The attack is over and we can thank automatic coin choice pools
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Give Me FTC shut off withdrawals. This has effectively killed the attack.
Because of the high hashrate the attacker was also overwhelmed by automatic coin choice pools.
The result was that many scrypt miners turned to FTC which snowballed. The attacker still managed to get some coin. But again this shows that a 51% injection and a full attack are different things.
To fully attack you must:
Gain 51% of the mining power.
SUSTAIN the 51% mining power.
Orphan legitimate block generation.
Get people to confirm your blocks.There is a misconception that mining helps the attacker. Yes, it helps the attacker to confirm some of his false coins. BUT, as soon as the rest of the network reaches higher rate than his, the ledger gets reorganized.
This would have been a hell of a lot worse without automatic coin choice pools. They routed a ton of hashpower at FTC. This broke the attacker’s control of the blockchain.
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So that explains the crazy hash rate fluctuations, in part. Thanks so much for the update. Keep on fighting the FUD in the trollbox
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[quote name=“erk” post=“11924” timestamp=“1370818163”]
What makes you think it’s over?Whilst the confirmation time are still a joke, FTC is a target. You can blame the 41.4% diff correction limit for that, not the auto coin choice pools.
[/quote]The confirmations are coming quickly. The autocoin choice pools brought a ton of hashpower from LTCers and other scrypters.
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Without the 41.4% limit we would be in a second high difficulty trap. High difficulty takes shorter time to go up than low hashrate to bring difficulty down.
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i think last valid block is http://explorer.feathercoin.com/block/c4bc5ef468c02f61e0ca6c77e1348a6809d9ee3538a4ad0aad790527c5ab1e8b
so i tried to fork the chain from that point, seems to work…
if enough people are willing to mine on the clean(er) chain, i would start it on my pool again.I think it should be clear that we cannot let any attacker just inject blocks making the legit blocks all invalid just get away with that. we should *fork* them out and proof to the world feathercoin cares about security of investments. Letting the chain beein played like it happed would be proven insecurity, not a very good point for a crypto coin from my point of view.
you can obtain a version with a custom checkpoint added by myself which sets this block above as checkpoint under github.
https://github.com/hynodeva/FeatherCoinIf you start it with -addnode=hynodeva.eu you should be able to retrieve this chain.
hynodeva dev
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I dont know if forking the block chain without majority consensus is the wisest idea. Fragmenting the miners would only make problems worse.
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the pools would need to jump in…
but i really dont like just watching this and keep mining… that would be kind of stupid. -
[quote name=“hynodeva” post=“11960” timestamp=“1370821312”]
the pools would need to jump in…
but i really dont like just watching this and keep mining… that would be kind of stupid.
[/quote]The attacker isn’t trying to profit.
The attacker wants us to reverse.
That will kill FTC because it would hurt legitimate miners and buyers and sellers especially when we are opening the market.
Stop worrying about the attacker making money. They want to waste their money to hurt us and then we’re going to hurt our users?
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Attacks will continue then.
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We set a bad precedent though by allowing this to stand. Anyone can come and fork the chain through 51% and nothing will be done.
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[quote name=“stulowe” post=“11982” timestamp=“1370823865”]
We set a bad precedent though by allowing this to stand. Anyone can come and fork the chain through 51% and nothing will be done.
[/quote]Yep.
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and how many blocks did they steal? Looks to be about 200 that they orphaned and took for themselves and we are now confirming them for them.
So I guess they stole about 40000 FTC from miners who had already earned it.
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we dont reverse anything if we fork the blockchain at a valid state, we just try to outrun the invalid chain from that point, and if successful save our mining rewards which we lost because of that attack.
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[quote name=“zerodrama” post=“11980” timestamp=“1370823780”]
[quote author=hynodeva link=topic=1463.msg11960#msg11960 date=1370821312]
the pools would need to jump in…
but i really dont like just watching this and keep mining… that would be kind of stupid.
[/quote]The attacker isn’t trying to profit.
The attacker wants us to reverse.
That will kill FTC because it would hurt legitimate miners and buyers and sellers especially when we are opening the market.
Stop worrying about the attacker making money. They want to waste their money to hurt us and then we’re going to hurt our users?
[/quote]Its just a trade-off, either you give the loser traders the shaft or you give the miners the shaft. By doing nothing you give the miners the shaft, while rewarding the attacker, and the “greedy” traders (not technically “users” at this point). That is 3 wrongs. In the other case, you screw the attacker, you reward the miners, and screw the “greedy” traders. That is at most 1 wrong. Better to do the later.
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Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea? Sure i got it up the ass dry by whoever did this too, but forking back to before this started is going to make many people lose confidence in the coin. Thats not even mentioning the fact that the exchanges could pull the coin for a stunt like that.
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[quote name=“sl1982” post=“11995” timestamp=“1370825566”]
Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea? Sure i got it up the ass dry by whoever did this too, but forking back to before this started is going to make many people lose confidence in the coin. Thats not even mentioning the fact that the exchanges could pull the coin for a stunt like that.
[/quote]I can see both sides of this. We are seemingly going to continue down the fork and assume the new price is going to keep miners happy even though they get shafted for the last two days of mining. Which damages credibility more? Depends on whether you see this as a community that stands up to attacks regardless of the short-term impact on value or do we care more about the short-term pump on value and seeming to be the most profitable? For me I would rather we made a stand against the attack.
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There is another side. Because of this event miners are now getting twice what they were, sooner.
I know it’s no consolation, but there is an actual benefit (not to mention price, more miners, stronger network) you can attribute to this event.
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[quote name=“Tuck Fheman” post=“12001” timestamp=“1370826406”]
There is another side. Because of this event miners are now getting twice what they were, sooner.I know it’s no consolation, but there is an actual benefit (not to mention price, more miners, stronger network) you can attribute to this event.
[/quote]Provided this is the end of it. If the hash is so consolidated in a couple of pools then this could just be a DDOS away from happening again once a large number of blocks are waiting confirmations.
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Maybe we should focus on finding the thief by tracking the coins.
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[quote name=“Vigil” post=“12005” timestamp=“1370826955”]
Maybe we should focus on finding the thief by tracking the coins.
[/quote]What does that do exactly?
