Quote from: fluffypony on June 17, 2016, 09:52:35 PM

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on June 17, 2016, 09:31:53 PM

Question for XMR core devs:

Under what (if any) circumstances would you request (or like VB forcefully demand under threat of rollback) a halt to XMR activity on exchanges?

We already did this during the block 202612 attack. We asked them to halt deposits and withdrawals (but not trading!) until we figured out what was happening. The minute the fork resolved and we had a handle on what to do about it we told them they could resume.

If, during that fork, an exchange had continued accepting deposits and processing withdrawals we wouldn't have stopped them, that's entirely at their own risk.

Monero still has a lot of work to do, and we don't have $20 million to rest on, so I can imagine that a sophisticated attack like this might be repeated in future. As it stands right now, a resourceful attacked could probably just fork the network based on hashing power alone. Obviously we will do our utmost to ensure that this isn't possible, but if it does happen we will - again - handle things as best we see fit. We won't ever ask exchanges to pause deposits / withdrawals unless we don't know what's going on and fear that we may be under attack.

Supremely informative answer, thanks!

I'd forgotten the in/out halt during the troll block attack.

But your retelling of the tale hits upon a critical distinction between XMR and ETH core dev's conduct/approach/attitude.

XMR devs Highly Recommended exchanges halt deposits and explained the basis for that urgent suggestion, but did not Command & Demand like the ETH guys.

And you didn't try to halt trading, preventing this kind of 100% bullshit scenario:

Quote

[3:43:10 AM] Bill Shihara: Stopping the trading will stop the hacker from liquidating. but that may be penalizing legit traders

Any exchange that penalizes legit traders to stop a hacker (especially one that only used the existing rules of a broken system to his benefit) is an amoral/unethical piece of shit.

If I knew better than to trust ETH/DAO's concept/code/crypto and went short in order to make the market aware of my pertinent information, HOW DARE SOME FUCKING TWAT AT POLO HQ ARBITRARILY DECIDE TO HALT/ROLLBACK?

All those presuming to force the invisible hand of the market should be pimp slapped by it until rendered unable to do further harm. Angry

For all the cyber/cypherpunk name dropping Vitalik does, he still utterly fails to grok the ethos. And he's met Nick Szabo FFS.