\[Bushstar Response Incl\] Fork and 51% the chain of event, including 33000
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Don’t panic :)
[quote name=“svennand” post=“6237” timestamp=“1369434490”]
waiting nervously for bushstar comment.
Is this some of the reason why ftc has dropped like a rock to 0.0009 btc/ftc. sell order of over 2mill ftc
[/quote]I saw that. Someone put huge sell orders on to suppress the price. I bought as many as I could :P
Back to business. Someone is “testing” our chain and this is expected. This is nothing new and is something that all coins have had to suffer. Orphan chains do occur naturally and resolve themselves. WorldCoin with 15 second block targets generates many orphans, apparently it saw a 300+ chain orphan on one pool. An attack of that size would be incredibly hard to sustain and prove costly to the attacker.
I’m not sure what the motives are but perhaps we could piece some information together to investigate what is going on. We already know that they must have around 2.25GH/s to create blocks as fast as they do. This could explain why some complained about confirms resetting to zero, if your transactions end up in an orphaned block they have to be resent in a new block.
I will bring zerodrama into this conversation.
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First off this concern isn’t about cheap coins but about breaking something. If you break something someone has to benefit from you using the non-broken thing.
I’m only about a month or so into the crypto-community. i remember jumping around to different mining pools to figure the stuff out and see results. There were so many that had some what high hash rate that I didn’t really anything from. i really learned more about crypto by using an honest stable pool done by BigVern because I could see actual results and attribute it to what people were talking about in many different forums. This makes me go back and literally question those other pools on whether for a day or two they were breaking stuff.
I wouldn’t call this a panic but a reasonable concern. Does this take effort? yes. Stability is FTCs future best friend. This would threaten it or deeply delay it.
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Quick point to note is that the best way to protect ourselves is to grow bigger. All our efforts on development and adoption will bring value, volume and miners to the coin. The larger the hashrate the harder we are to attack. All coins can suffer from these attacks, but the larger ones have less concern.
Then again Bitcoin could experience this again with the rise of ASICs in the hands of the few.
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First of all, a 51% attack is actually half of an attack.
51% takes control of the network, you still need to create false transactions, orphan your target chain so it ends, all sorts of other business.
The interesting thing in this thread is the idea of jumping orphan chains. This is interesting because it could be a means of fraud or a means of destroying your own trail (not necessarily a bad thing).
Still, 51% isn’t a death sentence. It just means shields are down, prepare to for pirates, if we’re to use a Star trek metaphor.
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Groll - should be troll :)
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Even a few consecutive 51% attacks can be reverted through a hard fork invalidating all blocks mined after a known good one. This is the last resort though.
It would be good to know who attacked our blockchain. If it is a large public LTC pool, then disclosure of this information is going to hurt their reputation badly.
UPD: BTC-e seems to know something. They have increased the number of confirmations for FTC deposits from 5 to 50.
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You think an LTC pool redirected work toward FTC? (6FeathercoinSucks C T B (btc backwards) seems more of a BTC ONE TRUE COIN tard attack).
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Could be. I remember the lethal 51% attack on CoiledCoin executed by Luke Jr using Eligius hash power, though it was rather easy due to merged mining with BTC. Need to investigate further.
UPD: Seems we’re still under attack. Someone moves millions of FTC.
http://explorer.feathercoin.com/address/6dxYyTAnvdNXMqViM7MRQPNsPQeKNFRnvo
http://explorer.feathercoin.com/address/6shZk4374LBcdWCEyHrNkateK754BXeCgx[url=http://explorer.feathercoin.com/block/10c8205bd7d63fa382d1564ae7f68a86a43afa8a44a8cc2551b511f45dd772b6]#33062[/url] is fake with 1 million FTC, the following #33063, #33064, #33065 and #33066 are empty of the same origin. [url=http://explorer.feathercoin.com/block/bb4218886e90d7c6bf114060f137e860101cbc8570def661c0c6469ac7455a7b]#33067,[/url] [url=http://explorer.feathercoin.com/block/84949d92dd66250a6dedaf44f480ab48622aa385901a0e29bdbc70a41cb90536]#33068[/url], [url=http://explorer.feathercoin.com/block/61ad1a86282247e26ce70be0458ee18cc9a45594d1f5a113a26eb8d0ecc56781]#33069[/url] are also very suspicious, though many transactions included in these blocks are valid most likely.
That’s all for now, I’m falling asleep.
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okay this is someone with a grudge.
i take this as a compliment.
we should give BTC-e a pat on the back for acting even without being asked.
1000x more trustworthy than mtgox.
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[quote]You think an LTC pool redirected work toward FTC? (6FeathercoinSucks C T B (btc backwards) seems more of a BTC ONE TRUE COIN tard attack).[/quote]
your probably right about the BTC lover type, but that means he control all the hash power himself as he need to make it scrypt not sha256.
[quote]UPD: BTC-e seems to know something. They have increased the number of confirmations for FTC deposits from 5 to 50.[/quote]
humm that don’t sound good :-[, i was about to ask if their was someone that accept after 5 confirm, this answer it and is exactly the answer i didn’t want to get: BTC-Eso this one is speculation but I think:
he send to BTC-E then revert it. Sell all in BTC-E and then transfer to a BTC wallet before BTC-E can get anything back(if he is not so stupid to keep money at BTC-E will trying to fraud them ;) ). so this can be a 500K$ lost for BTC-E :(I can be wrong on this but I will not bet against that speculation ;)
for 33062 to 33069 their was move of coin. Block mine by he, but only a 33062 orphan as of now without anything very suspicious in my eyes at least. this seems just a i get out as fast as i can (would be a good thing in fact)
or he can try to make a 50 transactions fork :'(edited their is a fork but at 33057. 1M FTC. Back in chain for 33062 was in fact making the orphan. a bit weird
For the one that call me troll or wrong please at least find some argument (BTW: many don’t mean all. my english is not very good but at least i know that :) )
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[quote]
How can someone have this hash power. Any of the top 5 LTC mining pool redirect to FTC can do it, a non listed LTC pool can also have this hash rate. [b]An alt coin with high hype can also do it with pool redirect.[/b] (redirect can be for one or more alt coins pools that use script redirect to the target coins)
[/quote]I have to admit I mined quite a few of the new alt-coins in the last weeks.
New pools spring up like mushrooms these days. No one knows for sure if they are legit or not. And no one cares, as long as they mine the coin of the hour.
Not all of the pools have paid out correctly. I remember a pool (won’t say which one) where I mined for 24h and got only paid a fraction of what I should have got.
So the idea would be:
- Open a pool for the most popular coin.
- Payout correctly for a day or two to build up lots of hashing power.
- Redirect to Feathercoin and screw up the chain
- Users start to complain … let the pool die …
- goto 1)
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[quote name=“ghostlander” post=“6262” timestamp=“1369440489”]
Could be. I remember the lethal 51% attack on CoiledCoin executed by Luke Jr using Eligius hash power, though it was rather easy due to merged mining with BTC. Need to investigate further.
[/quote]Wait what? Luke Jr misused the hashing power of his clients to start a 51% attack? How come he’s not tarred and feathered?
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Although BTC-e has acted accordingly to the situation, we have to do something as well. A quick solution is to release a new version of the client with a higher number of confirmations required for transaction. We can also implement some kind of central checkpointing for a while or even proceed further to PoS. If we do nothing, repeated attacks may destabilise the network as many valid transactions get into orphaned blocks.
[quote name=“Radacoin” post=“6294” timestamp=“1369466192”]
[quote author=ghostlander link=topic=797.msg6262#msg6262 date=1369440489]
Could be. I remember the lethal 51% attack on CoiledCoin executed by Luke Jr using Eligius hash power, though it was rather easy due to merged mining with BTC. Need to investigate further.
[/quote]Wait what? Luke Jr misused the hashing power of his clients to start a 51% attack? How come he’s not tarred and feathered?
[/quote]He thought of CLC as of another pump & dump altcoin and punished it in his way. Far not all Eligius miners approved this execution post factum, though he got away easy.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3472/what-is-the-story-behind-the-attack-on-coiledcoin
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So it looks more like feathercoin is being used rather than attacked, used to make profit from the exchanges.
With the exchanges upping the confirm amount, it will make it harder to sell feathercoin at those exchanges, the price of FTC should establish a more stable base (it will slow down the pump/dump antics).
Its probably being done with other coins also.
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[quote name=“pyxis” post=“6305” timestamp=“1369473665”]
So it looks more like feathercoin is being used rather than attacked, used to make profit from the exchanges.With the exchanges upping the confirm amount, it will make it harder to sell feathercoin at those exchanges, the price of FTC should establish a more stable base (it will slow down the pump/dump antics).
Its probably being done with other coins also.
[/quote]So if we get the exchanges to up their confirm count then it is much harder for someone to sustain that kind of attack and would probably be better off chasing another coin. I’m going to contact Vircurex and Cryptonit and let me know that they should take action on this immediately.
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We can’t release updates so fast. We’re lucky to have good pools using the correct version as it is. It took long enough to schedule a hard fork which worked out cleanly.
What we need to do honestly is first help users understand the situation. Losing hashrate is more damaging than not having a superman feature against attack.
This isn’t like updating your instant messenger. Every time you update the client, if you change the way things work, you change the contract with the network.
Also the pools and exchanges have to implement defenses. Longer confirmations (it’s already 120) are what killed novacoin pools. No one will stick around that long.
Proof of stake is also not the solution. It doesn’t mean anything unless there are already transactions that are consumer class and people can see direct benefit from the extra protection.
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I’m glad we have this thread. We are already making sense of what could be happening. Now that BTC-e has 50 confirms it is safe. I have now contacted Vircurex, BTER and Cryptonit by email. I will go spam their ticketing system in a minute.
If this is a pool it would have to be a scrypt pool. Are there any clues as to whether any hash power left the pools at the time of the attacks?
But then considering the CTB (BTC backwards) in the address it could be a member or members of the BTC cult or the CTB could be misdirection perhaps.
Too much guessing will turn us paranoid so we should not start jumping at shadows.
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The exchanges will defend themselves in such or another way. The attacks slow down transactions, make them restart due to orphans, people spread FUD, then panic and dump. If the attackers needed 2GH/s to make profit through BTC-e, they can damage the network operations seriously and continuosly with much less hash power. What we have now is 0.3GH/s, too little to resist.
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[quote name=“ghostlander” post=“6323” timestamp=“1369478026”]
The exchanges will defend themselves in such or another way. The attacks slow down transactions, make them restart due to orphans, people spread FUD, then panic and dump. If the attackers needed 2GH/s to make profit through BTC-e, they can damage the network operations seriously and continuosly with much less hash power. What we have now is 0.3GH/s, too little to resist.
[/quote]I completely agree about hash power. We’re just a little too small at the moment. BTC and LTC cast a big shadow when their hash rate is so much larger than ours.
Any bright ideas to get more miners? Unless I’m missing something I think it should be at the top of our list.
Of course other goals will make mining more attractive. I’m suggesting making all our efforts a means to an end, more value and more miners.
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I have never been able to contact BTC-e, I approached them a few times in the run up to and on the day of block 33,000 but never got a response.
I would like to know what prompted them to change the confirmations to 50 as this could give us a clue as to what these people are up to.
Are they trying to sell FTC for BTC and ultimately retain both or are they trying to suppress the price. Yesterday we saw massive sell orders pushing the price down and still sat there at a very low price before disappearing.I’m wondering if this incident could have been the reason for the confirms going up. I will go and try to contact them again to get more information.
My thinking is that they are either trying to make money or ruin us. If making money is there goal then with higher confirms on exchanges there are much easier targets now. If they are trying to ruin us then they will stick around and give us an extra incentive to add value.
