Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Andreas M. Antonopoulos is "bullish on Ethereum"
by
iamnotback
on 21/06/2016, 17:35:42 UTC
Understand that all your altcoins are either centralized clusterfucks (like Ethereum and include all PoS block chains) or they can be destroyed by an attacker very easily:


r0ach is full of shit babbling on about how great Monero is. Monero is insecure. The following is from the attacker who is draining the DAO and who did the Mt.Gox attack:

The "attacker" wrote:

...

Nevertheless, Bitcoin (no, not "cryptocurrencies", there is not nor can ever be such a thing as "cryptocurrencies") has put an end to all that. So it dun work no more.

Regarding the linked blog article that the "attacker" provided in the quote in which he explains that altcoins which employ proof-of-work are impossible to secure...

This difficulty attack requires a much higher percentage of the hashpower than a 51% attack.

The article does make a valid point. If a coin uses the same mining algorithm as an "ASIC Goliath coin" that has gone through more than one generation of ASICs, then it can be attacked using the now obsolete first generation ASICs from "ASIC Goliath coin" that would be otherwise worthless junk. The example of Dogecoin in the article would only work if Litecoin goes through more than one generation of ASICs and Dogecoin were not merged mined with Litecoin. Extrapolating  this attack to Monero fails because:
1) Monero uses CryptoNight not SHA 256, Ethash, Scrypt etc.
3) CryptoNight is ASIC resistant. There are no ASICs for CryptoNight let alone multiple generations of ASICs
2) Monero has by far the greatest hashrate of all the CryptoNight coins.

Incorrect. The point is that no matter what proof-of-work algorithm an altcoin employs, those who are protecting Bitcoin will rent enough mining hash rate to fuck your coin forever. They only have to rent it for a short period of time, and your difficulty will be so high that it will never produce a block again. And all the money in the chain will be unspendable for a very, very, very long time.

The "attacker" has the resources to do that to any proof-of-work altcoin which doesn't have the level of hashrate of Bitcoin.

Of course the altcoin can then manually reset the difficulty lower using a fork, but then the attacker can repeat again. It will quickly become clear that the altcoin is fucked.

If Monero starts to approach $1 billion market cap (or perhaps much less if the liquidity is very high, which it is for Monero), this attacker will destroy Monero and profit by shorting.