Quote from: d5000 on May 08, 2016, 05:54:24 PM

Quote from: kiklo on May 02, 2016, 12:32:43 AM

So basically the Nothing At Stake Problem , is really just a Stupid Myth.
Because staking on the online fork makes it impossible , for your Same coins to create enough difficulty on an offline fork concurrently to matter,
As the online fork will always have it's difficulty plus your own if you mine both concurrently.

Although I agree that the Nothing @ Stake problem is highlighted, above all, by "Bitcoin hardliners", I would not ignore it.

There has been a lot of research about the topic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NXT/comments/2sewhu/nothing_at_stake_attack_researched_and_deemed_not/
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity/

All PoS coins are actually working, but most PoS coins do not have the market cap that would incentive a malicious attacker to try a real attack. There is also actually no easy possibility to short-sell large amounts of PoS coins, and short-selling is one of the key components of the most dangerous of all N@S attack types (it coinsists to lend a large amount of coins (about 1-5% of the coin supply), attack it via N@S and buy it back at much lower prices).

Facts are that PoS is still far from perfect, it must be continuously improved to harden it against this class of attacks. NXT is for the moment the best-protected (as far as I know), and I hope that Peercoin can soon improve its algorithm to get rid of the centralized checkpoints that are still protecting it.

The Nothing at Stake , is a pretend problem , as it is not an actual problem which is why the concurrent staking is literally nothing to worry about as it was just PR to try and keep people from buying PoS coins.

The Only real thing to watch out for is called a History Rewrite, where someone leaves their coin offline and tries to stakes a longer chain with a higher difficulty.
(Economically this is stupid as you just spent million of Dollars to try and harm a coin, not really bright at all, and worse due to the below means you just wasted your money.)
Even a History Rewrite is not a big deal, as checkpoints can block it or a large # of coins staking can stop it ,
and even if the worse case happen, just replace the corrupted blockchain with a correct blockchain and issue a checkpoint to protect it.

So you see it just the PoW's Boogie Man trying to scare people from moving to PoS.

No Worries. Cheesy

FYI: Why the Short Selling is just more PoW BS.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1183043.msg14602558#msg14602558

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You Have to Fund Your Margin Account which holds Collateral used to Secure Loans used in Margin Trading.

Meaning if you don't have the Collateral ,you can not even attempt a short sell.
Odds are your attempts at short selling will make you lose your Collateral.

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What Is a Forced Liquidation?
A forced liquidation is when all or part of your positions are closed automatically to prevent further loss and ensure you do not default on your loans. Forced liquidations are executed using one or more market orders; as such, order book liquidity at the time of these orders will affect the extent of the losses you incur from the liquidation. Forced liquidations occur when your Current Margin dips below your Maintenance Margin. It is strongly advised that you check the markets and your open positions regularly, mitigating your risk as necessary by reducing the size of your positions or transferring additional collateral into your margin account. Markets can change very quickly, and no guarantee can be made that you will receive a Margin Call warning in time for you to prevent a forced liquidation.

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Hey guys,
Just have an interesting case study of my trading experience on Poloniex last week. I traded on Poloniex's margin trading platform and was margin called on June 15th 17:15 when the prices went from .000029 BTC per BTS to .000014 BTC per BTS back to .000028 BTC per BTS in a ten minute span. (Down 50% in less than 10 minutes!) I didn't realize the liquidity was so low on Poloniex, but it's interesting to know what can happen. I lost a chunk of money.
I think someone or some bot just ran down the book on all the buy orders and got the price really low to trigger all the margin calls and bought back at low prices, but not sure of the exact mechanics.

The following Info upset the BTC Shrill that was running that forum so much , he locked it , so it could not be bumped to the top of the queue where more people could see it. Cheesy

FYI2:
What is interesting is how the BTC community completely ignores the fact that China now owns 66% of the Mining power, which means they can 51% attack BTC whenever they feel like it.
https://blockchain.info/pools