6 confirmations is not enough

[MrTeal]

As another scenario, if you actually could get 50+% of miners to agree to a scheme like this, why wouldn't you just have them start mining their own blocks and not including any blocks from other miners? They could maintain the longest chain at no cost to themselves, and once the difficulty drops substantially due to the blocks from the other 45% or so of miners not being included they would effectively be almost doubling their income (in BTC) at no cost. That would give them massively more than a couple hundred BTC.

[Come-from-Beyond]

So you believe a rational miner would accept the 500BTC in fees in place of the (150BTC/2) in block rewards in order to attack an exchange for a $93,500 profit, irregardless of the potential damage it might cause to the valuation of the $30-50M worth of equipment they need to use to help you with the attack?

I believe that at some level of fee the majority of miners will help to double-spend, it's no necessarily could be 500 BTC.

[Come-from-Beyond]

As another scenario, if you actually could get 50+% of miners to agree to a scheme like this, why wouldn't you just have them start mining their own blocks and not including any blocks from other miners? They could maintain the longest chain at no cost to themselves, and once the difficulty drops substantially due to the blocks from the other 45% or so of miners not being included they would effectively be almost doubling their income (in BTC) at no cost. That would give them massively more than a couple hundred BTC.

Interesting. Any ideas why we don't observe this right now?

[MrTeal]

So you believe a rational miner would accept the 500BTC in fees in place of the (150BTC/2) in block rewards in order to attack an exchange for a $93,500 profit, irregardless of the potential damage it might cause to the valuation of the $30-50M worth of equipment they need to use to help you with the attack?

I believe that at some level of fee the majority of miners will help to double-spend, it's no necessarily could be 500 BTC.

But remember the premise of the attack is that you need to be able to immediately convert the 1000BTC to other crypto (or some other store of value) that you can withdraw immediately, and then attempt the double spend. Unless the market cap of other crypto changes relative to Bitcoin in the near future, even converting 1000BTC to alts and withdrawing it with no delay is going to be a challenge. If you need to send a 5000BTC fee and use 10kBTC in your attack, you'd never be able to buy enough alts and get them off target exchange.


If you were actually to plan this, why would you try and send the 500BTC as a fee anyway? Even a (likely unsuccessful) attempt at something like this would require a lot of planning with the mining parties involved. Unless they were anticipating just such a scenario, no miner would have the custom software in place to scan for new possible double spends many blocks back and make a realtime determination on whether it should aide in the attack. It would be a lot easier to just double spend the 1000BTC to yourself and bribe the miners in a separate transaction.

[colinistheman]

TL/DR:  Come-from-Beyond states he was a NXT dev and currently holds NXT. He currently holds no BTC and is trying to pick apart bitcoin. The motives seem pretty clear-cut to me.

It's a wrong TL;DR.

It's a correct TL;DR.

You assume that only a holder of bitcoins is eligible to question Bitcoin internals which is obviously a fallacy.

I never said that, nor do I think that.

You slyly use the word "question" but I think you are not doing it for the best interests in bitcoin, but to try to find a weakness for your own personal gain, as stated in the logic of my previous post. If I thought you were trying to help strengthen bitcoin then I would not have even posted in this thread. At this point all you can do is deny my claims and all I can do is state what I believe are your motives. My job is done there, so carry on if you wish. I just wanted to share with others my reasoning behind the motives of your picking-apart techniques, because to me it seems alterior-motive driven, not anything helpful or constructive.

PS: I wouldn't trust to reasonings of colinistheman because he is biased:

2.) And yes I possess BTC.
As a bonus answer, I also possess NXT.

You are slipperly like an eel with your selective answers. You left out that I stated I also own NXT. And I did not obtain them from a faucet. I own much more than 1000 NXT (I won't say exactly how much however).

[Come-from-Beyond]

You are slipperly like an eel with your selective answers.

Haha, I just used the same trick as you had done.

[colinistheman]

You are slipperly like an eel with your selective answers.

Haha, I just used the same trick as you had done.

No, you manipulate the conversation. You also over-use the tactic of trying to reverse everything said to you.

[Come-from-Beyond]

No, you manipulate the conversation. You also over-use the tactic of trying to reverse everything said to you.

I expected that you won't reply...

My job is done there

[steven.G999]

whether the magnitude of the confirmation number, depending on the magnitude of the number of shipment?

[colinistheman]

No, you manipulate the conversation. You also over-use the tactic of trying to reverse everything said to you.

I expected that you won't reply...

My job is done there

lmao

[thejaytiesto]

My god, 1 is enough!
Unless you are buying something like a car, you dont even need to be paranoid about confirmation times imo. its just bullshit. pay, look on the blockchain.info if the payment went through and as soon as 1 confirmation happens then you can be safe. Even with 0 confirmations i wouldn't care to leave a shop after paying. Or are we supossed to wait? this should be instant like cash and credit cards, otherwise no one will use it because its a waste of time having to wait for confirmations to happen in the middle of a shoop creating big ass waiting lines.

[Come-from-Beyond]

My god, 1 is enough!
Unless you are buying something like a car, you dont even need to be paranoid about confirmation times imo. its just bullshit. pay, look on the blockchain.info if the payment went through and as soon as 1 confirmation happens then you can be safe. Even with 0 confirmations i wouldn't care to leave a shop after paying. Or are we supossed to wait? this should be instant like cash and credit cards, otherwise no one will use it because its a waste of time having to wait for confirmations to happen in the middle of a shoop creating big ass waiting lines.

1 is not enough because of Finney attack.

[thompete]

My god, 1 is enough!
Unless you are buying something like a car, you dont even need to be paranoid about confirmation times imo. its just bullshit. pay, look on the blockchain.info if the payment went through and as soon as 1 confirmation happens then you can be safe. Even with 0 confirmations i wouldn't care to leave a shop after paying. Or are we supossed to wait? this should be instant like cash and credit cards, otherwise no one will use it because its a waste of time having to wait for confirmations to happen in the middle of a shoop creating big ass waiting lines.

1 is not enough because of Finney attack.

How much for avoiding the double spend . Are 2 confirmations enough to  be certain about avoiding a double spend ?

[Come-from-Beyond]

How much for avoiding the double spend . Are 2 confirmations enough to  be certain about avoiding a double spend ?

Depends how much you have for bribery I think.

[bitllionaire]

I think only 1 confirmation is enough, controling the mining is almost impossible

[jones_]

In the early days of bitcoin an attack like this would have been trivial. CPU and gpu miners have nothing to lose if bitcoin goes under so they would be happy to pick up a bribery.

Because of asics on the market, people now need special hardware in order to mine bitcoin. Because the have an investment directly to the success of bitcoin, (if transactions are double spent, bitcoin becomes less valuable and asic miners become junk) they will follow the honest road and not try to rewrite the history.

So bitcoins increasing centralization is a reason for safety in this situation, oops.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Because the have an investment directly to the success of bitcoin, (if transactions are double spent, bitcoin becomes less valuable and asic miners become junk) they will follow the honest road and not try to rewrite the history.

We just need a few altcoins with SHA256 mining algo to solve this issue.

[jones_]

Because the have an investment directly to the success of bitcoin, (if transactions are double spent, bitcoin becomes less valuable and asic miners become junk) they will follow the honest road and not try to rewrite the history.

We just need a few altcoins with SHA256 mining algo to solve this issue.

If the alt coins were able to pick up the slack from all the asics and be profitable enough for miners to take the bribe on bitcoin, then yes, there is a problem there.

Bitcoins core security relies on the fact that mining hardware can pretty much only be used for bitcoin, if anyone can think of a good use for trillions of sha256 hashes, then bitcoins security would go down greatly.

Seems weird that bitcoins security relies on buying miners that only work for bitcoin, PoS just simplifies the process from a mining device investment to an investment in the currency itself, but that's a little off topic

[ABitNut]

Because the have an investment directly to the success of bitcoin, (if transactions are double spent, bitcoin becomes less valuable and asic miners become junk) they will follow the honest road and not try to rewrite the history.

We just need a few altcoins with SHA256 mining algo to solve this issue.

If the alt coins were able to pick up the slack from all the asics and be profitable enough for miners to take the bribe on bitcoin, then yes, there is a problem there.

Bitcoins core security relies on the fact that mining hardware can pretty much only be used for bitcoin, if anyone can think of a good use for trillions of sha256 hashes, then bitcoins security would go down greatly.

Seems weird that bitcoins security relies on buying miners that only work for bitcoin, PoS just simplifies the process from a mining device investment to an investment in the currency itself, but that's a little off topic

An alt coin? In my conspiracy theory there is a prepared plan to fork BTC to include some method for full nodes (or other miners) to veto some malicious mined blocks and possibly include a reward for running a full node somehow. After crashing BTC hard all holders will jump on board of a plan that may recover their loss.

BTC would recover, just like it (has not yet) recovered from mtgox. Because people are too invested to let it go.

[Daedelus]

As another scenario, if you actually could get 50+% of miners to agree to a scheme like this, why wouldn't you just have them start mining their own blocks and not including any blocks from other miners? They could maintain the longest chain at no cost to themselves, and once the difficulty drops substantially due to the blocks from the other 45% or so of miners not being included they would effectively be almost doubling their income (in BTC) at no cost. That would give them massively more than a couple hundred BTC.

Interesting. Any ideas why we don't observe this right now?

I don't think anyone answered this