----- Forwarded message from Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric@snell-pym.org.uk> -----
It is possible for any current governmental agency to hijack the entire system, due to their access to supercomputer infrastructures and/or immense budgets. This will however become less and less possible while bitcoin continues to grow and is already a massive and technological challenge which I do not see any governmental institutions execute proper. It is also strange to say these transactions are "untraceable". Nothing is less true. Governments have complete transcripts of all sent data (USA, GB and AUS have a neat little system for this set up, catch all emails too), and every transaction is signed by the money's owner, it needs to be processed. Sure one could create many different unique signatures (bitcoin adresses) but those could all be traced moving out of the house. It's just immensely more tedious to do than tracking, say, bank transactions and so many agencies will just not be technical enough to do this. Funny enough the same internet security things will help as with all internet things Tor on your neighbors network with IPSEC and SSL "behind 7 proxy's". (even then the network will need to process your transactions and agencies can just follow along with that, they just can't really trace the transactions back to you; if you use different bitcoin adresses) So kids; go crazy, be paranoid and have fun, Best regards, Lodewijk Andre de la Porte 2011/5/17 Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
----- Forwarded message from Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric@snell-pym.org.uk> -----
From: Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric@snell-pym.org.uk> Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 17:25:22 +0100 To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Bitcoin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; NetBSD amd64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100520 Lightning/1.0b2pre Shredder/3.0.4 Reply-To: silklist@lists.hserus.net
On 05/17/11 17:01, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric@snell-pym.org.uk> wrote:
Currently, the bitcoin network produces about 1.5 trillion hashes per second, total. So somebody managing a billion a second, in a mining pool, earns about a 1500th of the total "income" of new bitcoin - 50 every ten minutes...
Wait, it doesn't work like this?
Alas no! The design of the system is all about global consensus - more than 50% of the hashing capacity needs to agree for stuff to happen. There's nobody to whack with a wrench - it'd cost more to go and whack each pimply nerd with a basement full of computers than to just buy more computers ;-)
ABS
-- Alaric Snell-Pym http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
It is possible for any current governmental agency to hijack the entire system, due to their access to supercomputer infrastructures and/or immense budgets. This will however become less and less possible while bitcoin continues to grow and is already a massive and technological challenge which I do not see any governmental institutions execute proper.
I'm not so sure that's true. Given the network at all times knows the amount of nodes out there (hence the 50%+1 rule for consensus) it would be trivial for a NSA (Nation State Actor, not TLA) to stand up 50%+1 virtual nodes fast enough to gain consensus and usurp the currencies (tokens) if I understand correctly the mechanism for determining legitimate tokens from the EconTalk interview. Am I missing something here?
I'm not so sure that's true. Given the network at all times knows the amount of nodes out there (hence the 50%+1 rule for consensus) it would be trivial for a NSA (Nation State Actor, not TLA) to stand up 50%+1 virtual nodes fast enough to gain consensus and usurp the currencies (tokens) if I understand correctly
On 18 May, 2011, at 01:00 , Peter Thoenen wrote: the
mechanism for determining legitimate tokens from the EconTalk interview. Am I missing something here?
You are. The moment that they stop doing that, the legitimate network overtakes it and restores order. It would have to be a sustained attack until all users of the network had abandoned it. Furthermore, it is really only a minor denial-of-service, because solving 100% of the blocks going forward only allows you to deny confirmation of the transactions of others, and to double-spend your own pre-existing coins. The moment the attack stops, the legitimate network would begin catching up, and would soon overtake it. -jp -- ======================================================== Jeffrey Paul -datavibe- sneak@datavibe.net +1 (800) 403-1126 http://sneak.datavibe.net 5539AD00 DE4C42F3 AFE11575 052443F4 DF2A55C2 "Virtue is its own punishment." ========================================================
participants (4)
-
Eugen Leitl -
Jeffrey Paul -
lodewijk andré de la porte -
Peter Thoenen