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

[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.

[Alphi]

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.

why should I imagine that?

51% hashing power in a PoW system does not give you the power to take coins from anyone.

you cannot mine 1 million btc with stolen hashing power without people noticing well before you get there. do you know of some kind of magic spell to make the entire world fall asleep for some 6 months and not notice their miners aren't paying out ? because I sure don't.

even with 51% of all Vericoins which uses PoS you cannot take coins directly from people.

people gave their coins to mintpal. That is how the hacker was able to steal them.

if people were stupid enough to put 1 million BTC into an exchange where it could be hacked....*ahem*  mt gox... then that should be their problem not the problem of the payment network.

the mintpal/vericoin hack only became a problem for the vericoin devs because it would have opened pandoras box.
you just cannot let anyone control 30% of the coin supply of any coin (coin supply is not hashing power) and expect the network to function properly.. especially when those coins are stolen.

mintpal claims they weren't staking but what if they were? and what if another exchange is staking their pos coins using hot wallets.... this could just be the tip of the iceberg.

[phzi]

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.

What you obviously don't understand:
Did VRC fix the protocol?  No...  VRC is still vulnerable to exactly the same majority holder attack. 

This is why Proof of Share coins are inherently inferior.

VRC cannot fix the flaw, because it's built into the protocol. The coin is permanently flawed.

[criptix]

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.

why should I imagine that?

51% hashing power in a PoW system does not give you the power to take coins from anyone.

you cannot mine 1 million btc with stolen hashing power without people noticing well before you get there. do you know of some kind of magic spell to make the entire world fall asleep for some 6 months and not notice their miners aren't paying out ? because I sure don't.

even with 51% of all Vericoins which uses PoS you cannot take coins from people.

people gave their coins to mintpal that is how the hacker was able to steal them.

if people were stupid enough to put 1 million BTC into an exchange where it could be hacked....*ahem*  mt gox... then that should be their problem not the problem of the payment network.

the vericoin hack only became a problem for the vericoin devs because it would have opened pandoras box.
you just cannot let anyone control 30% of the coin supply of any coin (coin supply is not hashing power) and expect the network to function properly.. especially when those coins are stolen.

i dont think you understood me.

ok one more time for you:

1. a great amount of bitcoins get stolen > 1 million by hacker

2. same hacker gets control over big mining pools, gets control over bitcoin network because 35%-51+% hashpower

3. double spends the amount of stolen bitcoins

4. ?



/edit

coin supply is in fact pos hashing power...

[jrich76]

A lot of the action in altcoin seems fear based.

The devs acted without fear of public crticism. They are also the devs not scared to show their faces.

I say they have the balls to get the job done whatever comes their way.

I have more faith in crypto than ever after this. I understand the idealists point of view. But thievery is something we have to be able to address in a more constructive way than letting them get away with it. Especially if its within reason, the technology allows it, and in the end, the most important THE COMMUNITY VOTES TO ACCEPT THE CHANGE.

Which is the point that FUDsters conveniently "forget" or "overlook". Had the community been against the fork we would have remained on the old blockchain/wallet and pnosker would have to just go make a new coin, we would have continued, or died, with the current vericoin and all the stolen coins.

As a decentralized community we reached consensus on this decision and went forward with it, no one was forced to upgrade to the new wallet/blockchain and if ONLY the 3 devs wanted to then it would not have happened. Period.

 All the main devs did was provide the technical management to get it done quickly, veri quickly. No one mandated or forced anyone to do anything.

Don't like it, dump your coins and leave. That is a free decentralized market in action, you are free to go and we are free to stay, on a new blockchain, theft free.

If you want to blame, blame the exchange that left 8 million vericoins in a hot wallet staking out of greed.

[gekos]

When will they turn on the power?   I updated my wallet to 1.3.3.0 and it seems to be stuck at block 109654.

[pnosker]

When will they turn on the power?   I updated my wallet to 1.3.3.0 and it seems to be stuck at block 109654.

That is the current block.