[ANN][VRC] VeriCoin Proof of Stake-Time Currency | New Roadmap Released

[buy4crypto]

People are worried that this might set precedent for other coins to respond the same. An example would be if Bitcoin did this when Mt.Gox happened.

Bitcoin has forked two times, significantly. One was in 2010 when someone was able to mint billions of Bitcoins. They had to go back 100 transactions and reset the chain. Thankfully, the network was really small then, and all the developers had to do was get to the big pools and tell them to update their codes. Bitcoin was really small, and no one cared about it, so it didn’t get much attention.

The second event was where Bitcoin was updating from, I believe, 0.7 to 0.8. People didn’t like the 0.8 change, so some people didn’t move over. Basically, they were competing on two parallel chains for a long time. Eventually, the developers decided to revert back to 0.7.

When people say we’re abusing our power, that’s fine; they can say what they want to. I don’t think of it that way, because we were going out of our way to prevent the coin from dying off. Most of the people who are critical of this are people that don’t own it and are people that want another coin to succeed. They attack every coin and right now it’s a good opportunity to attack VeriCoin.

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There is more, read the full article @ http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/vericoin-developer-speaks-ccn-mintpal-hardfork/2014/07/15

That is the mos important part.
The dev decided to make a change but the people didn't.
And in the end it was the users that decided the which chain was the right one.

Here there was decision taken by a few to protect a business , nothing more.

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

So bravo VeriCoin devs! You did a good thing, and although people are upset you violated some sort of imaginary moral law, the problem that has always been there is now front and centre.

If you don't like it, show me the code to fix the problem.

Well you see Bitcoin had to fork there, as it was a flaw in the protocol. VeriCoin on the other hand had no need to fork as there was no flaw, it was simply a theft.

Theft is what keeps people away from bitcoin's. You saw the headlines about gox right, you saw it go from 1,000+ to > $300. A lot of investors where burned and never came back, outsiders stay away from crypto due to those headlines.

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[smoothie]

Interesting discussion. I am glad the VRC developer at least addressed the concern even though I personally disagree with him only having 2 options. The 3rd option is to let the coin die and start a new.

LINK: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/2apsj7/litecoin_developers_will_never_fork_litecoin_to/

[–]pnosker 5 points 9 hours ago
Well said. If we thought we had any other option, we would never have forked. But to not fork would guarantee the death of VeriCoin. I'm sure you realize how difficult of a decision it was for us.
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[–]cobleeLitecoin Founder 11 points 6 hours ago
Yes, I do realize the position PoS has put you in. But I think in the long term, it would have been best to not fork. Sure, you arguably saved the currency. What would you do if this happens again? And it will happen again. How much of a theft would you deem big enough to require another fork? 50%? 25%? 10%? Where do you draw the line? And why are the devs responsible for making this decision? Who's to decide whether or not this was a theft? How can anyone even be sure? What if MintPal sold those Vericoins to someone else in a private deal and cried foul to the devs? Not that it is likely, but how would you know for sure? Are you going to fork the coin and effectively help them double spend?
You've opened up Pandora's box by doing this. I believe it is not the right decision. There are lines that the devs should not cross, and this is one of them. Devs should not play monetary policy with their coins. You need to play by the rules that you set out at the start. It is a slippery slope when you can change the rules on a whim.
That said, this is just my opinion. There's no rule or law that says you can't do this. But if the US starts to regulate cryptocurrency as real currencies, I'm positive they will view this action as illegal. Right now, developers can claim that they are working on software and not creating money and that the money is creation is decentralized. Once you start making monetary policy decisions with your coin, you can no longer make that claim.

Unfortunately I/the other VeriCoin developers were put into a position that no other coin developer has ever been put into:
We knew the coin was at the risk of an attack and there was something we could do about it.
Bitcoin has never faced this issue. Litecoin has never faced this issue. No other PoS coin has faced this issue.
When someone is faced with a critical question like this with very little decision-making time it is very difficult to make a wise decision. We quickly analyzed the blockchain and determined that if the coin count was above 6 million coins it was able to attack the coin by mechanism of a 51% attack. That left us with only two options: Fork (like we did) or to blacklist the new addresses in a wallet update and hope people upgraded before the thief sent the coins to new addresses.
We decided that the only feasable way to handle this was to reverse the blockchain to a state prior to the attack as upgrading over 51% of the wallets in time would be too difficult/impossible and even if we did, those 8M coins could potentially still override that based on the fact that it could have over 51% of stake due to the quantity of coins.
Yes, there's clearly a downside to PoS which is that it's attackable without necessary investment. To attack Litecoin like this you would have to physically steal many mining farms. PoS coins can be attacked by stealing a wallet file.
But, it must be understood that we had been given information from both MintPal as well as performed our own analyses of the blockchain to determine that in fact these 8M coins were indeed stolen, not subject to some back alley deals, and the transaction volume excluding these 8M coins was magnitudes smaller in amount than the stolen coin volume. In our minds, we had the ability to preserve the coin by preventing an illicit 51% attack in the future. In addition to that, and less significantly, we had the ability to return funds to those whom it was stolen from.
There are critics of our actions who in their minds rightly say we are not following in the footsteps of Bitcoin. But there are significant differences between what happened with VeriCoin and what happened ever, with any other coin. No coin has ever had 30% of it stolen in one transaction. No coin has ever gone from no risk of 51% attack to high risk in a single transaction due to an illicit transfer. We made a very very hard choice, and it's one that has kept VeriCoin alive.
Now we can all say maybe we shouldn't be trusted as developers. That's fine. I will officially announce now that if the community would prefer for me to step down as a developer for VeriCoin I will do so. I don't think it's the right decision, but it's something I will do to preserve the integrity of the coin. Otherwise, I can promise you that this is something that will never happen again with VeriCoin. We did it once. It now serves a very important lesson to all of Crypto: DO NOT STORE YOUR COINS ON AN EXCHANGE AND EXPECT THEM TO BE SAFE.
With that thought hopefully engrained into the minds of all that deal with Crypto, I hope that if nothing else, people learn that lesson.
Thanks for your criticism. You have been a great role model for me and you have been very helpful to me in our private conversations. I really admire you disagreeing with our actions because it sets a good precedent for Litecoin, where a 30% theft is a big deal but not one that will destroy the coin.
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[–]cobleeLitecoin Founder [score hidden] 7 minutes ago
Thanks Patrick. I think making a public statement on what the devs will and will not do in the future is important.
For the 51% stake attack concern, why are you concerned that someone with 30% of the coin will attack the network? Doesn't PoS mean that since people with stake wouldn't want to hurt their own investment, they won't attack the network with their coins. I think the thief would behave the same way. Because they would want to sell the stolen coins for the most amount of money, they will slowly sell the coins instead of attacking.

You have no excuse. You damaged the entire reputation of cryptocurrencies for your own selfishness. Breaking core principles to get out of your own bind is not an excuse. You should have killed the coin. Go down with your ship, have some honor.
Instead you decided to be a parasitic group focused on short sighted gains and your own selfishness. Nice job.
permalinkparent

[–]pnosker -1 points 3 hours ago
Maybe your core principles are different than mine. But for me, knowing I could do something without much disruption that could save a $6M economy is reason enough to do it. If we did nothing, VeriCoin would be dead right now.
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[–]jentfoo 2 points 2 hours ago
Vericoin likely will still die from this. As coblee pointed out, you created a precedent that looses all trust. I would never want to accept a currency that could be reversed by the developers deciding to hard fork due to poor security on an exchange. It's inappropriate, and it has caused a complete loss in trust in the currency. Once you lost trust in the currency, it has no value

[–]until0 0 points 2 hours ago
If we did nothing, VeriCoin would be dead right now.
Correct. Did I make a exploitable algorithm and release it to the world or did you?
But for me, knowing I could do something without much disruption that could save a $6M economy is reason enough to do it.
Oh, I forgot you decided that for a de-centralized currency. Did you use the Offical Disruption Measurement Scale to confirm that, or the un-official one?
Anyway, I'm sure the entire comunity suppported your decision anyway. I mean you had almost 300 total votes and approximately 70%, that's clearly a total sweep. Did anyone outside of MintPal/Vericoin support this decision? Not like it would matter, because you only care about yourself anyway. Good job /u/pnosker.
You are a parasite to cryptography in general. Please leave the community, how many other people outside of VeriCoin need to tell you this.
permalinkparent

[–]Knerd5 1 point 2 hours ago
You gave a dying patient a shot of adrenaline. You now have two options:
Let the patient die
Continue unethical practices

[Reavon]

Can someone tell me when mint pal  opens vrc/but trades again?  It's time to get some more coins  from weak hands to strongholds like me.  I hope for some big sell walls, for me it's kinda hard buy up much vericoin without causing a panic buy with this coin...

[criptix]

People are worried that this might set precedent for other coins to respond the same. An example would be if Bitcoin did this when Mt.Gox happened.

Bitcoin has forked two times, significantly. One was in 2010 when someone was able to mint billions of Bitcoins. They had to go back 100 transactions and reset the chain. Thankfully, the network was really small then, and all the developers had to do was get to the big pools and tell them to update their codes. Bitcoin was really small, and no one cared about it, so it didn’t get much attention.

The second event was where Bitcoin was updating from, I believe, 0.7 to 0.8. People didn’t like the 0.8 change, so some people didn’t move over. Basically, they were competing on two parallel chains for a long time. Eventually, the developers decided to revert back to 0.7.

When people say we’re abusing our power, that’s fine; they can say what they want to. I don’t think of it that way, because we were going out of our way to prevent the coin from dying off. Most of the people who are critical of this are people that don’t own it and are people that want another coin to succeed. They attack every coin and right now it’s a good opportunity to attack VeriCoin.

------

There is more, read the full article @ http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/vericoin-developer-speaks-ccn-mintpal-hardfork/2014/07/15

That is the mos important part.
The dev decided to make a change but the people didn't.
And in the end it was the users that decided the which chain was the right one.

Here there was decision taken by a few to protect a business , nothing more.

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

So bravo VeriCoin devs! You did a good thing, and although people are upset you violated some sort of imaginary moral law, the problem that has always been there is now front and centre.

If you don't like it, show me the code to fix the problem.

Well you see Bitcoin had to fork there, as it was a flaw in the protocol. VeriCoin on the other hand had no need to fork as there was no flaw, it was simply a theft.

well, i would think a better comparison would be if a big pool like ghash.io gets hacked and the attacker iniates an succesful double-spend attack.

if this gets noticed fast the best way to deal with it would be a rollback

[ofp]

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

this simply is not true at all...

in a PoW coin you have to convince the miners to adopt the new fork.
If 51% of the miners do not agree then the fork simply does not happen.

due to its size and also its PoW implementation it would be virtually impossible for the bitcoin devs to do something like this with bitcoin without first gaining the consensus from mining community.

miners play a vital role in securing the network not only from outside attacks but from internal misuse of power. they are separate from stake holders with separate interests so they act as a counterbalance.

in a PoS coin there are no miners so there is no separation of powers.
in theory stake holders should play that vital role of making sure that power is not abused.
in practice however.. stake holders do what they are told or get locked out of the system.

this is not just a problem for PoS coins, it does affect all small growing coins, the PoS part merely amplifies problem because some crucial checks and balances are removed.

so I reiterate that it really isn't true at all so say that ANY coin can be rolled back. Some are many orders of magnitude more difficult to roll back than others.

But they *CAN* be rolled back. That's the point.

Damn...you beat me to it lol

If a disastrous event happened that effected miners and holders of Bitcoin and the only way to fix the problem was the Devs to hard fork....what do think would happen?

no doubt that when a coin is faced with a fundamental problem which could break it going forward the only option is to hard fork.
I think you are missing the point though..

because of the centralization of power it was all too easy to force this coin into a position where it was faced with such a dilema.
and it was all too easy for the devs to force change upon the community.

perhaps you are too busy arguing theoretical when you cannot even see the reality of the situation in front of you.

But they *CAN* be rolled back. That's the point.

humans have space flight they *CAN* fly the moon and they *CAN* fly to the next solar system.

your missing the point that one is possible.. and the other is currently practically impossible.

I'm afraid we're missing the most important aspect in this discussion: Scale
You're trying to compare POS and POW using VRC example and comparing it to BTC? BTC market cap is 1500x bigger. If VRC was that big, we would have 7B worth in coins staking at any given moment of time, spread across millions of wallets.
No single exchange would hold 30% of the coins in a hot wallet.
POS is much more effective and efficient than POW.
VRC is right now in its infancy. Let's hope it makes it to the maturity where it will become unbreakable, exactly as BTC is nowadays.

[megadestruct61]

Hey can anyone tell me why Vericoin isn't trading on Mitpal again yet? The blockchain has been rolled back to before the attack already correct? I see Bittrex trading and wonder why not on Mintpal since 1/3 of the coins used to be there at least.

[Alphi]

i dont understand your argument why miners have only a limit time? do you mean because the network hashrate can increase?
that argument doesn't revoke anything because the entity with over 51% can just buy/produce more hashpower.

even if i give you the point that a pool might not count as a single entity, because miners could leave if the pool acts in a malicious way -
bitcoin is facing the same problem when an entity decides to buy/produce more then 51% hashpower - tbh even 35% is enough, but u should know it if you read the thousands of articles about it.

no single entity has 51% of the hashing power .. nobody has even 30% of the hashing power of bitcoin so what you are arguing is theoretical.

sure someone could buy 51% percent of the hashing power but it would cost them several hundreds of millions of dollars and as I said it would only be temporary because the difficulty rises exponentially.

even if someone has 51% of the hashing power for an extended period of time.. they cannot control 51% of the coins..

someone quite easily managed to steal 30% of vericoin through very little effort at all .. all they needed to do was buy, borrow or steal 21% more and they would have been in a monopoly position for the production of vericoins for as long as they held onto their coins. they would not need an air conditioned facility, they would not need to keep upgrading their hashing power to stay on top, they would not need to keep paying massive electricity bills. They would only need to run 1 computer and they would be able to produce 51% of all new coins for eternity (if they so wished)

now if someone managed to steal 30% of all bitcoins in existance or even 20% that would be a very huge problem for the bitcoin economy... but someone having 51% hashing power and being able to produce 25 BTC every 10 minutes... that's not really comparable not even in the same ball park.

people who compare 51% PoW with 51% PoS attacks really do not understand the complete difference in scale of how much power each attacker has.
being king for a day is nothing compared to being king forever.

(well at least until the coin gods hard fork you off your throne.. LOLZ)

[buy4crypto]

People are worried that this might set precedent for other coins to respond the same. An example would be if Bitcoin did this when Mt.Gox happened.

Bitcoin has forked two times, significantly. One was in 2010 when someone was able to mint billions of Bitcoins. They had to go back 100 transactions and reset the chain. Thankfully, the network was really small then, and all the developers had to do was get to the big pools and tell them to update their codes. Bitcoin was really small, and no one cared about it, so it didn’t get much attention.

The second event was where Bitcoin was updating from, I believe, 0.7 to 0.8. People didn’t like the 0.8 change, so some people didn’t move over. Basically, they were competing on two parallel chains for a long time. Eventually, the developers decided to revert back to 0.7.

When people say we’re abusing our power, that’s fine; they can say what they want to. I don’t think of it that way, because we were going out of our way to prevent the coin from dying off. Most of the people who are critical of this are people that don’t own it and are people that want another coin to succeed. They attack every coin and right now it’s a good opportunity to attack VeriCoin.

------

There is more, read the full article @ http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/vericoin-developer-speaks-ccn-mintpal-hardfork/2014/07/15

That is the mos important part.
The dev decided to make a change but the people didn't.
And in the end it was the users that decided the which chain was the right one.

Here there was decision taken by a few to protect a business , nothing more.

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

So bravo VeriCoin devs! You did a good thing, and although people are upset you violated some sort of imaginary moral law, the problem that has always been there is now front and centre.

If you don't like it, show me the code to fix the problem.

Well you see Bitcoin had to fork there, as it was a flaw in the protocol. VeriCoin on the other hand had no need to fork as there was no flaw, it was simply a theft.

well, i would think a better comparison would be if a big pool like ghash.io gets hacked and the attacker iniates an succesful double-spend attack.

if this gets noticed fast the best way to deal with it would be a rollback

This is what happeend to us, only difference is we where on an exchange that was supposed to be securing our coin. A hacker could access a 51% mining operation and get access that way. Even if the intentions of the mining party is good. They are a big target, just 1 security breach and it would be over for POW security.

[Fippy]

Truth be told, I just wanna see some hacker steal 4+ million Bitcoins, just to see how Bitcoin would react.

Then we could end this silly "right or wrong" debate once and for all.

Since I'm sure there is no one place that 4 million Bitcoins are stored and I hope there never is that will not happen.

Who says it has to be all in one place?

I guess I should be more to the point:

We get a lot of commentary around here from people who may or may not have skin in the game, or an alternate agenda regarding the fate of VRC or it's price in the future. It's easy to hang your hat on principles when you aren't the one who has to pay the piper, or better yet, be getting paid.

As a general rule, just about everyone around here has some skin in the game when it comes to Bitcoin. Since the sudden theft of 4 million Bitcoin would almost surely be a lethal blow to Bitcoin (and quite possibly to the very principles of cryptocurrency at the same time), I would love to see what song the people around here sing in the face of such an event.

I bet it would be vastly different for quite a few people in this thread.

[BitcoinPorn]

Please don't attack Charlie Lee (coblee). He owns VeriCoin and is family. His criticism is justified.

Plain and simple, he would have done things differently, or at least that is his claims.

I think people are not fully being understanding the situation that was at hand and the choice (or lack of choices) you guys had to make.

I was with Litecoin from the beginning, I am a coblee fan, love Coinbase and his help with them too.   I agree, the guy doesn't need to be attacked.  Nor do a lot of the haters in this thread, put them on ignore or respond like people who are willing to have a discussion, otherwise take a page out of the Dogecoin book and keep things positive.

[Alphi]

Who says it has to be all in one place?

it most definitely shouldn't be all in one place... the fact that 30% were all in one place was what scared the pants off everyone involved.

this is true for the coins themselves but also equally true for the power to control the network. the more decentralized the better...
the devs have said that they will not roll back ever again.. but it does leave people wondering what is going to happen if this kind theft happens again or if someone puts a gun to their heads.

As a general rule, just about everyone around here has some skin in the game when it comes to Bitcoin. Since the sudden theft of 4 million Bitcoin would almost surely be a lethal blow to Bitcoin (and quite possibly to the very principles of cryptocurrency at the same time), I would love to see what song the people around here sing in the face of such an event.

I bet it would be vastly different for quite a few people in this thread.

if I recall correctly Mt Gox alone lost about 7% of all bitcoins to hacks.
so greater than 4% has already happened and bitcoin is not dead.

regardless of PoW or PoS... if a single entity had manged to steal 30% of bitcoins there's no doubt in my mind that it would have shaking bitcoin to the core also.
I'm not arguing that PoS is the problem only that PoS combined with small coin size encourages centralization and centralization is the problem.

[criptix]

no single entity has 51% of the hashing power .. nobody has even 30% of the hashing power of bitcoin so what you are arguing is theoretical.

sure someone could buy 51% percent of the hashing power but it would cost them several hundreds of millions of dollars and as I said it would only be temporary because the difficulty rises exponentially.

even if someone has 51% of the hashing power for an extended period of time.. they cannot control 51% of the coins..

someone quite easily managed to steal 30% of vericoin through very little effort at all .. all they needed to do was buy, borrow or steal 21% more and they would have been in a monopoly position for the production of vericoins for as long as they held onto their coins. they would not need an air conditioned facility, they would not need to keep upgrading their hashing power to stay on top, they would not need to keep paying massive electricity bills. They would only need to run 1 computer and they would be able to produce 51% of all new coins for eternity (if they so wished)

now if someone managed to steal 30% of all bitcoins in existance or even 20% that would be a very huge problem for the bitcoin economy... but someone having 51% hashing power and being able to produce 25 BTC every 10 minutes... that's not really comparable not even in the same ball park.

people who compare 51% PoW with 51% PoS attacks really do not understand the complete difference in scale of how much power each attacker has.
being king for a day is nothing compared to being king forever.

(well at least until the coin gods hard fork you off your throne.. LOLZ)

1. we had ghash.io several times with over 51% hashpower, this is fact.

2. if someone has 51+% of the hashpower they control the network, because they can alter the blockchain after their will

3. yes someone stole 30% of all vericoin, what do you think would happen if someone manages to hack ghash.io? and maybe some other big pools on top of that.

4. the attacker would need to pay nothing if hes hacking big pools and gets control over them, initiate a double spend attack and give him millions of bitcoins for free - all that with just one computer.

5. of course there are differences between pos/pow, im not denying but if you look on a bigger scale its not much difference at all


/edit

As a general rule, just about everyone around here has some skin in the game when it comes to Bitcoin. Since the sudden theft of 4 million Bitcoin would almost surely be a lethal blow to Bitcoin (and quite possibly to the very principles of cryptocurrency at the same time), I would love to see what song the people around here sing in the face of such an event.

I bet it would be vastly different for quite a few people in this thread.

if I recall correctly Mt Gox alone lost about 7% of all bitcoins to hacks.
so greater than 4% has already happened and bitcoin is not dead.

regardless of PoW or PoS... if a single entity had manged to steal 30% of bitcoins there's no doubt in my mind that it would have shaking bitcoin to the core also.
I'm not arguing that PoS is the problem only that PoS combined with small coin size encourages centralization and centralization is the problem.

4 million bitcoins are not 4% ^^"

[Fippy]

if I recall correctly Mt Gox alone lost about 7% of all bitcoins to hacks.
so greater than 4% has already happened and bitcoin is not dead.

Gox "lost" a substantial amount, but from everything that I've seen, no one can really pinpoint when precisely they were lost, or if they were already absorbed into the market. It's was (and I guess one could hypothesize is) a slight shadow looming in the background. But it is still a far cry from the threat a sudden singularly identifiable theft of 30% of the Bitcoin in existence would pose.

[Alphi]

well, i would think a better comparison would be if a big pool like ghash.io gets hacked and the attacker iniates an succesful double-spend attack.

if this gets noticed fast the best way to deal with it would be a rollback

do you understand what a double spend attack is?

with 51% you cannot double spend anyone else's coins only the ones you control.


so lets say you hack the ghash.io and manage to control if for a few hours before someone notices (say everyone watching the pool was asleep, all miners  absolutely everyone using the pool fell asleep)

so you point the pool to your mining address and mange to mine some 2000 or so bitcoins.
you then go ahead and transfer those coins to an exchange and buy up some LTC or some other coin with them. and then withdraw those LTC.
once you have your LTC you then use your massive 51% hashing power to fork the network so that your 2000 bitcoin deposit effectively never happened. <-- the double spend.
you have your 2000 btc and your bag of LTC...

meanwhile the miners and pool operators begin to wake up and take their hashing power off the pool.

this is what could happen in an absolute worst case scenario.
 a few million dollars stolen from the BTC network.

given the size of the bitcoin network of some 8 billion dollars,  I doubt that even that handsome some would be enough to trigger a roll-back  which would destroy and entire 8 hours worth of transactions and shake confidence in the network.

we are talking economies of scale here... as was said by one of the previous posters.

btw the attack in mintpal was not a double spend it was a simple SQL injection attack.
but if the attacker was left to keep those 30% vericoins that were stolen then they could have used those coins for numerous attacks in the future.

[Alphi]

if I recall correctly Mt Gox alone lost about 7% of all bitcoins to hacks.
so greater than 4% has already happened and bitcoin is not dead.

Gox "lost" a substantial amount, but from everything that I've seen, no one can really pinpoint when precisely they were lost, or if they were already absorbed into the market. It's was (and I guess one could hypothesize is) a slight shadow looming in the background. But it is still a far cry from the threat a sudden singularly identifiable theft of 30% of the Bitcoin in existence would pose.

indeed...

[criptix]

well, i would think a better comparison would be if a big pool like ghash.io gets hacked and the attacker iniates an succesful double-spend attack.

if this gets noticed fast the best way to deal with it would be a rollback

do you understand what a double spend attack is?

with 51% you cannot double spend anyone else's coins only the ones you control.


so lets say you hack the ghash.io and manage to control if for a few hours before someone notices (say everyone watching the pool was asleep, all miners  absolutely everyone using the pool fell asleep)

so you point the pool to your mining address and mange to mine some 2000 or so bitcoins.
you then go ahead and transfer those coins to an exchange and buy up some LTC or some other coin with them. and then withdraw those LTC.
once you have your LTC you then use your massive 51% hashing power to fork the network so that your 2000 bitcoin deposit effectively never happened. <-- the double spend.
you have your 2000 btc and your bag of LTC...

meanwhile the miners and pool operators begin to wake up and take their hashing power off the pool.

this is what could happen in an absolute worst case scenario.
 a few million dollars stolen from the BTC network.

given the size of the bitcoin network of some 8 billion dollars,  I doubt that even that handsome some would be enough to trigger a roll-back  which would destroy and entire 8 hours worth of transactions and shake confidence in the network.

we are talking economies of scale here... as was said by one of the previous posters.

yes exactly what you said. now imagine not some 2000 btc but 1 million btc and more, so we have the right scale to compare to the vrc theft.

[BitcoinPorn]

The developers proved that they are in full control of Vericoin, capable of taking anyone’s Vericoin away for any reason.

[EtherCoin]

Bitcoin has forked two times, significantly. One was in 2010 when someone was able to mint billions of Bitcoins. They had to go back 100 transactions and reset the chain. Thankfully, the network was really small then, and all
Well you see Bitcoin had to fork there, as that hack exploited a flaw in the protocol. VeriCoin on the other hand had no need to fork as there was no flaw in the underlying protocol, this hack on MintPal was simply a theft.

What you and many others fail to understand, (or more believably use as excuse to FUD) is the fact that not rolling back would exactly lead to the situation in where protocol would be exploited.

Therefore same situation.

Eth.

[abercrombie]

(BitTrex): Last price: 0.000314 BTC
(Cryptsy): Last price: 0.00031875 BTC
(Poloniex): Last price: 0.00032 BTC

[EtherCoin]

Bitcoin has forked two times, significantly. One was in 2010 when someone was able to mint billions of Bitcoins. They had to go back 100 transactions and reset the chain. Thankfully, the network was really small then, and all
Well you see Bitcoin had to fork there, as that hack exploited a flaw in the protocol. VeriCoin on the other hand had no need to fork as there was no flaw in the underlying protocol, this hack on MintPal was simply a theft.

What you and many others fail to understand, (or more believably use as excuse to FUD) is the fact that not rolling back would exactly lead to the situation in where protocol would be exploited.

Therefore same situation.

Eth.

^^^

Sorry forgot to mention, which lead us to the following conclusion:

Those that believe that rollingback was not the right thing to do are

a) To stupid to understand the implications

or

b) Just using that excuse as a reason to FUD

Either way, both deserve to be ignored.

Eth.