Blockchain's Once-Feared 51% Attack Is Now Becoming Regular (telegra.ph) 168
Monacoin, bitcoin gold, zencash, verge and now, litecoin cash. At least five cryptocurrencies have recently been hit with an attack that used to be more theoretical than actual, all in the last month. From a report: In each case, attackers have been able to amass enough computing power to compromise these smaller networks, rearrange their transactions and abscond with millions of dollars in an effort that's perhaps the crypto equivalent of a bank heist. More surprising, though, may be that so-called 51% attacks are a well-known and dangerous cryptocurrency attack vector. While there have been some instances of such attacks working successfully in the past, they haven't exactly been all that common. They've been so rare, some technologists have gone as far as to argue miners on certain larger blockchains would never fall victim to one.
The age-old (in crypto time) argument? It's too costly and they wouldn't get all that much money out of it. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. NYU computer science researcher Joseph Bonneau released research last year featuring estimates of how much money it would cost to execute these attacks on top blockchains by simply renting power, rather than buying all the equipment. One conclusion he drew? These attacks were likely to increase. And, it turns out he was right. "Generally, the community thought this was a distant threat. I thought it was much less distant and have been trying to warn of the risk," he told CoinDesk, adding: "Even I didn't think it would start happening this soon."
The age-old (in crypto time) argument? It's too costly and they wouldn't get all that much money out of it. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. NYU computer science researcher Joseph Bonneau released research last year featuring estimates of how much money it would cost to execute these attacks on top blockchains by simply renting power, rather than buying all the equipment. One conclusion he drew? These attacks were likely to increase. And, it turns out he was right. "Generally, the community thought this was a distant threat. I thought it was much less distant and have been trying to warn of the risk," he told CoinDesk, adding: "Even I didn't think it would start happening this soon."
Coming soon (Score:2)
Bigger, better, blockier. Just try us.
Re:Coming soon (Score:5, Funny)
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Blockcheney did 9/11
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Blockchain 2, the Search for More Money.
Don't you mean: Blockchain 2: Electric Boogah-boo!
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Re:Coming soon (Score:4, Funny)
I'll wait for Objective-Blockchain
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Best to wait for Functional-Blockchain.
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So... RustyChain? Not the most secure and robust sounding name.
CaptainDork's corollary: (Score:4, Interesting)
For every motherfucker out there with a computer, there's another motherfucker out there with a computer.
The strategy for hacking blockchain is no different from hacking anything else: Learn the theory then apply the theory.
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A successful attack will also cause bad publicity and a sudden drop in value of the coin, which will hurt the attacker just as well. That's good incentive not to perform an attack.
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You don't understand the speed at which these things happen on smaller blockchains. They happen fast enough for most people to simply not notice until far too late. By then, the attacker has gotten the money, made the exchange out to hard currency, and is out.
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Not if you have a short position in bitcoins.
1. borrow bitcoins off somebody
2. sell them to somebody else
3. do 51% attack and make sure it is publicised
4. buy bitcoins back at a fraction of their previous value and give them back to the person you borrowed them from
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Then you need to read TFA. Their targets are small cryptocurrencies because these currencies still have small networks. Also, they can make money if the condition is right.
From TFA:
To make money using this attack vector, hackers need a few pieces to be in place. For one, an attacker can't do anything they want when they've racked up a majority of the hashing power. But they are able to double spend transactions under certain conditions.
...
As such, hackers have found various clever ways of making sure the conditions are just right to make them extra money. That's why attackers of monacoin, bitcoin gold, zencash and litecoin cash have all targeted exchanges holding millions in cryptocurrency.
By amassing more than half of the network's hashing power, the bitcoin gold attacker was able to double spend two very expensive transactions sent to an exchange.
Through three successful attacks of zencash (a lesser-known cryptocurrency that's a fork of a fork of privacy-minded Zcash), the attacker was able to run off with about more than 21,000 zen (the zencash token) worth well over $500,000 at the time of writing.
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Indeed, and that is what worries me most. It seems that criminals got hold of 51% of the computing power in certain crypto systems. Maybe we need more legitimate interest?
(And as far as I understand, you can get away with less than 51% and a bit of luck.)
We need to smash the money printing machines. (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope the 51%ers wreck as many cryptocurrencies as possible to crash the market so the environment can be saved, graphics cards go back to making graphics and people go back to investing into stocks of real companies that provide real services.
Re:We need to smash the money printing machines. (Score:5, Informative)
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And the non-centralized feature is also one of the biggest drawbacks.
What happens when someone accesses your wallet and steals your currency? Who can reverse the transactions and get your money back?
What happens when you lose access to your account? Who can verify your identity and restore access?
Like any anarchist ideal, it only works if everyone doesn't have any ill intent. Once you have ill intent, you need some kind of enforcement capable of setting things right. Something that can govern, if even just
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'And the non-centralized feature is also one of the biggest drawbacks.'
Dependent upon your viewpoint. Decentralization relies upon verification and trust of all nodes. The hive mentality verifies the trust.
"What happens when someone accesses your wallet and steals your currency?"
The same thing that happens when you loose fiat currency.
"Who can reverse the transactions and get your money back?"
See above. Even if the transfer was adjudicated as fraudulent the probability of receiving compensation fr
Features, not bugs! (Score:2)
Goodness knows why I'm replying to an AC, but the inability to reverse transactions is a feature! People get scammed all the time by customers reversing credit card charges once the transaction is complete. You can go ask Steve Wozniak about it.
None of the items you mentioned are really drawbacks. Protecting access to private keys is not that difficult if you're competent with computer security.
you need some kind of enforcement capable of setting things right. Something that can govern, if even just a little bit.
Cryptocurrencies are clearly not for you! If you need a babysitter you can use the traditional money system.
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While I agree with most of your statement, cryptocurrencies do provide a real service. That service is a non-centralized bank transaction. The real value of this non-centralized bank transaction is where the speculation comes into play. That all being said, I don't think see such a network as being sustainable as the cost of transactions is exponential over time.
Do you really think that it is all good with non-centralized transaction? There are plenty of ways to exploit it when nobody is controlling or at least some control. New problems will arise and the currency itself will eventually fail.
Decentralized currency is an "ideal" only and it is extreme. Humans like to do things their own way. For example, if you give a problem and a computer to 1000 people and let each solve the problem on the computer their own way, what do you think would happen? That's why extrem
Re:We need to smash the money printing machines. (Score:5, Funny)
People are prostituting them selves for chucky cheese tokens
Oh come on! Who among us hasn't given BJs and handies in the ally behind Chucky Cheese for tokens? You do realize they have pizza and video games, right? ;)
I refuse to call that oil covered cardboard (Score:2)
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The entirety of the Netherlands is growing tulips instead of food.
Flevoland is growing tulips. Actually not true. Noordoostpolder is growing tulips. That's a couple of hundred of sq km worth. The rest of the country on the other hand is not only growing enough food for itself but is also providing food for a fair chunk of the EU as one of the biggest food exporters in the world.
I hate cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy, but it helps your argument if you don't start the first sentence with senseless hyperbole.
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Tulips are edible, and were eaten during famines. The core of the bulb contains some toxic glycosides that can cause diarrhea and vomiting, but if you trim that out the rest is fine.
Re:We need to smash the money printing machines. (Score:5, Informative)
The Netherlands in fact is number TWO in the world in food exports, as measure by value! $93 billion vs $150 billion for the U.S.
This is possible because the focus on high value vegetable crops (not cheap tonnage grains) and by having a large food processing industry. A lot of that value, is processing value-added, and may not even be from raw foods that The Netherlands produces itself, but imports.
It's a feature, not a bug (Score:1)
OK it's a bug if you want "no single person" to control a blockchain, but it's a feature for "captive" blockchains like bank- or governmetn-backed digital tokens.
If the US Federal Reserve wants to issue tokens with a fixed value of, say, 1 United States Dollar, they will want to "control" the blockchain, perhaps only allowing banks and other licensed entities to process transactions.
The same goes for a business that uses transferable tokens as gift certificates - they or their agent will want to control the
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Color me shocked LOL (Score:1)
So there is this old adage. Goes something like this.
If you build it they will work around it.
Maybe that is just my cynical take on things which has been learned over years and years of systems development and implementations.
Bottom line.
Never say never.
If it is, someone will find a way to benefit from it and/or work around it, legal or not.
On that note. I like my finances to be on paper.
I like my money to have a trail.
I like that my money is insured and backed.
I don't worry that my money is going to disa
Good. (Score:1)
Now we can go back to the old ways of buying drugs: Cash and sex.
By "rent" they mean steal (Score:2)
If I were into that kind of thing, I'd use a botnet to do it.
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Shadowy Russian cybermafias or AWS, computer cycles are available for a price. It is a commodity.
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... Becoming Regular ... (Score:2)
... only for PoW alt-coins which are barely used. Bitcoin and Ethereum are safe. This kind of attack will be impossible against these two currencies unless you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare.
PoS coins are not affected but they are vulnerable to another type of attack (network cloning) - no one has carried such an attack yet though.
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Given that Ethereum has had a centralized hard-fork and bitcoin has had a mining pool over 50% control, your faith in those coins seems very misplaced...
https://www.coindesk.com/ether... [coindesk.com]
https://arstechnica.com/inform... [arstechnica.com]
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bitcoin has had a mining pool over 50% control
It doesn't matter how big the pool is. The pool doesn't own all that hardware; they're just managing it for others. If they tried to abuse their position to execute a 51% attack the miners would either shut down their hardware or jump ship to another pool and the misbehaving pool would no longer control 50% of the hash rate.
As for the smaller altcoins, there is a well-known defense against this issue: merge-mining. This leverages Bitcoin's superior proof-of-work network to provide additional verification fo
$630K to be authoritative for bitcoin ? (Score:2)
is https://www.crypto51.app/ [crypto51.app] saying that $630K would make me solely authoritative for the bitcoin BC for a couple hours or so ?
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For exactly one hour. Also I suspect its theoretical - while this would be cost of computing power it would need to be actually available for rent. If you go down the list you find more practical targets eg Bytecoin with market cap of over 1B$ and cost of attack under 600$/h
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Seems to be.
I think there are mafia organizations that a sophisticated enough to spend a couple million to make an attack, pump up the panic that will shock the price of the coin, gain a little lucre on the side from double spending, and scoop up tens of millions from selling the coin short before the attack.
Note the placement of the apostrophe in the title (Score:2)
"Blockchain's"
Because there's only one blockchain?
What is this, Highlander?
Or just clickbait journalism?
"Attack vector?" (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not an attack vector, that's using the rules to your advantage. The designers expressly adopted a design rule that says that "51% of the current computing power dictates reality." The designer may not have intended for any one group to amass 51% of the current computing power, but intending that nothing "bad" will ever happen is not sufficient in engineering, contracts, law, or any other aspect of human endeavor that has evolved to survive contact with the real world.
A bunch of people who want to make money using blockchain technology are become quite ticked off that a group of other people who want to make money using blockchain technology are using that blockchain technology as expressly designed to take their money.
Thankfully the article seems to be focused on improving the designs rather than demands that governments intervene in these "government not welcome" currency projects.
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I love how you believe that "disagreements" and "bogus transactions" are in any way different, especially in any technical way regarding recording int
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I love how you believe that "disagreements" and "bogus transactions" are in any way different, especially in any technical way regarding recording into the blockchain.
They are different in the same technical sense that a buffer overflow is not a privilege escalation. One is a flaw that can occur in programming and one is an attack meant to undermine a system. The intent and use are different. Disagreements in Bitcoin can occur when two competing miners solve a block at nearly the same time and how to resolve who should be awarded. A 51% attack means that some entity can effectively control the whole network and all transactions. Do you see the difference now?
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Yes. One is a flaw that can occur in programming and one is a use of an intentional feature of the design of the programming.
Of course you've now shifted focus to the programming and not the transactions. The transactions exercising the intentional feature of the design of the programming are not in any way different, especially from a technical perspective. One merely has a "di
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Yes. One is a flaw that can occur in programming and one is a use of an intentional feature of the design of the programming.
No, one is a flaw and one is the exploitation of a flaw. A privilege escalation [wikipedia.org] is not an "intentional use" of feature by definition. Please read up on what it is.
Of course you've now shifted focus to the programming and not the transactions. The transactions exercising the intentional feature of the design of the programming are not in any way different, especially from a technical perspective. One merely has a "disagreement" as to whether a block was solved by a miner, or whether a coin has actually been spent. The fact that you consider mining the block or wanting the transaction spending the coin to complete to be a prerequisite is irrelevant to the system and design.
Of course you missed the point entirely. The difference as I said are by definition. The difference is intent and use. Please read above. The difference A programmer doesn't intend to have buffer overflows in his program but a hacker can take advantage of them. A 51% attack is an entity trying to take control of the network where a disagreement i
Government's will never be welcome (Score:2)
If I sound harsh it's because I'm a little ticked that a buddy of mine spend a bunch of real money on one of those "Proof of St
again, poor headline (Score:2)
Depends on the value of shenanigans (Score:5, Interesting)
The main potential gains from a 51% attack are (1) trashing of a blockchain, primarily reducing its credibility, or (2) double (triple?) spending.
Basic theory assumes that the financial advantage of playing nice and mining is greater than can be achieved from the above.
I would like to see the math on that. Because, in theory, I could get a loan of a bunch coin, rent enough computing power for a 51% attack with that coin, short the coin, double (triple?) spend the coin, and then buy the coin I need at a reduced price after the market responds to the shock. Bitcoin itself may be too big to attack in this manner at this moment in time, but...
I cannot speak to all blockchains, but the basic theory makes assumptions that hardware is a sticky and expensive thing, so the weight of many servers already dedicated to a blockchain will be too high a barrier to scale.
The new world may utterly crush those assumptions because: (1) there is a large and growing ecosystem of efficient blockchain mining machines that will happily and quickly work on another blockchain for the right fee, (2) that ecosystem is rapidly growing and well beyond the scope of any one blockchain, (3) the ability to simply rent one thousand servers for an hour is getting easier and easier, and cheaper and cheaper.
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I cannot speak to all blockchains, but the basic theory makes assumptions that hardware is a sticky and expensive thing, so the weight of many servers already dedicated to a blockchain will be too high a barrier to scale.
What hardware and where? Do you want to gain over 51% of power over Bitcoin? If it were available you could rent that kind of hasing power for $700k for one hour. And one hour is all you'll need to make off with more money than that.
Fortunately Bitcoin is too big to make that kind of computational power available for rent. Most companies with ASICs massively parallel processors don't offer those kinds of resources.
On the other hand Zencash was recently 51%ed and the attackers made off with $550000. If they
George Soros (Score:2)
This is more akin to a run on a currency than a bank heist. George Soros did the same to the GBP and the GBP is one of the biggest currencies in the world. Any small country's currency is vulnerable to a similar attack. They protect against it by holding USD reserves. This gives the US way too much control as any country the US wants to f*ck with US can put sanctions so that they cant use US banks and without using US banks its very difficult to hold USD reserves (Iran and North Korea come to mind as being
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I am a little confused. When one or more cryptocurrencies are under attack, what does "withdraw Bitcoins mean exactly"? You can sell Bitcoins immediately for USD easily enough on some exchange, I suppose. But unlike normal currencies where enormous banks/countries have adequate trust to make monster loans in an emergency based on politics and handshakes in the proverbial smoke-filled backroom, a cryptocurrency may not be able to make any transactions. In theory, that could apply to Bitcoin, too, BTW.
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Well say Verge is about to get to 51% attack and you realize its happening you can go to any online exchange and exchange Verge for Bitcoin. Yes an attack could happen on bitcoin but then a Soros type attack could happen on the USD too. The chances are small. The larger the scale of the currency the more difficult it is to attack.
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I don't think it's possible a 51% scam is possible. Imagine a 51% attack. It's really costly. You have all your investment on ASIC boards, plus all the infrastructure installation (power and bandwidth and storage ). You use your mining power to modify transactions. Immediately after the price of bitcoin plumbs to 0. Real
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It is plausible that an attack could be made by renting cpus for a couple hours for a few million bucks. Don't you think someone could scoop up 10X that by shorting a coin?
It all comes down to the numbers. The ability to rent large amounts of cpus changes the game. Whether this is actually practical is not known, but it seems within the realm of plausible.
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It is plausible that an attack could be made by renting cpus for a couple hours for a few million bucks
It isn't plausible. Bitcoin mining leaders do it by dedicated hardware. Assuming your plan is renting general purpose GPUs on a computing cluster
Maximum Bitcoin Total Bitcoin Hashrate is 43EH/s https://blockchain.info/es/cha... [blockchain.info] (E stands for Exa = 10^18) For a 51% attack, starting from 0, you'd need to add another 43EH/s to the pool. The Nvidia Tesla S2070 has a hash rate of 749.23
You'd need to rent 57 Gigas of GPUs plus all the infrastructure to manage that. For context the third largest superco
Regular (Score:1)
The curse of majority rule (Score:1)
It is a an attack vector, and it threatens far more than cryptocurrencies... What if 51% of voters decide, for example, that a tiny minority of the population ought to be enslaved again? Or that an even tinier minority have "too much" money [salon.com]?
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we have Republic to protect us from California, thankfully
Attack vector? (Score:2)
In related news, "Battering Rams are a known attack vectors for doors". yeah. sure.
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one blockchain to rule them all network effect (Score:2)
All the splinter chains are vulnerable to Beowulf-cluster alliance attacks.
Unless you've got 51% of all available blockchain compute over all blockchains held by honest parties, your blockchain is at risk if all the hostile compute coalesces for a quick, selective heist (before going back to its sundry regular programming).
Even worse: all available blockchain compute includes Amazon's instant army (and any other advanced GPU cloud service), though perhaps the ASIC-advantage presently renders this moot (I do
This is why altcoins are stupid (Score:2)
Proof of Location May Address 51% Risks (Score:1)
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I don't see the point either. I have nothing against them, but it just falls under the category of "a fool and his money...."
That is the exact point. Its operating in a range outside of regulators, so it is much easier to dupe people into giving you money.
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But for how long? regulators are already taking notice, and some are already regulating. The rest are sure to follow shortly.
And then what are you left with?
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A pile of money. The early adopters and scammers will get rich quick and get out. If they are not already out, they are likely fools.
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A pile of money. The early adopters and scammers will get rich quick and get out. If they are not already out, they are likely fools.
Except if any significant portion of coins are sold the market crashes. If you have a large sum of coins now, you can't sell them. They are hypothetical assets.
Maybe you think you can sell them on the down low. And no one will notice. And no one will ever have the same idea as you. Good luck with that.
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Oh, I agree with you. The people using it as a get-rich scheme have already cashed out. The ones still left holding tons of coins are the ones that are screwed and must carefully maintain the bubble lest their "assets" become worthless. (or "more worthless", whatever)
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Bitcoin is the 10 cent deposit on the Coke bottle (Score:5, Insightful)
The goal of the 10 cent coke bottle deposit is NOT to make coke bottles into a hobo currency. The goal is to have distributed recycling (back when we reused bottles). To do that you needed an incentive.
In a similar fashion, recycling (as opposed to re-use) in general was spawned as a PR move to solve a problem for the nascent alumumin can industry, and not because its somehow the ethical thing to do. Steel cans rust (or at least thy used to ) so they naturally biodegrade. Same with paper and cloth packaging. But rise of plastic in the 50s creates a non-biodegradable trash problem that people in the 60s really felt was a moral insult to mother earth. The aluminum can people saw the problem with introducing a product to replace steel cans that wasn't re-usable like glass and would not biodegrade like all other packaging and was even more resource intensive to manufacture. So they solved two problems at the same time: Promote recycling. By paying for aluminum cans they got people to see them as better for the earth. And they also got back their expensive materials to reprocess.
So the point of paying for alumium was not to turn aluminum cans into Hobo currency either. It was to enable everything else. The fact that it induced the neccessary behaviours was the reason to pay pennies for cans.
I perceive that people misunderstand the purpose of crytocurrency. The goal is not to have a currency. It's to have a distributed ledger but in order to have that a currency is neccessary for two reasonss.
first, in order to vanquish the doule-spend problem it's essential to a crytpocurrency that it be very expensive to bless a ledger entry and because computing power grows the cost must increase with time.
Second, since the whole point is that the block chain is a distributed ledger there has to be a way to pay the people who pick up the cans and bottles. Namely, you include a payment into the ledger too. So it has to be a currency.
But the currency isn't the reason for it. it's the necessary glue to make it work
SO the two problems with crytpo currencies that are intrinsic are not the currency part or the speculative bubble part. (afterall we could use cans and bottles as currncy if we really wanted to-- whether or not people accept something is a different matter than it's intrinsic value.)
specifically: if the expansion rate of the cost isn't managed right it becomes an energy consuming nightmare. but if you undershoot the expansion rate then the double-spend problem isn't fixed.
Getting that right is probably not yet solved by any existing crypto currency. But that doesn't mean it can't be gotten right. We just don't know either way right now.
Re: Bitcoin is the 10 cent deposit on the Coke bot (Score:3)
The problem with the distributed ledger is outside of crypto coins is a solution in search of a problem, and almost every single use I've seen the follow up question "but who asked for this? And what's the use case that can't be solved by good old fashion public key exchange signing or just putting the quicken backups in a safe like worked perfectly well for the past century or three
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Well I sort of agree. I keep seeing these cases where some company proposes to have records stored in block chain and to use a central administration to bless the ledger. Huh?? that makes zero sense. If it's not distributed or it's something that can be easily centralized then centralize it. Adding block chain makes no sense. On the other hand there's lots of things one might want to timestamp that need a trustworthy public proof. For example a laboratory notebook showing proof of an invention coul
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Solution in search of a problem?
What about micropayments? When the fees on credit card transactions are ten or a hundred times the amount people would pay for a micro-transaction, then the credit card is not an option.
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The problem of micropayments and the problem of byzantine fault tolerance have little to do with each other. Byzantine fault tolerance is so expensive to get, it would be very strange if it turned out to just accidentally be good for something different to.
So we should not have been surprised that bitcoin stopped being good for micropayments long ago.
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Dogecoin and Reddcoin, and probably another hundred or so crypto-currencies.
There's more than just Bitcoin and Litecoin out there.
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There is nothing that prevents a service like cloud storage or video hosting site or anything else from creating a publicly accessible data storage without exposing an API that allows editing or deleting content. That doesn't exist not because the limit is people not technology.
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indeed that is a question isn't it.
It seems to me that if the expansion were done right then it should stay at exactly the same cost and only grow in proportion to the transaction's value. That is as computers make computation cheaper, raise the cost to the same constant cost. However, that doesn't solve the problem until the the cost is about 1/2 the transaction size.
That being said the amount of energy spent on bitcoin is orders of magnitude less than the cost spent on Mastercard when you include all th
Re:Bitcoin is the 10 cent deposit on the Coke bott (Score:4, Insightful)
But we know what value mastercard provides. We don't know what value blockchain provides.
Comparing the power use of the two is therefore somewhat irrelevant.
Mastercard allows me to shop both in person and online with certainty. I present my card, and within a couple of seconds we have certainty that my transaction is approved and will go through. I know that even if the merchant finds a way to double bill me, mastercard will indemnify me for it, and I know what the transaction will cost me in relation to the amount of money I have, and in relation to every other transaction I make, because they all use the same currency.
Blockchain transactions on the other hand have none of the certainty, none of the speed, and none of the security. They also aren't tied to the currency used for everything else, so the wild price swings can, and will, affect you. Also by your own admission, blockchain isn't even supposed to be for payment, just as a distributed ledger. Something that nobody has ever found a use for that isn't already better served by other existing tools.
I'm not saying the technology is completely useless. But I can confidently say that nobody has found a practical use for it yet other than to try to find the "greater fool" willing to pay more for it than it cost the original person.
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At the moment you are right, with the exception of it extreme uses in international money laundering, evasion of laws odious to Libertarians, and a refuge for people with domineering central banks (zimbawe and china for instance).
on the otherhand the internet was pretty useless when there were only two connections. And why would you want to text people before there was a blackberry when you could just call them.
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See the last line of my previous comment.
I didn't say it would be useless forever. just that it's useless right now. And it's not a scale thing like the internet or texting. It's a fundamental problem of figuring out a use for it. Right now there is no use case. I can't predict the future, and it's possible that there will be a use case in the future, but right now there's none. I won't write off the technology as a whole, but so far this is a solution in search of a problem. We may yet see this solve some
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Decentralized isn't necessarily the problem though, The average person doesn't understand the current financial system, nor do they care whether something is "centralized" or "decentralized". People simply look at the pros and cons. People will even accept more risk, if there's a tradeoff that offsets it. (look at IOT for example, people will accept the risk of their door locks being hacked for the convenience of having them accessible from their smartphone). But blockchain solves none of the problems peop
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"I know there are a small handful of businesses that reduce their price for cash purchases, but it's not normal"
Unless you're a gas station, at least in southern California. I can name only one single station (in a small mountain town) in SoCal that does not charge around a dime a gallon extra for plastic - and I've seen the same in any other part of the country that I've encountered.
I don't know how many gas stations there are out there compared to other businesses, or how there gross sales compare to oth
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And as a counter point, I have never seen that practice at any gas station in any of the countries I have ever visited (including yours). So I'd say the sample size is extremely small. Which would stand to reason as it is also against their contract with their card processor to charge different rates for card vs cash so they risk losing their ability to accept cards at all. Which would also kill their ability to sell to any fleet. A risk very few businesses are willing to take.
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A simple visit to arco.com will show that they are alive and well and expanding into Mexico. hey are now part of BP, but the brand continues. They still refuse credit cards, and still charge a 35 cent 'convenience' fee for using debit cards. (They are also ubiquitous in SoCal).
Visa and MasterCharge used to ban cash discounts in their contracts. They were sued by the DoJ back in 2010, immediately settled, and agreed to never again discourage merchants from offering cash discounts or pushing other forms o
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And yet, nobody ever provides a cash discount. Funny that.
Thing is it would be stupid for a consumer to use cash. It's against their self interest. Credit cards are ALWAYS cheaper for the consumer than cash. Every single time.
There's no discount for cash, and you get points or cash back on credit cards. Even if you don't get points or cash back, you still get an interest free 30 day loan, that alone is worth something.
For the retailer it may be another story, but even there it's not so clear cut. I do know
dry water out of biofuels (Score:3)
It would be nice if the hash calculation were also solving some other problem of lasting value. As an example, let people submit NP hard problems they actually need solved. Like say planning an airline's schedule of matching pilots and planes under varied weather scenarios. I think ethereium might have this in mind. You could also use the heat to heat something you were going to heat anyhow, like your house or for drying water out of biofuels. The latter is one of the big energy costs for ethanol base
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Because blockchain!
This is exactly the issue. Nobody knows why we want it. Somebody came up with a cool new technology, but just because the technology exists, doesn't mean there is any actual use for it. People keep trying to kludge a purpose on to it, but so far every one of those purposes is better served with existing tools.
I'm not going to say that blockchain technology is useless. But I will say that nobody has yet come up with a good use for it.
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There's nothing about a 51% attack that involves breaking cryptography.
Most blockchains work by consensus of 51% of the compute power in the pool agreeing on a result being close enough to satisfy the difficulty level for that block. If you control 51% of the compute, you can make your result win the consensus every time. You're not breaking any encryption. Just steamrolling everyone else.
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Depends how quickly you can cash out. It likely doesn't take long to cash out if you know how and have pre-arranged it, and you only need it to happen a fraction of a second faster than the time it takes the crypto currency value to tank.