3 Bitcoin Doomsday Scenarios I can't find much discussion on...

[dagelf]

Update: A lot of people are completely misunderstanding this thread, and we're on page 3 already. So here's the premise: Will a global currency system have any practical use in a global post apocalyptic scenario? Eg. global economic collapse, global police state, global nuclear winter, world wide killer virus outbreak, giant asteroid impact, sentient computers, etc...?

Perhaps not. But if it would, then the question is simple: What can we do now, to ensure that this currency will be Bitcoin, and to maximize its utility both today and at such a point in the future?

These are questions that I believe will lead to answers in aid of the above.

While I've seen 51% and Bad-actor/rational-actor type scenarios being discussed ad nauseam, and in-depth, and we know the encryption and protocol is very resilient, my searches for any sort of unpacking of the following scenarios have been fruitless:

1) "Stealth" code changes, that could get slipped in via an update, to modify network operation in some unforeseen, but yet-to-conceive exploitable way.
How huge a social-engineering effort would this take?
Do the huge-pool-guys vet every line of code themselves?
Does anyone log- and track stats on how quickly updates propagate throughout the network?
(This one looks pretty cool, but seems to have crashed: http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/)

2) Someone big player, say the World Bank, establishing and promoting their own, incompatible network.
...coupled with an international media- and marketing campaign, backed by much more finance than the Bitcoin network, perhaps even offering lucrative-by-comparison shares in their new venture, to current Bitcoin players.
Once the mainstream is persuaded by the resilience and power of crypto-currency technology, it seems natural that they would adopt it... on their terms... doesn't it? What would the first ripples of this look like? Which banks are the key stakeholders? Is Bitcoin leading the pack to bank-adoption?

What is the man-hour- and dollar cost of launching something on par with what Bitcoin currently has?

3) Computer intelligence optimizing ("modifying") the protocol
...potentially silently taking control of the network (without anyone noticing) only to wield its power at some opportune watershed moment. Yes, I know, Sci-fi...The moment we have all been waiting for... with it's plausibility-spectrum all the way from "impossible" and "maybe in 100 years", to "an AI (or CI as I like to call it) will be algorithmically cheap enough to run on a smartphone", all the way to, "the *insert multinational organization* is already run by an AI." (eg. http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/how_the_robots_will_take_over/)

Sure, on the surface, the latter two scenarios are very hypothetical and unlikely... yet, if Bitcoin *is* the biggest hedge against global economic stability, doesn't that in fact highlight their relevance?...

But here are the stats that are within arms length, and I'd like to see... (shouldn't be hard to compile, even collect as part of the protocol...)

4) Isn't it relevant how each GH is powered and how easily that power can be removed by tactical means?
...to diminish the network hashrate as part of a global co-ordinated multi-faceted strike, the hashrates taken out only to come back up to a network beyond its recognition? Eg. How stable is the US national grid? Compared to those of other countries? What proportions of what countries' power grids run the internet - and Bitcoin? What is the minimum number of power stations that needs to get taken out? What is the minimum fire power required and the cost thereof? Or actually, how many steel poles (of neglible cost) of what length would be needed to short out said power supplies?

5) Add to that security. How many layers of security and obscurity in the hardware+software that powers each GH/TH/PH/xH?
ie. How many layers of security? How agile is its management? How rapidly can the system be secured and restored to a previous point in time?

What I'm concerned with, in particular, is concerted efforts to gather metrics on factors relevant to the above, in a public forum.

Any links welcome... particularly to a Wiki or new https://blockchain.info/pools or https://blockchain.info/charts pages monitoring metrics relevant to any- or all of the above. I'm fairly certain the bigger players of the world keep tabs on the above, but shouldn't it be out in the open? How better to guard against it than having it in the public domain?

10 BTC in 1EfnAXe2dyuKiVXfGyoSBMSKqvzzQcfr3L will see me dedicate one month to compiling the best sources of the above information, as professionally as I can, and compile what I can on a live dashboard, and post the link here.

[LeMiner]

While I've seen 51% and Bad-actor/rational-actor type scenarios being discussed ad nauseam, and in-depth, my searches for any sort of unpacking of the following scenarios have been fruitless:

1) "Stealth" code changes, that could get slipped in via an update, to modify network operation in some unforeseen, but yet-to-conceive exploitable way.
How huge a social-engineering effort would this take?
Do the huge-pool-guys vet every line of code themselves?
Does anyone log- and track stats on how quickly updates propagate throughout the network?

2) Someone like the World Bank establishing their own, incompatible network.
...coupled with an international media- and marketing campaign, backed by much more finance than the Bitcoin network, perhaps even offering lucrative-by-comparison shares in their new venture, to current Bitcoin players.
Once the mainstream is persuaded by the resilience and power of crypto-currency technology, it seems natural that they would adopt it... on their terms... doesn't it? What would the first ripples of this look like? Which banks are the key stakeholders? Is Bitcoin leading the pack to bank-adoption?

3) Computer intelligence optimizing ("cracking") the protocol
...potentially silently taking control of the network (without anyone noticing) only to wield its power at some opportune watershed moment. Yes, I know, Sci-fi...The moment we have all been waiting for... with it's plausibility-spectrum all the way from "impossible" and "maybe in 100 years", to "an AI (or CI as I like to call it) will be algorithmically cheap enough to run on a smartphone", all the way to, "the *insert multinational organization* is already run by an AI." (eg. http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/how_the_robots_will_take_over/)

Sure, on the surface, the latter two scenarios are very hypothetical and unlikely... yet, if Bitcoin *is* the biggest hedge against global economic stability, doesn't that in fact highlight their relevance?...

But here are the stats that are within arms length, and I'd like to see... (shouldn't be hard to compile, even collect as part of the protocol...)

4) Isn't it perhaps most relevant how each GH is powered, and how easily that power can be removed by tactical means
...to diminish the network hashrate as part of a global co-ordinated multi-faceted strike, the GH taken out only to come back up to a network (and world?) beyond its recognition? Eg. How stable is the US national grid? Compared to those of other countries? What proportions of what countries' power grids run the internet? What is the minimum number of power stations that needs to get taken out? What is the minimum fire power required and the cost thereof? Or actually, how many steel poles (of neglible cost) of what length would be needed to short out said power supplies?

5) Add to that security. Who holds this metric: How secure is each GH?
ie. How many layers of security? How agile is its management? How rapidly can the system be secured and restored to a previous point in time?

Any links welcome... particularly to a Wiki or new https://blockchain.info/pools pages monitoring metrics relevant to any- or all of the above. I'm fairly certain the intelligence agencies of the world keep tabs on the above, but shouldn't it be out in the open? How better to guard against it than having it in the public domain?

I suppose, in the spirit of Bitcoin, I have to post a wallet address here. If it reaches 10BTC (my living expenses are cheap), I will dedicate one month to compiling the best sources of the above information, as professionally as I can, and post it here. 1EfnAXe2dyuKiVXfGyoSBMSKqvzzQcfr3L

I'll go ahead and answer most of these without too much hassle....

1) "Stealth" code changes, that could get slipped in via an update, to modify network operation in some unforeseen, but yet-to-conceive exploitable way.
How huge a social-engineering effort would this take?
Do the huge-pool-guys vet every line of code themselves?
Does anyone log- and track stats on how quickly updates propagate throughout the network?

Every merge, or pull request on Github get's looked at by Core bitcoin developers, so unless you get them all in on the scheme it simply won't happen. There are also a lot of separate developers that work on the code in their free time, you can see all this on the bitcoin Github which can be found here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

2) Someone like the World Bank establishing their own, incompatible network.

Anyone is free to start their own big "bitcoin" competitor, just look at all the alt-coins that are out there, or for example governments like Ecuador that have "banned" Bitcoin and say they want to start their own crypto currency. But judging from the popularity and the short lifespan of most alt-coins it seems that not too many people are as interested in them at all as much as they are in Bitcoin.

3) Computer intelligence optimizing ("cracking") the protocol

The unlikeliness of cracking the Bitcoin private keys can be found here: https://i.imgur.com/CzyO1yv.jpg  --- On a side-note, the protocol is as secure as it's code and the miners that secure the blockchain. As long as the code is secure it's very unlikely of a flaw massive enough that could damage the protocol as a whole.

4) Isn't it perhaps most relevant how each GH is powered, and how easily that power can be removed by tactical means

In the unlikely event that all mayor pools would be hit in a coordinated effort to kill the networks hashrate, I'm sure that a lot of miners within a few hours would step over to decentralized solutions like P2Pool, etc. In which case the entire internet would have to be taken down.

5) Add to that security. Who holds this metric: How secure is each GH?

The main security is the protocol which is secured by cryptography and is extremely unlikely to be cracked (refer to the image I posted before, even by quantum computing), then the blockchain is secured by the miners that perform work to secure it. Judging by the exponential growth in hashrate that we've been experiencing for the last 2 years it's also unlikely that anyone will secure a big enough share (51%) to threaten the network.

In the case of a split of the blockchain the network can be restored to previous states relatively simple (has been done twice before in 2013), where we forked away from the longest chain and continued on a different one.

There you go, all questions answered and it didn't cost anyone a single bitcoin.

[inBitweTrust]

1) "Stealth" code changes, that could get slipped in via an update, to modify network operation in some unforeseen, but yet-to-conceive exploitable way.

There are more than one Bitcoin Implementations or stacks which work with the Bitcoin Blockchain. Any bugs, backdoors, or problems with one and we can just use the other implementation like libbitcoin. https://wiki.unsystem.net/en/index.php/Main_Page

2) Someone like the World Bank establishing their own, incompatible network.
...coupled with an international media- and marketing campaign, backed by much more finance than the Bitcoin network, perhaps even offering lucrative-by-comparison shares in their new venture, to current Bitcoin players.

Countries have already and are already doing exactly this. Canada, Ecuador are two examples. You shouldn't be concerned about this because :

1) Their digital currencies will likely have security flaws - counterpartry risk from regulators or banks and/or inflation that allows them to steal from the public, and/or doesn't respect users privacy.
2) In the odd event they do create a cryptocurrency that both respects the privacy and property of users than great, we all win anyways, but Bitcoins first mover advantage will probably keep it ahead.

3) Computer intelligence optimizing ("cracking") the protocol

This is unlikely to happen but if this "black swan" event ever did occur than Bitcoin would be the least of anyone's problems as all fiat currency, corporate secrets, and state secrets will be open for everyone. If this ever did happen we could simply take a snapshot of the blockchain and switch algorithms.

4) Isn't it perhaps most relevant how each GH is powered, and how easily that power can be removed by tactical means
5) Add to that security. Who holds this metric: How secure is each GH?

A 51% attack only means that the attacker can do the following :
1) Temporarily prevent a transaction from occurring
2) Create 2-3 false transactions
This attack would quickly get noticed,prevented,  and possibly rolled back by the community.

[franky1]

While I've seen 51% and Bad-actor/rational-actor type scenarios being discussed ad nauseam, and in-depth, my searches for any sort of unpacking of the following scenarios have been fruitless:

1) "Stealth" code changes, that could get slipped in via an update, to modify network operation in some unforeseen, but yet-to-conceive exploitable way.

there are atleast 100 coders checking the code and then many people in the community that double check it too. so chances of spotting stealth code are easy

2) Someone like the World Bank establishing their own, incompatible network.

thre are 500 altcoins already, who says one of them is not a world bank invention.. and more importantly who cares? bitcoin is bitcoin and does not need to be compatible with other altcoins or fiat. people that want to exchange one for another will find a way even if the blockchains do not talk to each other.

3) Computer intelligence optimizing ("cracking") the protocol

if there was a chance that 256bit encryption was at risk, then within 24 hours private/public keypairs could be updated to 1024bit. and funds would be moved across.
never underestimate how fast an update can outpace hackers/crackers exploits.. look how fast the heartbleed was figured out and the world updated its security.. how much data or value was lost... not much...

4) Isn't it perhaps most relevant how each GH is powered, and how easily that power can be removed by tactical means

if a national blackout occured bitcoin would be the least of your worries. within 12 hours all frozen food would start to thaw out and become unusable. people wont be able to get cash out of ATMS, shops would not be able to accept credit cards or bitcoins. meaning no commerce would happen. atleast bitcoin does not have to rely on american companies (visa/mastercard) so that non americans can still use bitcoin as electronic payment whilst most banks are closed due to no access to bank details.

5) Add to that security. Who holds this metric: How secure is each GH?

restored to a previous point.. ?? im not even going to comment on the stupidity of having restore points as thats the fungability argument. bitcoin will continue on as it should, as you say it would require a hell of alot of things in combination to cause the bitcoin ledger to be re-written and governments would not waste resources or risk fiat catastrophe based on bitcoin. after all there are over 100 FIAT currencies.. do you see america trying EMP explosions in russia and china to stop the BRICS development.
as for your comments on how secure is GH.. well better than KH better than MH, but not as good as TH and definetly not as good as PH.. so dont worry about the small stuff we are over 25% nearer to EH than dropping all of the way back to GH
[/quote]

[dagelf]

In a nutshell... I'm looking for hard numbers. It's easy to speculate, but unless you have hard numbers, you don't know much.

1) Yet - on Github - there are only 12 contributors with more than 50 commits. Does anyone actually know all these people, in person? How socially connected are the contributors? If someone were to take them out and replace them, one by one, or somehow engineer for them all to go on holiday, away from internet access, for a week or two, at the same time, after compromising their accounts, who would notice? :-D

How closely guarded is the Github infrastructure? How many people would you need to get by, to gain access to the server and modify the code without anyone picking it up right away?

But what I really meant is... what is the potential impact of code changes - how quickly does it propagate through the network? I'm sure someone can - and has already - written a piece of code that graphs the percentages of versions of bitcoin clients, and the lead time... but where is it?

Isn't this an important security metric that should be gathered?

And again... how many of the big pools and guys personally vet the code, line by line?

I'm looking for hard numbers... and I'm pretty sure that people seriously looking to mess with Bitcoin, and capable of doing so, has this.

(And considering the value that it contains, and the growth path, there certainly is more than enough incentive, as the potential payoff is huge!)

2) Again, looking for hard numbers. How much money and man hours has gone into the Bitcoin social- and physical infrastructure? In total. Spread over how much time? How much money would it take to launch something bigger, and more successful.

How big a of a global misinformation campaign will it take to remove public confidence in Bitcoin, and focus it on something else? How big are the syndicates operating in the space? How many are there? How many of the big exploits and hacks were likely carried out by governments? Who has made a list of institutions who may both be capable, and incentivised to do this?

3) Haha, I don't think anything can guard against this, except luck. This is, to me, the biggest threat - perhaps only cancelled out by the fact that we'd either have no more problems, or much bigger problems. Intelligent machines could upgrade the security for you, to something not recognizable by humans, in nanoseconds. Something that could take hundreds of human years to figure out or calculate could potentially be calculated or figured out and applied by intelligent machines in microseconds.

4) Many countries require critical infrastructure to maintain their own backup power systems, capable of running for months... but yes, there would be bigger problems. Still, what if you only had to take out 3 or 4 major powerlines, or grid transformers, to remove 90% of the hashing power from the network? Or even easier, just take an axe and a shovel and hack away at 5 or 10 fiber conduits, so your petahash grid can leap ahead... How long will it take for those to be repaired? Most lucrative potential return on investment.

Again, it's easy to speculate, but hard numbers are better.

I maintain that our civilization really is very civilized and advanced, seeing as that stupid, nasty things like this are quite rare. Perhaps we are, in some sense, all keenly aware of how insignificant even the biggest thing that we can accomplish, on this speck of dust, in infinite space, is.

5) I'm not talking about attacks on the protocol, I'm talking about physical access to the hardware and wallets. Good thieves rarely enter through the front door. And again... hard numbers: How many years of security experience protects said pool? How many layers of security? Do they have a worst case compromise recovery plan, and what is the impact? How many layers of security?

Has anyone penned down a good and comprehensive security protocol? And how many of the items on the protocol do they comply with / adhere to?

[inBitweTrust]

It is good that you are curious but your many questions aren't exactly new or haven't been addressed by security experts already.
In order to answer all your questions we would need to essentially discuss all the security best practices in Bitcoin and the open source movement in general which would involve far more time than a simple thread.

Bitcoin is as secure or insecure as you choose to make it. A mutisig paper wallet with the keys stored in different locations and different forms is essentially impossible to steal, unless you torture the owner into recovering the keys and than in that case you can use a dead mans switch or ntimelock to even protect against this vector of an attack.

I would suggest you start researching into computer security by first reading the available information.

As far as getting hard numbers on how many "man hours" has been invested in Bitcoin this is impossible to obtain as Bitcoin is a global open source project in which anyone can participate and many are anonymous with their contributions.

[electerium]

Moore's law is already cracking, from the perspective that IPC increases out of AMD and INTEL have been strictly nominal for the past few years. So from that narrative, which I think also holds strong (looking at the supercomputer list when you normalize some combination of flops/kw or cores/kw) in the proprietary chip market also (e.g. IBM).

So what's going to likely happen moving forward is that sha256 gets slowly eroded, which is basically what has happened to every other industry standard cryptographic algorithm.

In the ASIC chip industry, people are already down to 28 and 20nm. Soon enough  (e/g 1 year) when everyone in the industry has reached down to 20nm you'll see a plateau in computing power between chips. The competitive advantage will dissipate between manufacturers as everyone optimizes their chips at 20nm.

So the point is that there is basically no likelihood of a zeroday event where someoen ramps up enough computing power to brute force out sha256 tomorrow.

[dagelf]

It is good that you are curious but your many questions aren't exactly new or haven't been addressed by security experts already.
In order to answer all your questions we would need to essentially discuss all the security best practices in Bitcoin and the open source movement in general which would involve far more time than a simple thread.

If that is true - where? I wrote my post because I went looking, and didn't find what you say exists.

I am well versed in computer security - and googling for the listed questions do not yield any quality leads. Perhaps my main question is this: Do you know if anybody has taken the time to compile a comprehensive wiki on the subject, and perhaps specifically, as it pertains to Bitcoin?

The closest I've been able to find is pages like https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths - and there are no real, hard numbers there. The words "Best practice" and Bitcoin do not seem to appear in close proximity, anywhere on the internet, and I see this as a barrier to Bitcoin's progress. 

How do they say... "Common sense is not so common".

[dagelf]

Moore's law is already cracking, from the perspective that IPC increases out of AMD and INTEL have been strictly nominal for the past few years. So from that narrative, which I think also holds strong (looking at the supercomputer list when you normalize some combination of flops/kw or cores/kw) in the proprietary chip market also (e.g. IBM).

So what's going to likely happen moving forward is that sha256 gets slowly eroded, which is basically what has happened to every other industry standard cryptographic algorithm.

In the ASIC chip industry, people are already down to 28 and 20nm. Soon enough  (e/g 1 year) when everyone in the industry has reached down to 20nm you'll see a plateau in computing power between chips. The competitive advantage will dissipate between manufacturers as everyone optimizes their chips at 20nm.

So the point is that there is basically no likelihood of a zeroday event where someoen ramps up enough computing power to brute force out sha256 tomorrow.

Again, isn't this just addressing the "front-door" approach, that everyone seems to stare themselves blind at?

Let's try this differently, how centralized are these pools?

Discus Fish    
GHash.IO    
KnCMiner    
AntPool    
(https://blockchain.info/pools)

What will it take to take them out, and if done, how long will they be down for?

Another scenario - how elaborate a hack will it take to link them together to do a 51% attack to empty some big wallets?

How many layers of security would you need to get through? How many stolen ssh keys will it take?

[dagelf]

5) Add to that security. Who holds this metric: How secure is each GH?

restored to a previous point.. ?? im not even going to comment on the stupidity of having restore points as thats the fungability argument. bitcoin will continue on as it should, as you say it would require a hell of alot of things in combination to cause the bitcoin ledger to be re-written and governments would not waste resources or risk fiat catastrophe based on bitcoin. after all there are over 100 FIAT currencies.. do you see america trying EMP explosions in russia and china to stop the BRICS development.
as for your comments on how secure is GH.. well better than KH better than MH, but not as good as TH and definetly not as good as PH.. so dont worry about the small stuff we are over 25% nearer to EH than dropping all of the way back to GH

What I mean, is, how easy is it to gain access to the largest mining operations and pool control structures?
On the physical layer?
On the OS layer?
On the social engineering layer?

What I mean is, how easy would it be to disrupt the 5 or 6 largest pools, and take half the network hashrate offline? How feasible is it? And as with anything, surely a cost can be attached to that... and a reward. Does it even out? Has anyone done a qualitative calculation? At what price point will it become feasible?

Where is this calculation? Or do I have to do it myself...?

[LeMiner]

Moore's law is already cracking, from the perspective that IPC increases out of AMD and INTEL have been strictly nominal for the past few years. So from that narrative, which I think also holds strong (looking at the supercomputer list when you normalize some combination of flops/kw or cores/kw) in the proprietary chip market also (e.g. IBM).

So what's going to likely happen moving forward is that sha256 gets slowly eroded, which is basically what has happened to every other industry standard cryptographic algorithm.

In the ASIC chip industry, people are already down to 28 and 20nm. Soon enough  (e/g 1 year) when everyone in the industry has reached down to 20nm you'll see a plateau in computing power between chips. The competitive advantage will dissipate between manufacturers as everyone optimizes their chips at 20nm.

So the point is that there is basically no likelihood of a zeroday event where someoen ramps up enough computing power to brute force out sha256 tomorrow.

Again, isn't this just addressing the "front-door" approach, that everyone seems to stare themselves blind at?

Let's try this differently, how centralized are these pools?

Discus Fish    
GHash.IO    
KnCMiner    
AntPool    
(https://blockchain.info/pools)

What will it take to take them out, and if done, how long will they be down for?

Another scenario - how elaborate a hack will it take to link them together to do a 51% attack to empty some big wallets?

How many layers of security would you need to get through? How many stolen ssh keys will it take?

5) Add to that security. Who holds this metric: How secure is each GH?

restored to a previous point.. ?? im not even going to comment on the stupidity of having restore points as thats the fungability argument. bitcoin will continue on as it should, as you say it would require a hell of alot of things in combination to cause the bitcoin ledger to be re-written and governments would not waste resources or risk fiat catastrophe based on bitcoin. after all there are over 100 FIAT currencies.. do you see america trying EMP explosions in russia and china to stop the BRICS development.
as for your comments on how secure is GH.. well better than KH better than MH, but not as good as TH and definetly not as good as PH.. so dont worry about the small stuff we are over 25% nearer to EH than dropping all of the way back to GH

What I mean, is, how easy is it to gain access to the largest mining operations and pool control structures?
On the physical layer?
On the OS layer?
On the social engineering layer?

What I mean is, how easy would it be to disrupt the 5 or 6 largest pools, and take half the network hashrate offline? How feasible is it? And as with anything, surely a cost can be attached to that... and a reward. Does it even out? Has anyone done a qualitative calculation? At what price point will it become feasible?

Where is this calculation? Or do I have to do it myself...?

For someone claiming to have read into the matter and know a lot about network security you certainly don't seem to know too much about the Bitcoin protocol. As I've answered before, taking down those pools would technically be the best possible thing you could do for the health of the network, since within hours all miners will step over to DECENTRALIZED solutions like p2poool, since none of them want to be missing out on potential mining profits. I wrote this before but I doubt you read it.

Now lets step over to the social engineering part of it all. Ok, so congratulations you've hacked into all of those pools and you can now unleash your evil plans on the blockchain... One problem, you can't STEAL anyone's wallet! WALLETS ARE SECURED BY CRYPTOGRAPHY STRONG ENOUGH THAT IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THE ENERGY OF THE ENTIRE SUN FOR ITS ENTIRE LIFESPAN TO CRACK. Having 51 or even 99% of the network changes nothing about that.

You could prevent transactions of your choosing from gaining any confirmations, thus making them invalid, potentially preventing people from sending Bitcoins between addresses. You could also reverse transactions you send during the time they are in control (allowing double spend transactions), and they could potentially prevent other miners from finding any blocks for a short period of time. That’s really about it

And all of this would be blatantly obvious to people monitoring the blockchain. Miners that notice they're mining on a malicious pool would step over to a different pool, or simply to p2pool. Once miners step over you and your evil plans will be left in control of nice pools.... controlling exactly 0% of the networks hashrate.

There is nearly no profit is obtaining 51% of the network through hacking except for doing some doublespends after which miners stop providing their hashing power to mine for your evil plans. In short, you'd be doing the network a favor since people will finally step over to decentralized mining pools.

[inBitweTrust]

I am well versed in computer security - and googling for the listed questions do not yield any quality leads. Perhaps my main question is this: Do you know if anybody has taken the time to compile a comprehensive wiki on the subject, and perhaps specifically, as it pertains to Bitcoin?

The closest I've been able to find is pages like https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths - and there are no real, hard numbers there. The words "Best practice" and Bitcoin do not seem to appear in close proximity, anywhere on the internet, and I see this as a barrier to Bitcoin's progress. 

How do they say... "Common sense is not so common".

Your questions lead us to believe that you really don't understand Bitcoin or how secure open source projects are developed. The problem with answering your questions is that the scope is so broad because their are so many details and different layers of security specific to every facet that it would cover a very large wiki of information.

You can start here :
http://mhuan.name/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/05/ExJobb_Final_Report_Huan_Meng.pdf

and than read more here :

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/

Just keep in mind that Bitcoin having almost a 6 billion dollar market cap, which peaked at over 10 billion last year is incentive enough for black hats to test all security weaknesses of the Bitcoin infrastructure. Bitcoin is constantly being tested and attacked because of this.

[jonald_fyookball]

I think the only one of these things that is even remotely possible is stealth code.

The others don't make sense on the face of things.
"Computer intelligence optimizing"?  What's that supposed to mean?
The protocol hasn't been "cracked" in 6 years.  The only way
to crack it would be to break the cryptography, which doesn't
seem possible.

[dagelf]

Now lets step over to the social engineering part of it all. Ok, so congratulations you've hacked into all of those pools and you can now unleash your evil plans on the blockchain... One problem, you can't STEAL anyone's wallet! WALLETS ARE SECURED BY CRYPTOGRAPHY STRONG ENOUGH THAT IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THE ENERGY OF THE ENTIRE SUN FOR ITS ENTIRE LIFESPAN TO CRACK. Having 51 or even 99% of the network changes nothing about that.

Again, you're staring yourself blind at the front-door approach. I have now have thousands of the highest value wallets and their keys. And malicious control of the pools. Now I'm emptying all those wallets into a network of new wallets under my control, too complex for anyone without a list of the exact wallets, to decipher.

Which will be near impossible, if at all feasible, without preparing for this exact scenario in advance.

How often do you change wallets? Every hour? Every day? Every month? How many transactions on the blockchain is purely people changing wallets? How many automatic-wallet-changing-apps are in the public domain? What's safer - a static wallet, or a dynamic wallet?

...Which improves your chances of winning the lottery - always playing the same number, or playing a different number every time? ... See what I'm doing here. Inception. And then reversing it. The bad guys don't. You've been incepted to stare yourself blind at how secure a protocol is that you don't understand yourself, nor tried to circumvent yourself.

And then, of course... not to mention that I have remote agents, and plenty of bandwidth, on my own dark net, and on almost every AS on the internet, and a decentralized control system of my own, that only I can control. Using encryption that is decades ahead of what is mainstream or available in the public domain today.

You could prevent transactions of your choosing from gaining any confirmations, thus making them invalid, potentially preventing people from sending Bitcoins between addresses. You could also reverse transactions you send during the time they are in control (allowing double spend transactions), and they could potentially prevent other miners from finding any blocks for a short period of time. That’s really about it

That's about all you need. What's the potential damage value, per minute, per hour, per day?
Hard numbers. What's the best hedge against it? Someone has worked it out. Is it in the public domain? No.
Is it being tracked in real-time, in the public domain?
No.
Should it be?
Would it be better that only a handful of malicious agents track it... or if everyone was keenly aware of the score?

Hey, the score can even make itself back into the protocol, to beef it up even more. The only beefing-up today is against Moore's law and the size of the network. Do you really, truly and honestly believe that that is enough?

---

This is the initial point of my post. Everyone is going on about how bullet-proof the protocol is, yet there are gaping vulnerabilities that nobody is talking about. Okay, perhaps they're not "gaping" yet, and perhaps not unique to Bitcoin, save for the fact that Bitcoin could potentially present their highest-value taget... perhaps the little talk about it is more a symptom of them not being an issue ...yet.

The protocol is pretty great, yes... but even the ancient Greeks had stories about how fallibility... the Indians were ahead by another few thousand years. Icarus. Jatayu.

What kills you? It's what you don't know or don't see coming. Complacency. What is the weakest link in the chain? It's you - and where you save your key. And your limited knowledge of- and ability to control the hardware-, software- and networks you need to utilize it. Which I started mastering before you could speak your mother tongue, which I stole even before you generated it (if you used my wallet software, or OS...) ... and you're still blissfully eating your steak, pretending that me and my world don't exist, simply because you've not come face-to-face with it yet... once you have, you'll be beyond thinking it will go away if you just close your eyes and pretend, you'll be beyond sticking your fingers in your ears... so perhaps all this is, is your assertion that you have not.

And all of this would be blatantly obvious to people monitoring the blockchain. Miners that notice they're mining on a malicious pool would step over to a different pool, or simply to p2pool. Once miners step over you and your evil plans will be left in control of nice pools.... controlling exactly 0% of the networks hashrate.

So... what's the reaction time on that? Microseconds? Hours? Days? Weeks?...
How many of the blockchain downloaders are actually running metrics on it? 5? 10? 100? 1000? How many of them are sharing their metrics with the world?...

How many people use randomized pool lists...? Because what if I even engineered those?...

Don't you want to know more?...

BTW... have you checked the p2pool code yourself? Which client and server versions? Downloaded from where? Who can you trust.... ? MUHAHAHAHA.

I'll mail you a postcard from my island... where the only currency I need is bananas and boobs.

[dagelf]

You can start here :
http://mhuan.name/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/05/ExJobb_Final_Report_Huan_Meng.pdf

and than read more here :

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/

Just keep in mind that Bitcoin having almost a 6 billion dollar market cap, which peaked at over 10 billion last year is incentive enough for black hats to test all security weaknesses of the Bitcoin infrastructure. Bitcoin is constantly being tested and attacked because of this.

Useful links. But Bitcoin is neither an OS, nor an open hardware standard, nor a person, yet it runs on all of these, and each is prone to exploitation on a wide scale.

What I'm saying is that these are relevant vulnerabilities with measurable metrics - and that these could and should be measured and could even perhaps find their way back into the protocol itself, so as to make it even more resilient...

[TinaK]

I am well versed in computer security - and googling for the listed questions do not yield any quality leads. Perhaps my main question is this: Do you know if anybody has taken the time to compile a comprehensive wiki on the subject, and perhaps specifically, as it pertains to Bitcoin?

The closest I've been able to find is pages like https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths - and there are no real, hard numbers there. The words "Best practice" and Bitcoin do not seem to appear in close proximity, anywhere on the internet, and I see this as a barrier to Bitcoin's progress. 

How do they say... "Common sense is not so common".

Your questions lead us to believe that you really don't understand Bitcoin or how secure open source projects are developed. The problem with answering your questions is that the scope is so broad because their are so many details and different layers of security specific to every facet that it would cover a very large wiki of information.

You can start here :
http://mhuan.name/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/05/ExJobb_Final_Report_Huan_Meng.pdf

and than read more here :

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/

Just keep in mind that Bitcoin having almost a 6 billion dollar market cap, which peaked at over 10 billion last year is incentive enough for black hats to test all security weaknesses of the Bitcoin infrastructure. Bitcoin is constantly being tested and attacked because of this.

great to share, thanks

[LeMiner]

Now lets step over to the social engineering part of it all. Ok, so congratulations you've hacked into all of those pools and you can now unleash your evil plans on the blockchain... One problem, you can't STEAL anyone's wallet! WALLETS ARE SECURED BY CRYPTOGRAPHY STRONG ENOUGH THAT IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THE ENERGY OF THE ENTIRE SUN FOR ITS ENTIRE LIFESPAN TO CRACK. Having 51 or even 99% of the network changes nothing about that.

Again, you're staring yourself blind at the front-door approach. I have now have thousands of the highest value wallets and their keys. And malicious control of the pools. Now I'm emptying all those wallets into a network of new wallets under my control, too complex for anyone without a list of the exact wallets, to decipher.

Which will be near impossible, if at all feasible, without preparing for this exact scenario in advance.

How often do you change wallets? Every hour? Every day? Every month? How many transactions on the blockchain is purely people changing wallets? How many automatic-wallet-changing-apps are in the public domain? What's safer - a static wallet, or a dynamic wallet?

...Which improves your chances of winning the lottery - always playing the same number, or playing a different number every time? ... See what I'm doing here. Inception. And then reversing it. The bad guys don't. You've been incepted to stare yourself blind at how secure a protocol is that you don't understand yourself, nor tried to circumvent yourself.

And then, of course... not to mention that I have remote agents, and plenty of bandwidth, on my own dark net, and on almost every AS on the internet, and a decentralized control system of my own, that only I can control. Using encryption that is decades ahead of what is mainstream or available in the public domain today.

You could prevent transactions of your choosing from gaining any confirmations, thus making them invalid, potentially preventing people from sending Bitcoins between addresses. You could also reverse transactions you send during the time they are in control (allowing double spend transactions), and they could potentially prevent other miners from finding any blocks for a short period of time. That’s really about it

That's about all you need. What's the potential damage value, per minute, per hour, per day?
Hard numbers. What's the best hedge against it? Someone has worked it out. Is it in the public domain? No.
Is it being tracked in real-time, in the public domain?
No.
Should it be?
Would it be better that only a handful of malicious agents track it... or if everyone was keenly aware of the score?

Hey, the score can even make itself back into the protocol, to beef it up even more. The only beefing-up today is against Moore's law and the size of the network. Do you really, truly and honestly believe that that is enough?

---

This is the initial point of my post. Everyone is going on about how bullet-proof the protocol is, yet there are gaping vulnerabilities that nobody is talking about. Okay, perhaps they're not "gaping" yet, and perhaps not unique to Bitcoin, save for the fact that Bitcoin could potentially present their highest-value taget... perhaps the little talk about it is more a symptom of them not being an issue ...yet.

The protocol is pretty great, yes... but even the ancient Greeks had stories about how fallibility... the Indians were ahead by another few thousand years. Icarus. Jatayu.

What kills you? It's what you don't know or don't see coming. Complacency. What is the weakest link in the chain? It's you - and where you save your key. And your limited knowledge of- and ability to control the hardware-, software- and networks you need to utilize it. Which I started mastering before you could speak your mother tongue, which I stole even before you generated it (if you used my wallet software, or OS...) ... and you're still blissfully eating your steak, pretending that me and my world don't exist, simply because you've not come face-to-face with it yet... once you have, you'll be beyond thinking it will go away if you just close your eyes and pretend, you'll be beyond sticking your fingers in your ears... so perhaps all this is, is your assertion that you have not.

And all of this would be blatantly obvious to people monitoring the blockchain. Miners that notice they're mining on a malicious pool would step over to a different pool, or simply to p2pool. Once miners step over you and your evil plans will be left in control of nice pools.... controlling exactly 0% of the networks hashrate.

So... what's the reaction time on that? Microseconds? Hours? Days? Weeks?...
How many of the blockchain downloaders are actually running metrics on it? 5? 10? 100? 1000? How many of them are sharing their metrics with the world?...

How many people use randomized pool lists...? Because what if I even engineered those?...

Don't you want to know more?...

BTW... have you checked the p2pool code yourself? Which client and server versions? Downloaded from where? Who can you trust.... ? MUHAHAHAHA.

I'll mail you a postcard from my island... where the only currency I need is bananas and boobs.

I'll reply a little bit right now and some more later. Not that you've actually even attempted to understand what I wrote but that's ok, you're starting to look more and more like an elaborate troll.

I don't think you've fully realized yet that even with 99% of the entire network under your control you cannot move or empty anyone's wallet. You do not have the private keys of those people. Without the private key you cannot move any funds on the blockchain even if you had 100% of the network. I don't have to change wallet since my private keys are secure, if someone would take control of the network I would just simply be relaxing and wait out the storm since my coins are secured by MY private key that YOU don't have access to. It's not a lottery, you cannot crack my private key. This image will explain it to you...



Then let's move on to who would see your malicious attempts... Well, pretty much anyone that's running a full node on the network. Doublespend attempts are easy to recognize and there are hundreds of people constantly looking at transactions on the blockchain, so yes, it will be obvious, and it is monitored in real time.

The potential damage would only last for a few hours, since miners will step over to p2pool, which is decentralized. And yes, people are constantly looking at the security of that OPEN SOURCE code as well and thousands of hackers have tried to attack it.

You can try to steal my private keys, but sadly for you all of them are offline. If you really are that good at hacking I recommend you start with coinbase, they have some nice hot wallets and just like Bitcoin their system is constantly tested by hackers. Write me back when you're in (although I'm sure we'll read in the news about it) and then post your "loot" on this thread and perhaps someone will believe you. Public keys are open domain so feel free to try and crack a private key from a public key, you can find some public keys here: http://blockchain.info/

I feel like you have a lot of reading to do. If you would like to learn more about cryptography you could read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algorithms-Source/dp/8126513683/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415981394&sr=1-1&keywords=Applied+Cryptography%3A+Protocols%2C+Algorithms%2C+and+Source+Code+in+C

[turvarya]

This thread looked interesting at first, but it became obvious, that the OP is either a troll or an idiot.
Thanks to all the people, who gave great answers here.

[dagelf]

I am really not trying to troll... only one out of more than 10 replies so far has come near addressing any of my questions directly.

Stop assuming that I'm asking what has already been answered. I'm not. How can I prove this to you?! Let's dig deeper...

I'll reply a little bit right now and some more later. Not that you've actually even attempted to understand what I wrote but that's ok, you're starting to look more and more like an elaborate troll.

I don't think you've fully realized yet that even with 99% of the entire network under your control you cannot move or empty anyone's wallet. You do not have the private keys of those people. Without the private key you cannot move any funds on the blockchain even if you had 100% of the network. I don't have to change wallet since my private keys are secure, if someone would take control of the network I would just simply be relaxing and wait out the storm since my coins are secured by MY private key that YOU don't have access to. It's not a lottery, you cannot crack my private key. This image will explain it to you...

Yes, I can, because I also have a huge number of private keys, including yours. (Hypothetically speaking) - do you really think that hacking syndicates who have stolen private keys, are going to rush out and use them right away?

Let me put it to you this way: even if I didn't copy your private key the moment you generated it, with some backdoor in your PC software or hardware, all I need to do is to look at the time and date of your first transaction, your OS, wallet software, and any and all other information leaking out from your computing devices, consult my vast database of PRNG quirks, to vastly reduce the amount of time I'll need to crack it.

But cracking, or tracking the crackability of the various parts of Bitcoin or the computing infrastructure it runs on, is the least of my concern. BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE IS FOCUSED ON THIS. So this isn't what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the lower layers that Bitcoin is built on and my concern is with measuring. With gathering metrics. With free and unfettered access to actual collected metrics. All which is wide open, and available, yet there's no concerted effort to gather any in a public forum.

Please address this concern. You seem to think this is irrelevant... why?!

All the encryption in the world won't help you if your key is stored in memory in your computer, and I have access to your computer.

So how many private keys are offline, and how many online? I am willing to take a substantial bet that 99.9% of all private Bitcoin keys are stored online, within reach of a CPU.

Still, when I originally posted, this was not my primary concern... but granted, it seems obvious that its perhaps the most relevant metric, and perhaps the most difficult to collect with great accuracy.

Then let's move on to who would see your malicious attempts... Well, pretty much anyone that's running a full node on the network. Doublespend attempts are easy to recognize and there are hundreds of people constantly looking at transactions on the blockchain, so yes, it will be obvious, and it is monitored in real time.

The potential damage would only last for a few hours, since miners will step over to p2pool, which is decentralized. And yes, people are constantly looking at the security of that OPEN SOURCE code as well and thousands of hackers have tried to attack it.

"Pretty much"... Have you done an internet search on "Bitcoin metrics", or "Most important bitcoin metrics"?

According to http://www.coindesk.com/state-of-bitcoin-q2-2014-report-expanding-bitcoin-economy/ about 5m wallets have been seen on the network, projected to be around 8m by December.

Soo..... 5m wallets. How many of those wallets' keys are stored offline? 100? 1000? 10 000? What's that? 0.001%.

Are you saying that's not a significant metric to get right?

Let's see... how many of those wallets are stored on some web-wallet service? A quick internet search reveals that coinbase is on track to keep around 2m of those by December. 25% of all wallets. Yes, coinbase is quite a high value target... so who runs the security over at Coinbase, and what's his experience? How many lines of code has he written? How many layers of security does he oversee, and what's the furthest anyone has come?

Googling for Bitcoin security, around about the first 2 pages only point to one person: Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Is this the only person on the planet who knows anything about securing computers?

So, needless to say, Coinbase sounds like they have pretty beefy security. But if I pull the geolocation records on all their keyholders (how many could there be now, 3? 5? 10? ... I track them down, put them all in the same room, and hold a gun to their head, how many of them will give their lives for a bunch of secret codes? Even this I can gather metrics on... how many of them served in the military? How many of them carry guns? How many of them adhere to a strict routine of visiting friends or relatives? How many of them visit random new places weekly?...)

How many others web wallet-services are there? How many exchanges? How many coins are held in pools and exchanges' wallets, for how long, on average?

Once again, I can almost guarantee you that the syndicates taking down exchanges, do not merely pick these exchanges at random...

Yes, considering this, perhaps putting this information out there is not the best idea.

All I want is a dashboard, showing the vital signs of Bitcoin. The real vital signs, not the surface features that are discussed to here and gone.

You can try to steal my private keys, but sadly for you all of them are offline. If you really are that good at hacking I recommend you start with coinbase, they have some nice hot wallets and just like Bitcoin their system is constantly tested by hackers. Write me back when you're in (although I'm sure we'll read in the news about it) and then post your "loot" on this thread and perhaps someone will believe you. Public keys are open domain so feel free to try and crack a private key from a public key, you can find some public keys here: http://blockchain.info/

Perhaps I should just clear this up: I am not trying to hack anyone... and I am not the hacker. I'm the concerned citizen, the messenger, the coder, the mathematician, the philosopher, who have looked into the future beyond the horizon commonly discussed, and I want the community to look further too... and be better prepared for what's coming.

Because, where there's a way, there's a will.

[inBitweTrust]

Let me put it to you this way: even if I didn't copy your private key the moment you generated it, with some backdoor in your PC software or hardware, all I need to do is to look at the time and date of your first transaction, your OS, wallet software, and any and all other information leaking out from your computing devices, consult my vast database of PRNG quirks, to vastly reduce the amount of time I'll need to crack it.

But cracking, or tracking the crackability of the various parts of Bitcoin or the computing infrastructure it runs on, is the least of my concern. BECAUSE ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE IS FOCUSED ON THIS. So this isn't what I'm talking about.

Turing complete devices will never be 100% secure. This is why people should store a bulk of their savings with mutisig cold storage and hardware wallets.

If you really care about bitcoin security I would like to see you promote cold storage and hardware wallets.

Instead it looks like you are merely a PoS shill:

Seriously, PoS is where it's at. PoS and utility ie. fast transactions. And fairness or democratisation ie. ASIC Proof.

These targeted attacks from PoS shills will not be forgotten and will come back to haunt your projects. Why don't you try and compete honestly through real development instead of creating shill accounts on bitcointalk?