Quote from: ArticMine on June 21, 2016, 07:47:05 PM

...there is nothing new here.

Who said it is new? I am just reminding everyone that altcoins are insecure. And if they have enough liquidity, they will be raided. First Litecoin, next Mt.Gox, next Ethereum, and next.

Quote from: ArticMine on June 21, 2016, 07:47:05 PM

Manipulating the difficulty in the manner suggested in the article is a horribly inefficient way to attack a POW coin, if the objective is to create havoc in the coin, since it requires much more hashpower than a simple 51% attack.

It only requires a very short duration to send the difficulty permanently into the stratosphere. Only a fork can revert it. The attacker doesn't have any ongoing cost. The rental cost is cheap. All your CAPEX arguments fail because you forgot about renting.

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on June 21, 2016, 07:49:46 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on June 21, 2016, 05:31:21 PM

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.

This doesn't mean I am attacking Monero. I am just speaking factually.

But, but, but. I heard Monero has already hired all the botnets of the world, and even invented a new FTP-based one.

What happens when a resourceful adversary starts a bidding war for those botnets?

Usually the price of Monero goes up with the difficulty (less blocks = less xmr supply), so I would welcome such an event! Cool

If the adversary succeeds in driving up the difficulty so high the network gets stuck between blocks when they leave, I'm sure somebody like Risto or Arcticmine (xmr whale types) can light up a data center long enough to get us over the hump.

The "attacker" can rent 1000X more botnets than you can. That was the entire point of the "attacker's" blog article.

rpietila and the "attacker" of the DAO are mortal enemies. And the latter is about 100X more wealthy than the former. You don't have a chance in hell. Plus he has rich friends. You are just tinker toys for him.

He commented about Monero today.

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on June 21, 2016, 07:49:46 PM

IIRC Litecoin briefly had a billion dollar cap. Your proposed scenario failed to materialize; ergo it's just paranoid FUD representing your demon-haunted world, not actual reality.

And look where Litecoin is now, after he "attacked" it by raiding it's liquidity.

You are all bravado and BS. Bye fool.