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Author Topic: Has a Nothing at Stake Attack ever been successfully performed?  (Read 1844 times)
mczarnek (OP)
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June 30, 2014, 09:32:26 PM
 #1

Everyone keeps saying that Nxt is vulnerable to a Nothing at Stake attack..  as I understand it you need to have over 50% of the stake of the network decide to participate in and forge along multiple fake forks in order to perform such an attack.. right?  Meaning you still need at least 50% of the stake of the network to agree to accept a fork as correct in order to attack it..  meaning an attacker still needs to be greater than 50% of the forging stake..correct?

Because my guess is that the Nothing at Stake problem is just an argument being passed around by miners who have placed thousands or millions of dollars into buying mining equipment that will suddenly become worthless as soon as people realize that Proof of Stake is a viable replacement and that Nxt is going to replace Bitcoin some day.

Which leads me to my question.. if a Nothing at Stake Attack is a big problem.. then why hasn't one been performed yet?  Surely the miners who own millions of dollars on mining equipment have spent some money hiring people to attack Nxt, right?

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newIndia
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June 30, 2014, 09:33:43 PM
 #2

Everyone keeps saying that Nxt is vulnerable to a Nothing at Stake attack..  as I understand it you need to have over 50% of the stake of the network decide to participate in and forge along multiple fake forks in order to perform such an attack.. right?  Meaning you still need at least 50% of the stake of the network in order to attack it..

Because my guess is that the Nothing at Stake problem is just something because passed around by miners who have placed thousands or millions of dollars into buying mining equipment that will suddenly become useless as soon as people realize that Proof of Stake is a viable replacement and that Nxt is going to replace Bitcoin some day.

Which leads me to my question.. if a Nothing at Stake Attack is a big problem.. then why hasn't one been performed yet?  Surely the miners who own millions of dollars would of mining equipment have spent some money hiring people to attack Nxt right?

Is it the 51% equivalent of PoS coins ?

mczarnek (OP)
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June 30, 2014, 09:37:52 PM
 #3

The idea behind a nothing at stake attack is that in a Proof of Work system a miner can't mine along multiple forks at the same time.

The Nothing at Stake attack is that every forger will decide to forge along every fork he sees because he doesn't have to commit to any one fork in order to forge for it(Nxt's version of mining). Meaning that he can just continue to forging fake forks and at a later point in time the entire network can decide to accept a different fork instead of their own.

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mczarnek (OP)
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July 01, 2014, 09:19:33 PM
 #4

So that's a no... right? That's what I thought...

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benjyz
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July 01, 2014, 10:00:41 PM
 #5

Peercoin has been around since 2012. So that's 2 years of history which shows this is nonsense. PPC peaked at 100,000,000 USD. That should be enough incentive to perform such an "attack". The answer is no. It does not even make sense.
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July 01, 2014, 10:22:05 PM
Last edit: July 01, 2014, 10:39:23 PM by Magic8Ball
 #6

Peercoin has been around since 2012. So that's 2 years of history which shows this is nonsense. PPC peaked at 100,000,000 USD. That should be enough incentive to perform such an "attack". The answer is no. It does not even make sense.

Peercoin had centralised checkpointing, so not a good indicator of robustness.

I do not know about NXT, but PPC style PoS an be exploited.
mczarnek (OP)
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July 03, 2014, 03:09:06 AM
 #7

Peercoin has been around since 2012. So that's 2 years of history which shows this is nonsense. PPC peaked at 100,000,000 USD. That should be enough incentive to perform such an "attack". The answer is no. It does not even make sense.

Peercoin had centralised checkpointing, so not a good indicator of robustness.

I do not know NXT, but PPC style PoS an be exploited.

Nxt has decentralized checkpointing for now, no fork longer than 720 blocks is accepted by the network.  They are soon adding a couple others methods.

The real way Nxt protects is by requiring that a SHA256 hash be performed for every block along every possible fork (along with taking into account stake and time since an account last forged).  If an attacker wanted to generate a fake fork that was only forged by his own forgers, then he would have to do far more SHA256 hashes within ten minutes or so than the Bitcoin network does within a week in order to calculate how he can build a strong enough fork in order to claim he's built a better fork entirely made out of his forgers... and after all the odds are against him unless he owns ~50% of Nxt.. at which point he can basically 51% attack the network.  Though granted he can 51% attack in burst even when he only has say 40% of all Nxt forging power,  that's the same as Bitcoin though, even only > 20% of all mining power owned by one pool should scare people.

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