aggressive than usual and somewhat cuckoo-type ponzi scheme profiteer doing the usual massive initial mining that is already so familiar in other chains.

The option possibly also remains of actually restarting at the genesis block but at the reached difficulty once enough hashing power is aboard.

Luke claims not to have used Eligius hash power in his attack, it seems possible that the reason an entire pool appeared to give up the fight was thinking they were up against Eligius not just one religious fanatic's personal hashing rigs.

-MarkM-

[Clipse]

I am not sure why this thread claims it is dead, maybe it just means the original post author has given up on it.

As far as I know the only pool to have so far included it in its roster of merged-mined chains is still slugging away at it and simply does not yet have enough hashing power to defeat the attack. If more people mine it, or join pools that are merged-mining it, at some point possibly honest miners will out-hash the attacker, who can then either be regarded as just a more aggressive than usual and somewhat cuckoo-type ponzi scheme profiteer doing the usual massive initial mining that is already so familiar in other chains.

The option possibly also remains of actually restarting at the genesis block but at the reached difficulty once enough hashing power is aboard.

Luke claims not to have used Eligius hash power in his attack, it seems possible that the reason an entire pool appeared to give up the fight was thinking they were up against Eligius not just one religious fanatic's personal hashing rigs.

-MarkM-

He had to use eligius pool because no way in hell does he have enough resources to outdo the blockchain since I combined 80gh onto it at one point and still couldnt compete and he sure as hell doesnt have the finances to top that hashrate albeit only 80gh.

[bulanula]

I am not sure why this thread claims it is dead, maybe it just means the original post author has given up on it.

As far as I know the only pool to have so far included it in its roster of merged-mined chains is still slugging away at it and simply does not yet have enough hashing power to defeat the attack. If more people mine it, or join pools that are merged-mining it, at some point possibly honest miners will out-hash the attacker, who can then either be regarded as just a more aggressive than usual and somewhat cuckoo-type ponzi scheme profiteer doing the usual massive initial mining that is already so familiar in other chains.

The option possibly also remains of actually restarting at the genesis block but at the reached difficulty once enough hashing power is aboard.

Luke claims not to have used Eligius hash power in his attack, it seems possible that the reason an entire pool appeared to give up the fight was thinking they were up against Eligius not just one religious fanatic's personal hashing rigs.

-MarkM-

He had to use eligius pool because no way in hell does he have enough resources to outdo the blockchain since I combined 80gh onto it at one point and still couldnt compete and he sure as hell doesnt have the finances to top that hashrate albeit only 80gh.

If you had the personal $$$ to get 80 ghash then how do you know he also doesn't have the $$$ needed as well ? Fail yet again. Please post concrete evidence next time before making random statements.

[casascius]

I am not sure why this thread claims it is dead, maybe it just means the original post author has given up on it.

As far as I know the only pool to have so far included it in its roster of merged-mined chains is still slugging away at it and simply does not yet have enough hashing power to defeat the attack. If more people mine it, or join pools that are merged-mining it, at some point possibly honest miners will out-hash the attacker, who can then either be regarded as just a more aggressive than usual and somewhat cuckoo-type ponzi scheme profiteer doing the usual massive initial mining that is already so familiar in other chains.

The option possibly also remains of actually restarting at the genesis block but at the reached difficulty once enough hashing power is aboard.

Why not just use a checkpoint to reject his alternate chain?  It still exists in your blockchain file afaik...  Then on, experiment with rejecting reorgs deeper than 5 blocks as a default option (where the other manually-selectable choices are to shutdown on attempted reorg, or to just reorg as usual).  Then Luke will be limited to rolling back no more than 5 blocks at a time, and you can consider any transaction 6 deep to be safe.

[Clipse]

I am not sure why this thread claims it is dead, maybe it just means the original post author has given up on it.

As far as I know the only pool to have so far included it in its roster of merged-mined chains is still slugging away at it and simply does not yet have enough hashing power to defeat the attack. If more people mine it, or join pools that are merged-mining it, at some point possibly honest miners will out-hash the attacker, who can then either be regarded as just a more aggressive than usual and somewhat cuckoo-type ponzi scheme profiteer doing the usual massive initial mining that is already so familiar in other chains.

The option possibly also remains of actually restarting at the genesis block but at the reached difficulty once enough hashing power is aboard.

Luke claims not to have used Eligius hash power in his attack, it seems possible that the reason an entire pool appeared to give up the fight was thinking they were up against Eligius not just one religious fanatic's personal hashing rigs.

-MarkM-

He had to use eligius pool because no way in hell does he have enough resources to outdo the blockchain since I combined 80gh onto it at one point and still couldnt compete and he sure as hell doesnt have the finances to top that hashrate albeit only 80gh.

If you had the personal $$$ to get 80 ghash then how do you know he also doesn't have the $$$ needed as well ? Fail yet again. Please post concrete evidence next time before making random statements.

The cat in the hat sat on the mat.

[Schwede65]

Why not just use a checkpoint to reject his alternate chain?  It still exists in your blockchain file afaik...  Then on, experiment with rejecting reorgs deeper than 5 blocks as a default option (where the other manually-selectable choices are to shutdown on attempted reorg, or to just reorg as usual).  Then Luke will be limited to rolling back no more than 5 blocks at a time, and you can consider any transaction 6 deep to be safe.

why not set the default-option to 1?

then all mined blocks are irreversible and save 

[jojkaart]

Why not just use a checkpoint to reject his alternate chain?  It still exists in your blockchain file afaik...  Then on, experiment with rejecting reorgs deeper than 5 blocks as a default option (where the other manually-selectable choices are to shutdown on attempted reorg, or to just reorg as usual).  Then Luke will be limited to rolling back no more than 5 blocks at a time, and you can consider any transaction 6 deep to be safe.

why not set the default-option to 1?

then all mined blocks are irreversible and save 

That would mean the chain would fork into 2 chains every few days spontaneously. Sometimes two different continuation blocks are found very close to each other and if everyone sticks to the one they got first, it means the network ends up split into two forks.

[Schwede65]

Why not just use a checkpoint to reject his alternate chain?  It still exists in your blockchain file afaik...  Then on, experiment with rejecting reorgs deeper than 5 blocks as a default option (where the other manually-selectable choices are to shutdown on attempted reorg, or to just reorg as usual).  Then Luke will be limited to rolling back no more than 5 blocks at a time, and you can consider any transaction 6 deep to be safe.

why not set the default-option to 1?

then all mined blocks are irreversible and save 

That would mean the chain would fork into 2 chains every few days spontaneously. Sometimes two different continuation blocks are found very close to each other and if everyone sticks to the one they got first, it means the network ends up split into two forks.

before the splitting: the networks has to decide: one is orphan and the other counts and is o.k.
when there are three, then 2 orphans, 1 o.k., whats the prob?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Why not just use a checkpoint to reject his alternate chain?  It still exists in your blockchain file afaik...  Then on, experiment with rejecting reorgs deeper than 5 blocks as a default option (where the other manually-selectable choices are to shutdown on attempted reorg, or to just reorg as usual).  Then Luke will be limited to rolling back no more than 5 blocks at a time, and you can consider any transaction 6 deep to be safe.

why not set the default-option to 1?

then all mined blocks are irreversible and save 

That would mean the chain would fork into 2 chains every few days spontaneously. Sometimes two different continuation blocks are found very close to each other and if everyone sticks to the one they got first, it means the network ends up split into two forks.

before the splitting: the networks has to decide: one is orphan and the other counts and is o.k.
when there are three, then 2 orphans, 1 o.k., whats the prob?

There is no "THE NETWORK" just individual nodes.

So if half the network (or some part of it) propogates block A and the protocol locks it and it can't change (the definition of a checkpoint).

The other half of the network (or some part of it) propogates block B and the procotcol locks it and it can't be changed (the definition of a checkpoint).

Now neither have of the network can reconcile w/ the other half.  Part of the network considers block A canonical and part believes B is and neither will trust the other half.

You can't have a system that checkpoints blocks after 1 block.

[gmaxwell]

Why not just use a checkpoint to reject his alternate chain?  It still exists in your blockchain file afaik...  Then on, experiment with rejecting reorgs deeper than 5 blocks as a default option (where the other manually-selectable choices are to shutdown on attempted reorg, or to just reorg as usual).  Then Luke will be limited to rolling back no more than 5 blocks at a time, and you can consider any transaction 6 deep to be safe.

Please stop saying that he's rolling back blocks.

He has not reversed any confirmed transactions or performed any double spends. He's just continually producing a longer chain that includes only his own blocks (and doesn't process transactions).   You can't use a checkpoint to cut him out because he'll just mine from the top of whatever chain is new can out pace that one too.. not unless you plan on distributing a checkpoint for every block, which makes the system not decentralized at all.


DeathAndTaxes is right about the automatic locking— but it's not just one block thats a problem. Say you lock after six.  Say I'm mr. mischievous and your network locks the chain after 6 blocks.  I get (beg, borrow, steal, build) a bunch of hash power and I mine 12 block— six forking left from some point, six forking right.  then I pick a node in Denver and one in Sydney, and I give each one of the forks... what was one currency is now two, as the two halves (closer to denver nodes vs closer to sydney nodes) will never come to agreement— and any coins that existed before can be independently spent on each half.  I can even target this attack to isolate single nodes or groups of nodes... and I can repeat it to fragment into ever smaller groups.

Locking at one would just make it trivially easy to pull off, but there is no automatic locking height which is technically safe.  You can invent fancier schemes, but they all fall to similar race attacks and allow devastating network partitioning.

[Minor]

In this case, Merged Mining was not a tool, BUT A WEAPON

Think what you wish of Luke-jr's actions, but we did learn something from the coiledcoin fiasco:
You can no longer rely on free hashing power from merged mining to instantly make a new alt/scam coin resilient right from launch.

Going forward, new alt-coins will have to use incompatible mining schemes, and maybe, just maybe, we'll start seeing some real innovation in alt-coins.

BTW one thing that I have been wondering about for a long time is why has none of the alt-coins addressed the issue of the sudden halving of the mining reward after a year or two?
Do they not expect their alt-coin to survive long enough to even reach the halving point? (I.e. they are intended as ponzi scams right from the start.)
Just do a progressive diminution of reward at every difficulty adjustment, it's not that hard.
Then we'll see what effect on mining the reduction of the reward might have.

I would even argue that we should try to change bitcoin itself to start using a progressive reduction of the mining reward to avoid the looming discontinuity.
We only need to convince the pool operators to switch, they collectively control more than half the hashing power.

[DeathAndTaxes]

In this case, Merged Mining was not a tool, BUT A WEAPON

Think what you wish of Luke-jr's actions, but we did learn something from the coiledcoin fiasco:
You can no longer rely on free hashing power from merged mining to instantly make a new alt/scam coin resilient right from launch.

Going forward, new alt-coins will have to use incompatible mining schemes, and maybe, just maybe, we'll start seeing some real innovation in alt-coins.

BTW one thing that I have been wondering about for a long time is why has none of the alt-coins addressed the issue of the sudden halving of the mining reward after a year or two?
Do they not expect their alt-coin to survive long enough to even reach the halving point? (I.e. they are intended as ponzi scams right from the start.)
Just do a progressive diminution of reward at every difficulty adjustment, it's not that hard.
Then we'll see what effect on mining the reduction of the reward might have.

I would even argue that we should try to change bitcoin itself to start using a progressive reduction of the mining reward to avoid the looming discontinuity.
We only need to convince the pool operators to switch, they collectively control more than half the hashing power.

Well no you would need to convince 51% of users to update their clients.  They would see the altered reward blocks as invalid and reject them and continue to look for valid blocks.  You are talking about a breaking fork in the Bitcoin network.  Those remaining on old clients would only see "old style" blocks as valid.  Thus some miners would remain to continue that chain, support those users, and collect those rewards.  The miners and users who switch would be on a seperate incompatible network than Bitcoin.

You will never see breaking changes like that.

[CoinHunter]

The sad thing is , the bitcoin proponents act like this exact thing can't happen to Bitcoin. It is simply a matter of scale. Someone hacks deepbit, someone gets upset at Gavin doing some changes (Luke already has threatened along these lines in developer chats) and expect your Bitcoins to be heading towards $0 USD.

Bitcoin is inherently insecure, all these altcoins (including SolidCoin) have pinpointed most of the flaws. Only one chain (SolidCoin 2) has done anything to address the most serious security issues and that is why we are the only alt chain which hasn't had a major attack on it. Luke and co continue to attempt to lie and attack SolidCoin and get nowhere. It's pretty funny all the fail.

No major investmest is going to happen in Bitcoin because it's inherently insecure. It's like a bank telling it's customers that their money is safe purely because they have 49 guards with guns. Then 51 criminals with guns get together and steals the money. With no other security in place it is just a matter of time before it is attacked. Anyone telling you otherwise is merely trying to scam you by selling security snake oil. The biggest scammers are the people like Luke-Jr and gmaxwell who imply this cannot happen in Bitcoin.

[ineededausername]

The sad thing is , the bitcoin proponents act like this exact thing can't happen to Bitcoin. It is simply a matter of scale. Someone hacks deepbit, someone gets upset at Gavin doing some changes (Luke already has threatened along these lines in developer chats) and expect your Bitcoins to be heading towards $0 USD.

Bitcoin is inherently insecure, all these altcoins (including SolidCoin) have pinpointed most of the flaws. Only one chain (SolidCoin 2) has done anything to address the most serious security issues and that is why we are the only alt chain which hasn't had a major attack on it. Luke and co continue to attempt to lie and attack SolidCoin and get nowhere. It's pretty funny all the fail.

No major investmest is going to happen in Bitcoin because it's inherently insecure. It's like a bank telling it's customers that their money is safe purely because they have 49 guards with guns. Then 51 criminals with guns get together and steals the money. With no other security in place it is just a matter of time before it is attacked.

because everyone knows your centralized architecture is much better, right?
Hey, it worked for the Fed. 

Your users must enjoy the lottery you built in to your shitcoin.  I also heard that they're stealing money from the CPF.  But whatever, it's not much worse than the Fed, right? 

[CoinHunter]

because everyone knows your centralized architecture is much better, right?
Hey, it worked for the Fed. 

Your users must enjoy the lottery you built in to your shitcoin.  I also heard that they're stealing money from the CPF.  But whatever, it's not much worse than the Fed, right? 

Since you're not a programmer or network engineer you probably don't realize a few things.

If you think SolidCoin is centralized then Bitcoin is even more centralized. Bitcoin has 3 pools which create 90+% of the blocks. SolidCoin has nowhere near this distribution of block creation being centralized.

Game, set, match. I guess.

[Minor]

I would even argue that we should try to change bitcoin itself to start using a progressive reduction of the mining reward to avoid the looming discontinuity.
We only need to convince the pool operators to switch, they collectively control more than half the hashing power.

Well no you would need to convince 51% of users to update their clients.  They would see the altered reward blocks as invalid and reject them and continue to look for valid blocks.  You are talking about a breaking fork in the Bitcoin network.  Those remaining on old clients would only see "old style" blocks as valid.  Thus some miners would remain to continue that chain, support those users, and collect those rewards.  The miners and users who switch would be on a seperate incompatible network than Bitcoin.

You will never see breaking changes like that.

You need 51% of the hashing power, not 51% of the users.
If you get that 51% from the pools, users that have not switched will see only "invalid" blocks and will soon switch to the new client.

[casascius]

DeathAndTaxes is right about the automatic locking— but it's not just one block thats a problem. Say you lock after six.  Say I'm mr. mischievous and your network locks the chain after 6 blocks.  I get (beg, borrow, steal, build) a bunch of hash power and I mine 12 block— six forking left from some point, six forking right.  then I pick a node in Denver and one in Sydney, and I give each one of the forks... what was one currency is now two, as the two halves (closer to denver nodes vs closer to sydney nodes) will never come to agreement— and any coins that existed before can be independently spent on each half.  I can even target this attack to isolate single nodes or groups of nodes... and I can repeat it to fragment into ever smaller groups.

Locking at one would just make it trivially easy to pull off, but there is no automatic locking height which is technically safe.  You can invent fancier schemes, but they all fall to similar race attacks and allow devastating network partitioning.

One of the proposed criteria for deciding on the value of blocks is to favor blocks that have been seen by major stakeholders.  That would include exchanges, known pools, operators of known services, who would sign and somehow distribute messages simply acknowledging having seen a block with hash X and that it is the first block it has seen at that height.  (Such messages of course would have to be out-of-band of the p2p network as we know it.)

An attack chain prepared in secret would never be able to get signed endorsements like this no matter how it was introduced into the network.

"Coiled Coin" could try this out, with its creator adding a feature to the P2P protocol that passes around an "I saw this block" message if it's signed by a trusted person, and adding an option where trusted keys can be added.  A threshold would be defined, where a block not seen by a percentage of trusted people cannot reorg and replace blocks seen by a percentage who have.

Luke can still drive the difficulty of "Coiled Coin" to the moon with empty blocks, but won't be able to replace legitimate blocks mined by others that contain transactions.

[ThiagoCMC]

because everyone knows your centralized architecture is much better, right?
Hey, it worked for the Fed. 

Your users must enjoy the lottery you built in to your shitcoin.  I also heard that they're stealing money from the CPF.  But whatever, it's not much worse than the Fed, right? 

Since you're not a programmer or network engineer you probably don't realize a few things.

If you think SolidCoin is centralized then Bitcoin is even more centralized. Bitcoin has 3 pools which create 90+% of the blocks. SolidCoin has nowhere near this distribution of block creation being centralized.

Game, set, match. I guess.

What's your point?! The blocks are of the users of the pools.
You're nonsense.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I would even argue that we should try to change bitcoin itself to start using a progressive reduction of the mining reward to avoid the looming discontinuity.
We only need to convince the pool operators to switch, they collectively control more than half the hashing power.

Well no you would need to convince 51% of users to update their clients.  They would see the altered reward blocks as invalid and reject them and continue to look for valid blocks.  You are talking about a breaking fork in the Bitcoin network.  Those remaining on old clients would only see "old style" blocks as valid.  Thus some miners would remain to continue that chain, support those users, and collect those rewards.  The miners and users who switch would be on a seperate incompatible network than Bitcoin.

You will never see breaking changes like that.

You need 51% of the hashing power, not 51% of the users.
If you get that 51% from the pools, users that have not switched will see only "invalid" blocks and will soon switch to the new client.

No they wouldn't to the user running the legacy client they would see hashing rate falling 51% but still get blocks and confirmations by the remaining 49%.  Miners who refused to switch would still sign blocks for the "old bitcoin" network, clients would see those blocks as valid and the network would continue on as "normal".

It would be those who made a breaking change which were on their own alt-Bitcoin network.  It would be no different than if today you updated miner code to produce a block w/ 100K BTC coinbase reward.

[k9quaint]

because everyone knows your centralized architecture is much better, right?
Hey, it worked for the Fed. 

Your users must enjoy the lottery you built in to your shitcoin.  I also heard that they're stealing money from the CPF.  But whatever, it's not much worse than the Fed, right? 

Since you're not a programmer or network engineer you probably don't realize a few things.

If you think SolidCoin is centralized then Bitcoin is even more centralized. Bitcoin has 3 pools which create 90+% of the blocks. SolidCoin has nowhere near this distribution of block creation being centralized.

Game, set, match. I guess.

You don't need to be an engineer to realize that Solidcoin2 is controlled by a single individual. There is nothing a user of Solidcoin2 can do about this.

Nor do you need to be an engineer to realize that Bitcoin pools are comprised of many individuals. Those individuals can leave those pools at any time and the pool owners will be rendered powerless. Could the pool owners act in concert to disrupt the protocol? Yes. Does all the power in Bitcoin still lie with the users of Bitcoin? Yes.

In theory, all bitcoin users can act in concert to change the blockchain any time they see fit.
Users of Solidcoin2 exist at the whim of 1 man.

P.S. You guessed wrong.

[k9quaint]

Those individuals can leave those pools at any time and the pool owners will be rendered powerless.

That is the theory in practice next to no one shifts a pool once they are settled on it as this debacle has shown.

Untrue. Users have left pools that provided shoddy or unreliable service. Those pools have withered and died. Just skim through the pool sub-forum of the mining section and you will find a few.

There are certainly improvements that can be made to the pool system in bitcoin, of that there is no doubt. But they are improvements in human behavior, not in computing protocols. For instance, pools that grow large enough to reach 25% of total hash power could close their pools to more work.

[Graet]

might i suggest the title be changed to
Rouge Pool Ops are now the Alt Currency Police

This has all been brought about by one poolop, please do not tar us all with the same brush
thanks
Graet

[kano]

might i suggest the title be changed to
Rouge Pool Ops are now the Alt Currency Police

This has all been brought about by one poolop, please do not tar us all with the same brush
thanks
Graet

However, apparently slush showed support for Luke-jr's actions also ...

... and go back a page and you will find even theymos supporting it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56791.msg678275#msg678275

[k9quaint]

Those individuals can leave those pools at any time and the pool owners will be rendered powerless.

That is the theory in practice next to no one shifts a pool once they are settled on it as this debacle has shown.

Untrue. Users have left pools that provided shoddy or unreliable service. Those pools have withered and died. Just skim through the pool sub-forum of the mining section and you will find a few.

There are certainly improvements that can be made to the pool system in bitcoin, of that there is no doubt. But they are improvements in human behavior, not in computing protocols. For instance, pools that grow large enough to reach 25% of total hash power could close their pools to more work.

Yeah when it affected the coin return anything else a pool operator does is fair game it seems for these people and I actually now want to see one get larger than 50% so I can watch these same little weasels whine, complain and squirm over it...

Again, why would users whine, complain or squirm? A few need only change the ordering of URLs so the largest pool is no longer their primary. The solution is so simple, and has already been effected in a continuous fashion by many individuals to prevent Deepbit from "controlling" Bitcoin. Not that I have anything against Deepbit, they simply offer an excellent service and are the easy choice for first time miners.

[bitlane]

If you had the personal $$$ to get 80 ghash then how do you know he also doesn't have the $$$ needed as well ? Fail yet again. Please post concrete evidence next time before making random statements.

Actually, I've read his Family Blog and everything points to him being as broke as a joke......quite pathetic actually, so I can see his concerns with maintaining BTC's value, as he must use it to feed his family. It was some of most entertaining 'Coupon Clipping' and Religion garbage that I had ever come across.
I downloaded full mirrors of all of his online personal websites, for future reference.

Unfortunately, everything now seems to be removed from the net, as too many people were given the opportunity to get a glimpse inside the life of such a self-righteous Bible thumper.
He seems to be living on love, prayers and donations from the rest of his family (although with a boycott list, as to which products he will not accept as gifts).
That's right - a real man who let's the rest of his friends & family pay to raise his kids.....CLASSIC. 80 ghash, did you say ?

[BTCHero]

http://eligius.st/~artefact2/

Doesn't seem like this has affected his hashrate at all. 

[CoinHunter]

You don't need to be an engineer to realize that Solidcoin2 is controlled by a single individual. There is nothing a user of Solidcoin2 can do about this.

And what do you base this claim on? I can do the same thing, Bitcoin is controlled by one person. Does it make it true? Usually you need to give the evidence for such bold claims.

SolidCoin's trust nodes aren't operated only by me, others have wallets now that cannot be taken away from them. They are forever out there to be used to sign blocks.

On top of that we have multiple pools creating half the blocks. So if we do the maths :-

SolidCoin . Upto 10 trust nodes can currently operate and create half the blocks (which contain no SC). The other half of the blocks are solved by everyone, and the current breakdown you'd say about 4 big pools or solo operators are there. That's 14 "nodes" solving the majority of SolidCoin blocks.

Bitcoin. Upto 3 nodes creating 90% of the blocks. Everyone else fights over 10% scraps. Since bitcoin security revolves around at least 51% of the power being in "good hands" and 3 people have 90% of the power it puts bitcoins security in a precarious position. Only 2 people in Bitcoin need to decide or have it decided for them (hacked) and bitcoins security is no more.

Bitcoin is so much more centralized than SolidCoin it isn't funny. You have some incorrect belief there is only one person mining or that has control of SolidCoin. Hopefully this shows it's more than one, and less centralization than Bitcoin. Finally there are now 4 developers working on the source code and able to work on it without needing "permission". Everyone else is able to submit pull requests.

https://github.com/solidcoin/solidcoin

If you want to have an opinion on SolidCoin at least make sure it's based in reality and factual eh.

[Luke-Jr]

If you want to have an opinion on SolidCoin at least make sure it's based in reality and factual eh.

Like the fact that #SolidCoin operators (in this case, yourself) kickban people for no reason whatsoever?

[g2x3k]

might i suggest the title be changed to
Rouge Pool Ops are now the Alt Currency Police

This has all been brought about by one poolop, please do not tar us all with the same brush
thanks
Graet

gonna have to vote for that... in end is up to ppl picking a pool & poolop they feel good about

and everyone haveing a go at one, thats to easy this is a p2p experiment and what failed ?... how many of you have tried contacting btc pools and get them to adapt clc as alt chain to improve its hashrate and thereby makeing the attack impossible ?... bit late now i guess since he prob holds quite a bit but option been there but ppl are busy hunting luke-jr facebook profile

my own opion is as said on btc-e chat ealier, theres no need for more gpu coins as it is now i think the efforts would be better spent improveing upon bitcoin, wich code spreads to rest of the altchains and if need shuld arise for alternative gpu later on it gotta be started in coop with other chains to secure a just decent hashrate from start to avoid early apdoption & 51% issues, major job and only worth if brings enough experimental features

dosnt excuse playing police but just keep in mind this is p2p and only have power relative to what you take & give

[k9quaint]

You don't need to be an engineer to realize that Solidcoin2 is controlled by a single individual. There is nothing a user of Solidcoin2 can do about this.

And what do you base this claim on? I can do the same thing, Bitcoin is controlled by one person. Does it make it true? Usually you need to give the evidence for such bold claims.

SolidCoin's trust nodes aren't operated only by me, others have wallets now that cannot be taken away from them. They are forever out there to be used to sign blocks.

On top of that we have multiple pools creating half the blocks. So if we do the maths :-

SolidCoin . Upto 10 trust nodes can currently operate and create half the blocks (which contain no SC). The other half of the blocks are solved by everyone, and the current breakdown you'd say about 4 big pools or solo operators are there. That's 14 "nodes" solving the majority of SolidCoin blocks.

Bitcoin. Upto 3 nodes creating 90% of the blocks. Everyone else fights over 10% scraps. Since bitcoin security revolves around at least 51% of the power being in "good hands" and 3 people have 90% of the power it puts bitcoins security in a precarious position. Only 2 people in Bitcoin need to decide or have it decided for them (hacked) and bitcoins security is no more.

Bitcoin is so much more centralized than SolidCoin it isn't funny. You have some incorrect belief there is only one person mining or that has control of SolidCoin. Hopefully this shows it's more than one, and less centralization than Bitcoin. Finally there are now 4 developers working on the source code and able to work on it without needing "permission". Everyone else is able to submit pull requests.

https://github.com/solidcoin/solidcoin

If you want to have an opinion on SolidCoin at least make sure it's based in reality and factual eh.

The trusted nodes may not be "operated" by you currently, but they are instantiated by you. You can take them away just as quick. It doesn't matter if there are one or ten nodes if you designate what is and what is not trusted. What happens when one of your "trusted" nodes attacks your protocol? You hit the switch and kick it out. What happens when one merely insults you, or says something you don't like? Depends on your mood I suppose.

Your blockchain isn't fixed, it is whatever you want it to be, whenever you want it to be. Users are forced to upgrade by your enforcer nodes, and your enforcer nodes can be decertified by a code update (which your users must adopt or they will be cast out of the blockchain).

4 devs is better than one. Unfortunately, your track record of playing well with others is somewhat bleak. As long as the four of you keep mining, Solidcoin2 will still be alive so there is always hope.

[makomk]

Your blockchain isn't fixed, it is whatever you want it to be, whenever you want it to be. Users are forced to upgrade by your enforcer nodes, and your enforcer nodes can be decertified by a code update (which your users must adopt or they will be cast out of the blockchain).

There's a slight error in your logic here. Nodes can only be forced to adopt an update if CodeHunter's "enforcer nodes" go along with it, and they've got no reason to do this for an update that takes away their power. Assuming that those nodes are genuinely independent of CoinHunter, he doesn't actually have much more control over SolidCoin than the Bitcoin developers have over Bitcoin - if they release a major change and the mining pools go along with it, users pretty much have to go along too.

[Schwede65]

Since you're not a programmer or network engineer you probably don't realize a few things.

If you think SolidCoin is centralized then Bitcoin is even more centralized. Bitcoin has 3 pools which create 90+% of the blocks. SolidCoin has nowhere near this distribution of block creation being centralized.

Game, set, match. I guess.

you may be a programmer, but basic arithmetics are not your favorite ability:

total btc-hashrate: ~ 9,000 GH / atm
deepbit + btc-guild + slush: ~ 6,000 GH / atm

now we calculate the hashing-percentage of the big three: ~ 66.67 % / atm  

Edit: it's much, but far away from 90+%

[k9quaint]

Your blockchain isn't fixed, it is whatever you want it to be, whenever you want it to be. Users are forced to upgrade by your enforcer nodes, and your enforcer nodes can be decertified by a code update (which your users must adopt or they will be cast out of the blockchain).

There's a slight error in your logic here. Nodes can only be forced to adopt an update if CodeHunter's "enforcer nodes" go along with it, and they've got no reason to do this for an update that takes away their power. Assuming that those nodes are genuinely independent of CoinHunter, he doesn't actually have much more control over SolidCoin than the Bitcoin developers have over Bitcoin - if they release a major change and the mining pools go along with it, users pretty much have to go along too.

Let us presume that enforcer node X is compromised and beings attacking the Solidcoin2 network. Coinhunter issues a code update to strip that node of its enforcer status. Some portion of the user base implements this code update, most critically exchanges and pools. Solidcoin has enough enforcer nodes under his direct control to continue the protocol processing until the other enforcers update. The remaining enforcer nodes now have a choice; they can run the old "insecure" client that allows them to be "attacked" by node X, or they can update to the newer more "secure" version.

If they don't update, they will be left behind and eventually become a liability themselves. They can't write their own source to fork because of the following line in license.txt:

"We reserve the right to cancel this open source license to any project which has a negative impact on the SolidCoin network or SolidCoin users."

Of course "negative impact" is defined by Realsolid, and he owns the copyrights to all the code.

[DeathAndTaxes]

total btc-hashrate: ~ 9,000 GH / atm
deepbit + btc-guild + slush: ~ 6,000 GH / atm

now we calculate the hashing-percentage of the big three: ~ 66.67 % / atm 

Edit: it's much, but far away from 90+%

The good news is this trend has been downward at one point Deepbit alone was almost 50% (about 5TH on 10TH network).  Hopefully we reach a point where the big three combined are 49% or less.

[k9quaint]

Since you're not a programmer or network engineer you probably don't realize a few things.

If you think SolidCoin is centralized then Bitcoin is even more centralized. Bitcoin has 3 pools which create 90+% of the blocks. SolidCoin has nowhere near this distribution of block creation being centralized.

Game, set, match. I guess.

you may be a programmer, but basic arithmetics are not your favorite ability:

total btc-hashrate: ~ 9,000 GH / atm
deepbit + btc-guild + slush: ~ 6,000 GH / atm

now we calculate the hashing-percentage of the big three: ~ 66.67 % / atm  

Edit: it's much, but far away from 90+%

Away with you and your facts!! /jazzhands /bugeyes

[Gavin Andresen]

My prediction for 2012:

Peer-to-peer pool technology will mature (will get easier to install and run), and p2pool's will be more than 25% of bitcoin hashing power by the end of the year.

[k9quaint]

My prediction for 2012:

Peer-to-peer pool technology will mature (will get easier to install and run), and p2pool's will be more than 25% of bitcoin hashing power by the end of the year.

But does the end of the year coincide with the end of the world?
Can you trace your ancestry back to the Mayans?
Will the 49ers beat the Saints?

[CoinHunter]

If you want to have an opinion on SolidCoin at least make sure it's based in reality and factual eh.

Like the fact that #SolidCoin operators (in this case, yourself) kickban people for no reason whatsoever?

Pot , kettle? A day before you were banned from #solidcoin for being a liar and thief.

* You were kicked from #eligius by gmaxwell (pretty sure luke would have wanted this: sorry, no scamcoins, please.)

[Luke-Jr]

you were banned from #solidcoin for being a liar and thief.

This is nothing but slander.

[CoinHunter]

Since you're not a programmer or network engineer you probably don't realize a few things.

If you think SolidCoin is centralized then Bitcoin is even more centralized. Bitcoin has 3 pools which create 90+% of the blocks. SolidCoin has nowhere near this distribution of block creation being centralized.

Game, set, match. I guess.

you may be a programmer, but basic arithmetics are not your favorite ability:

total btc-hashrate: ~ 9,000 GH / atm
deepbit + btc-guild + slush: ~ 6,000 GH / atm

now we calculate the hashing-percentage of the big three: ~ 66.67 % / atm  

Edit: it's much, but far away from 90+%

Well I think it varies day to day what the exact makeup of the larger 3 or 4 pools is. Either way, there is less centralization in SolidCoin than bitcoin when using these metrics. We have a much wider distribution of block creation and decentralization than Bitcoin.

[gmaxwell]

I congratulate people like gmaxwell ( responsible for the LTC TX spam attack ) and Luke-Jr.

I had nothing to do with the litecoin dustspam attack, except for potentially forseeing part of it as a consequence of the anti-dos rules being unchanged from bitcoin and totally out of wack with the low currency value and fast chain speed (though the fact that the attacker would send to pre-existing addresses in order to slow down wallets wasn't even something I'd guessed would happen), and I posted patches to correct it ahead of the attack.

I'd appreciate it if you edited your message to retract this claim, as well as any other places where you've made it.

Thanks.

[RandyFolds]

you were banned from #solidcoin for being a liar and thief.

This is nothing but slander.

Better add it to the lawsuit. That's what, like, a hundred billion dollars in damages and counting now, right?

[kano]

I congratulate people like gmaxwell ( responsible for the LTC TX spam attack ) and Luke-Jr.

I had nothing to do with the litecoin dustspam attack, except for potentially forseeing part of it as a consequence of the anti-dos rules being unchanged from bitcoin and totally out of wack with the low currency value and fast chain speed (though the fact that the attacker would send to pre-existing addresses in order to slow down wallets wasn't even something I'd guessed would happen), and I posted patches to correct it ahead of the attack.

I'd appreciate it if you edited your message to retract this claim, as well as any other places where you've made it.

Thanks.

However, the attack occurred within an hour of you posting about it in the forum ...

[gmaxwell]

* You were kicked from #eligius by gmaxwell (pretty sure luke would have wanted this: sorry, no scamcoins, please.)

Well you came in blablah about coiledcoin, it was trolling as far as I could tell.   I'm not very active in #eligius but luke wasn't around at the time.   I got a talking to as a result of that kick— he's a lot more tolerant of casual trolling than I am, and I wasn't aware that he'd been hanging out in your channel.  Sorry about that.

[dirtycat]

My prediction for 2012:

Peer-to-peer pool technology will mature (will get easier to install and run), and p2pool's will be more than 25% of bitcoin hashing power by the end of the year.

Fingers crossed that you're correct.

Why anyone is still mining at these pools is a mystery to me.. I was able to get p2pool up and running in less than 10 minutes.  Def gonna stay with it.. much better than any pool I have tried.

[CoinHunter]

Let us presume that enforcer node X is compromised and beings attacking the Solidcoin2 network. Coinhunter issues a code update to strip that node of its enforcer status. Some portion of the user base implements this code update, most critically exchanges and pools. Solidcoin has enough enforcer nodes under his direct control to continue the protocol processing until the other enforcers update. The remaining enforcer nodes now have a choice; they can run the old "insecure" client that allows them to be "attacked" by node X, or they can update to the newer more "secure" version.

It will take more than a single trust wallet to get out in the wild to have any severe impact on the SolidCoin network. If any security holes appear they will of course be quickly taken care of. That is what SolidCoin is known for, security.

If they don't update, they will be left behind and eventually become a liability themselves. They can't write their own source to fork because of the following line in license.txt:

"We reserve the right to cancel this open source license to any project which has a negative impact on the SolidCoin network or SolidCoin users."

Of course "negative impact" is defined by Realsolid, and he owns the copyrights to all the code.

Just because I own the copyright is irrelevant. Someone owns the major bitcoin domains which control the code most people run on. Someone owns the sites and content we are posting here. It isn't us. It's already stated that I will pass all my code ownership to the NPO when it is setup. Including any SolidCoin wallets, code, domains, etc used. If you want to get into this "well RealSolid owns this so blah blah" we can go on all day with Bitcoin too. It's a strawman

[CoinHunter]

Well you came in blablah about coiledcoin, it was trolling as far as I could tell.   I'm not very active in #eligius but luke wasn't around at the time.   I got a talking to as a result of that kick— he's a lot more tolerant of casual trolling than I am, and I wasn't aware that he'd been hanging out in your channel.  Sorry about that.

This is nothing but slander!

[gmaxwell]

However, the attack occurred within an hour of you posting about it in the forum ...

I don't think I even heard about it for several days later, are you sure about that?

And what I posted about wasn't even the attack that actually happened. Though I'd love to take credit realizing that lots of inputs would gum up the wallet, which is so obvious in retrospect,  what I was pointing out was that the fees were out of wack.  Moreover, I was interested in finding out if it was easier to influence chain fee policy in a chain which was mostly solomined (as ltc was at the time).    At the time the attack irritated me as much as anyone else— it screwed up my mining psychology experiment by providing a non-selfish motivation for changing the fee schedule.

Here is the thread for anyone interested https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51915.0.  I don't think I ever saw any of the posts in it after the first until just now. I knew about the attacks from IRC (and from seeing my own blockchain copies grow).

Unlikely Luke I don't think Litecoin is a scam. It may be ultimately pointless, as Art convinced me when I suggested scrypt POW in #bitcoin-dev a long time before litecoin— the cpu pow really means that only criminals can mine it profitably (perhaps ultimately a fate for Bitcoin too), and the increased block rate makes it actually 4x less lite than bitcoin when you have a pruning node.  But I've never had anything against worse than those reservations against it, and have defended it against people trying to spread "dark pool fud" here.

[k9quaint]

Just because I own the copyright is irrelevant. Someone owns the major bitcoin domains which control the code most people run on. Someone owns the sites and content we are posting here. It isn't us. It's already stated that I will pass all my code ownership to the NPO when it is setup. Including any SolidCoin wallets, code, domains, etc used. If you want to get into this "well RealSolid owns this so blah blah" we can go on all day with Bitcoin too. It's a strawman

Actually, you owning the copyright makes you the rightsholder. You dictate the terms of use to anyone who uses the code. Those terms are spelled out in license.txt. Finally, license.txt says you reserve the right to revoke usage of the solidcoin codebase from anyone.

As for copyright and bitcoin, the bitcoin code is distributed with the following license:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

Once I download the bitcoin code, I can do with it as I wish, as long as I include that notice at the top of the files.
Solidcoin code and all of its derivatives will always be under the control of Coinhunter (unless the license changes).

[CoinHunter]

Once I download the bitcoin code, I can do with it as I wish, as long as I include that notice at the top of the files.
Solidcoin code and all of its derivatives will always be under the control of Coinhunter (unless the license changes).

And what's the point of you being able to do anything with Bitcoin code? What do you want to do? If you want to do anything non malicious you have free right to use SolidCoin code provided it's a SolidCoin orientated project (ie not a chain fork). Revoking a source license for "no reason" wouldn't be very good PR would it. Revoking a malicious project would be what 99.999% of people want. That's democracy.

The point remains someone controls the actual bitcoin code that MOST people download and use. Regardless of the license. It was the same with SolidCoin v1, anyone could have forked it but what is the point when every google search and whatnot just heads to solidcoin.info ? Just because that's stated a little more clearly in the new solidcoin license doesn't change the actual reality.

[k9quaint]

Once I download the bitcoin code, I can do with it as I wish, as long as I include that notice at the top of the files.
Solidcoin code and all of its derivatives will always be under the control of Coinhunter (unless the license changes).

And what's the point of you being able to do anything with Bitcoin code? What do you want to do?

I can fork it. I can improve it. I can attack it. I can experiment with it. I can run which ever version of it I like. It is called freedom.

If you want to do anything non malicious you have free right to use SolidCoin code provided it's a SolidCoin orientated project (ie not a chain fork). Revoking a source license for "no reason" wouldn't be very good PR would it. Revoking a malicious project would be what 99.999% of people want. That's democracy.

If that power was in the hands of the people, it would be democracy. Unfortunately, you are head of Solidcoin for life and nobody voted you in. That is a dictatorship, not a democracy. You also define the term "non malicious" and you might consider any action counter to your wishes at the time a malicious one. Bad PR hasn't stopped you in the past from making choices, I don't see it stopping you in the future.

The point remains someone controls the actual bitcoin code that MOST people download and use. Regardless of the license. It was the same with SolidCoin v1, anyone could have forked it but what is the point when every google search and whatnot just heads to solidcoin.info ? Just because that's stated a little more clearly in the new solidcoin license doesn't change the actual reality.

No, they don't control bitcoin. That is what you fail to understand. The users of bitcoin are free to do with it what they like. They can run it in any fashion, they can use any derivative work they choose. They can get their bitcoin code or binaries from competing sources. They can make their own mods and offer that as a competing client.

All Solidcoin derivative works are subject to your whim as you retain all rights to code & binary usage.

That is the difference and it is a major one. Perhaps Solidcoin2 needs this additional protection, who knows.

[Syke]

The point remains someone controls the actual bitcoin code that MOST people download and use. Regardless of the license. It was the same with SolidCoin v1, anyone could have forked it but what is the point when every google search and whatnot just heads to solidcoin.info ? Just because that's stated a little more clearly in the new solidcoin license doesn't change the actual reality.

The reality is you control SolidCoin. You control the license. You control the source code. You control the wallets that run the control nodes. You control SolidCoin 100%.

[NASDAQEnema]

Once I download the bitcoin code, I can do with it as I wish, as long as I include that notice at the top of the files.
Solidcoin code and all of its derivatives will always be under the control of Coinhunter (unless the license changes).

And what's the point of you being able to do anything with Bitcoin code?

I have my gun right here. I no shoot you. What you want it fo'?

What do you want to do? If you want to do anything non malicious you have free right to use SolidCoin code provided it's a SolidCoin orientated project (ie not a chain fork).

Are you still beating your wife?

Revoking a source license for "no reason" wouldn't be very good PR would it.

Why would I lie? Don't you trust me? Free candy. Come to my van.

Revoking a malicious project would be what 99.999% of people want. That's democracy.

NO! What the people want is for themselves and not you to decide whether a project is malicious. I smell another Luke Jr.

You people actually support the financial architecture we are trying to escape. Next word, I bet, is going to be technocrat. You and all the idiot finance journalists cheering on the appointment "of those who know what's best for us".

The point remains someone controls the actual bitcoin code that MOST people download and use. Regardless of the license.

Um. no. because no.

It was the same with SolidCoin v1, anyone could have forked it but what is the point when every google search and whatnot just heads to solidcoin.info ? Just because that's stated a little more clearly in the new solidcoin license doesn't change the actual reality.

By that logic, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Stumble Upon should not exist. What's the point? Reminds me of Michael Dell refusing to build machines with AMD CPUs.

Diversity leads to stability. Efficiency leads to paranoia. Fer chrissake.

[illpoet]

thank you enema. i'm completely lost on most of what's going on in this thread, i thought it was about lukejr, but now its about solidcoin? either way that last post made me laugh really hard.

[bitlane]

you were banned from #solidcoin for being a liar and thief.

This is nothing but slander.

It's actually Libel....but thanks for playing, Sherlock.


I am still actually waiting to hear how the 'personal equipment' vs 'pool resources' thing plays out....and I still haven't got a response to this:

If you had the personal $$$ to get 80 ghash then how do you know he also doesn't have the $$$ needed as well ? Fail yet again. Please post concrete evidence next time before making random statements.

Actually, I've read his Family Blog and everything points to him being as broke as a joke......quite pathetic actually, so I can see his concerns with maintaining BTC's value, as he must use it to feed his family. It was some of most entertaining 'Coupon Clipping' and Religion garbage that I had ever come across.
I downloaded full mirrors of all of his online personal websites, for future reference.

Unfortunately, everything now seems to be removed from the net, as too many people were given the opportunity to get a glimpse inside the life of such a self-righteous Bible thumper.
He seems to be living on love, prayers and donations from the rest of his family (although with a boycott list, as to which products he will not accept as gifts).
That's right - a real man who let's the rest of his friends & family pay to raise his kids.....CLASSIC. 80 ghash, did you say ?

bulanula ?

[ArtForz]

Anyone with a copy of the CLC blockchain and bitcoin-utils can easily verify that the bitcoin parent blocks used to attack CLC belong to eligius. Personal equipment my ass.

[3phase]

Anyone with a copy of the CLC blockchain and bitcoin-utils can easily verify that the bitcoin parent blocks used to attack CLC belong to eligius. Personal equipment my ass.

As far as I understand, this is clearly the case, however Luke claims that creating a custom coinbase to include CLC in the merged mining of his pool, does not have anything to do with Eligius miners. It's not the first time he used the coinbase to his personal whims. Their hashes therefore just "happened" to solve CLC blocks, which were passed to the CLC daemon that Luke was running in his "personal equipment". Instead of a CLC-related string, it could have been hymns or exorcisms.

Thus, the "I did not use Eligius hashing power to shut down CLC".

[k9quaint]

Anyone with a copy of the CLC blockchain and bitcoin-utils can easily verify that the bitcoin parent blocks used to attack CLC belong to eligius. Personal equipment my ass.

As far as I understand, this is clearly the case, however Luke claims that creating a custom coinbase to include CLC in the merged mining of his pool, does not have anything to do with Eligius miners. It's not the first time he used the coinbase to his personal whims. Their hashes therefore just "happened" to solve CLC blocks, which were passed to the CLC daemon that Luke was running in his "personal equipment". Instead of a CLC-related string, it could have been hymns or exorcisms.

Thus, the "I did not use Eligius hashing power to shut down CLC".

When are you guys going to stop with this letter vs. spirit of the law thing ?

The fact is he betrayed the trust of his users. Implementation detail only matter
to lawyers. What needs to happen now is that folks mining at eligius need to know
what the freak is up to with their hashing power, that's all.

If they condone his actions, they can stick around. If they don't they can leave.

But they need to know, and right now, they don't : luke has taken great care to
stay as non-committal as possible to make sure the non-techie eligius miners
aren't sure what's going on.

Your spirit of the law is based on flawed presumptions. When are you going to stop presuming that every pool must offer every altcoin that can be merged mined? In another thread, I announced the creation of 100 altcoin block chains that can be merge mined from day 1. To date, all of the pools except 1 are refusing to grant their users access to these new and valuable coins.

This really boils down to different axioms that cannot be resolved, such as presumed guilt vs presumed innocence.
Luke did it, but he did it with information that his users had no claim on whatsoever.

Should he have done it? That is a far stickier question.
After warnings were not heeded, action to demonstrate is the next step. AFAIK, Luke did not doublespend any CLC, he merely forked the block chain in such a way that it is very difficult to mine. He certainly could have approached this in a less abrasive manner. He could have forked the chain, demonstrated that he could block it, and then released his hold after a patch was released to mitigate the vulnerability. He could have notified his users beforehand that he was going to use the results of their BTC hashes to demonstrate a vulnerability in another blockchain. He could have explained to his users why he would not offer merge mining of CLC until such a time as it was not vulnerable. In short, there are many things he could have done to come off as less of a phallus.

IMO all Luke is guilty of is bad public relations and an abrasive personality, not computer crimes or fraud.

[k9quaint]

I explained in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57288.40 how your assumptions about how pools interact with their users are unwarranted and thus your entire cause for complaint moot.

[jothan]

thank you enema. i'm completely lost on most of what's going on in this thread, i thought it was about lukejr, but now its about solidcoin? either way that last post made me laugh really hard.

Scammer vs scammer, I'm about to pull out the popcorn.

[kano]

I explained in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57288.40 how your assumptions about how pools interact with their users are unwarranted and thus your entire cause for complaint moot.

These assumptions, wrong or not, are likely shared by a large
chunk blissfully unaware eligius miners who would probably
walk away from the pool of they knew what is actually happening.

If you can't see why that is a problem, the conversation ends here.

Different people have different opinions of if they give a damn about anyone but themselves.
I'll say clearly I agree with the idea that one should care about the follow-on of one's actions.
I will certainly never mine at Eligius (though I have never before) since I do not think that Luke has the right to do with my hashing power as he pleases and he has done something that I would not wish to be a part of - even if everyone here disagrees - well that's your opinion.
Hiding behind some rule or law for not caring about anyone else is truly the way these days by many and most unfortunate in my opinion.

Of course if deepbit did use some floor in Bitcoin to effectively destroy it, suddenly most people here would be upset about that ...

Many years ago I did some work through a friend without knowing who the client was.
When I received payment I returned it. It was from BATA and I could not in good conscience accept payment from such a company (and proceeded to point out to my friend that I would never do that again! and I would check first who it was )
I suspect few people here would do the same.

[joulesbeef]

Luke shows it could put you in legal jeopardy joining a pool. How are you going to claim you didnt know they were going to hack paypal? What is one of these rogue pool ops decides he wants to attack congress over sopa. It is very important to know and trust your pool.

And obviously luke cant be. What baffles me, is he claims to be a christian and yet he betrays the trust of his users with a whim. Ok plenty of scum bag Christians out there, just like in every other group, but luke likes to at least pretend he actually believes and doesnt just wear it on his sleeve. But it turns out he is a self centered little shit, who has his panties shoved so far up his ass, i can see the label sticking out his mouth.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Luke shows it could put you in legal jeopardy joining a pool. How are you going to claim you didnt know they were going to hack paypal? What is one of these rogue pool ops decides he wants to attack congress over sopa. It is very important to know and trust your pool.

How can a hash be used to hack Paypal?

The miners didn't give the pool op access to run custom code on their systems/GPUs.

You do realize that the miners simply provided hashes.  Period.  Nothing more, nothing less.
It would be like saying the electrical company could be liable because they supplied the electricity.

[k9quaint]

Luke shows it could put you in legal jeopardy joining a pool. How are you going to claim you didnt know they were going to hack paypal? What is one of these rogue pool ops decides he wants to attack congress over sopa. It is very important to know and trust your pool.

How can a hash be used to hack Paypal?

The miners didn't give the pool op access to run custom code on their systems/GPUs.

You do realize that the miners simply provided hashes.  Period.  Nothing more, nothing less.
It would be like saying the electrical company could be liable because they supplied the electricity.

Facts. They are not needed in this thread.

[k9quaint]

Facts. They are not needed in this thread.

Fact:  When I sign up with a pool to me (and many others) there is a relationship with the pool op, one in which I provide my hash rate and computing power to be pooled in an effort to find the coin(s) I want to mine.  Not using my computing power for any other purpose, particularly shady side attacking.  With that said some may like this but their are a lot of douches in the world...

The statement you made is false. You don't understand mining. You do not provide your computer as a platform that others can run their code on.

[bitclown]

I would love to hear (or read) from a miner at Eligius pool and how THEY feel about having their hashing power used for something they didn't consent to or agree with ?

Luke can print out my hashes and use it as toilet paper if he want as long as he sticks to his fair reward scheme and pays in virgin generation txs. It's just random numbers.

[Raize]

I would love to hear (or read) from a miner at Eligius pool and how THEY feel about having their hashing power used for something they didn't consent to or agree with ?

I'm thrilled luke-jr did this. Alt currencies (with the exception of maybe Litecoin) are scum.

The end.

[kano]

I would love to hear (or read) from a miner at Eligius pool and how THEY feel about having their hashing power used for something they didn't consent to or agree with ?

I'm thrilled luke-jr did this. Alt currencies (with the exception of maybe Litecoin) are scum.

The end.

LOL ... with the exception of ...

[btc_artist]

Facts. They are not needed in this thread.

Fact:  When I sign up with a pool to me (and many others) there is a relationship with the pool op, one in which I provide my hash rate and computing power to be pooled in an effort to find the coin(s) I want to mine.  Not using my computing power for any other purpose, particularly shady side attacking.  With that said some may like this but their are a lot of douches in the world...

The statement you made is false. You don't understand mining. You do not provide your computer as a platform that others can run their code on.

He didn't say the pool op has access to the miners' computers to do nefarious things with. In a technical sense, miners *only* provide hashes to the pool, nothing more.  In a moral sense, there is an unwritten agreement as to what those hashes will be used for.  Namely, to mine BTC and possibly NMC. If the pool op uses those hashes for other purposes and without the miners' consent, it's morally iffy to wrong.

If he was simply purchasing hashes for a fixed price, to use as he wanted it would be a different moral situation than a cooperative where hundreds of people pool their resources and split the profit.