Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?)
by
CoinHoarder
on 07/07/2016, 19:45:25 UTC
[1]Another scenario is DDoS attack other stake holders when their turn to mine a block, then jack up your transaction fees sky high when its your turn to mine a block. Note this has many variants as follows:

I do not think the following is possible in dPoS (I'm not sure about other forms of PoS), because delegates cannot change or set transaction fees by themselves. Transaction fees can only be changed by committee members which are elected by stakeholder vote. Not including a transaction because it doesn't have a certain amount in transaction fees seems silly, because the next honest delegate will do so and the honest delegate will get whatever fees are associated with the transaction. They would basically be giving up free money, putting a big red flag on their witness campaign, and it would be very likely that would get them voted out. Part of the incentive for delegates to stay honest is the future income of blocks produced in the future, although as I stated earlier... even if they are dishonest there is not much they can do other than withhold transactions from blocks (and the transaction would be included in the next block produce by an honest delegate.) The way I understand it, DPoS' main weakness is that all consensus algorithms suffer from.. a 51% attack.
Quote
[1] Another scenario is DDoS attack other stake holders when their turn to mine a block, then jack up your transaction fees sky high when its your turn to mine a block.

You forgot my point that the attacker can short the coin. And that delaying transactions is an attack that could cause the share price to crater. Or DDoS attack all the others and then force all transactions on to your block. This is the problem with PoS and DPOS, because the ordering of who will mine is known before the transactions are sent. That is a major flaw compared to PoW.

I didn't forget anything. All I am saying is DPoS is not susceptible to this kind of attack. You state all forms of PoS can suffer from this type of attack: "Another scenario is DDoS attack other stakeholders when their turn to mine a block, then jack up your transaction fees sky high when its your turn to mine a block". All I said was that this is not possible with DPoS because the attacker cannot change transaction fees with DPoS unless he has a majority stake. The attacker shorting the coin then doing any random attack on a cryptocurrency is a different attack vector altogether (and there is no cryptocurrency invulnerable to these types of attacks.) The attack vectors should not be commingled. Just because it can be attacked another way doesn't mean that it can be attacked in the way you stated. I could go on to explain how this attack can be performed on PoW cryptocurrencies, but I am sure you can rationalize your own scenarios. I am sure your cryptocurrency will be susceptible to this type of attack (exploit while shorting) as well, but obviously I cannot prove or disprove that at this time as you still have not released any details.