Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Terracoin. What the hell is going on?
by
SalvorHardin
on 13/04/2013, 17:11:03 UTC
I really don't understand why someone with 500 Giga to 1 Tera hash/second hashrate would attack the TRC network instead of making a load of money mining BTC.  Note that this attack has gone on for many days now, while BTC has gone all the way to USD$250 and beyond.  So instead of making up to $5,000 mining BTC everyday, this person is screwing around with the TRC chain and got maybe 50K~60K TRC coins, worth only $10,000 at the current exchange rate.  So the person basically spent $30,000~40,000 in lost opportunity cost to attack the TRC chain.  That frankly is not rational.  

Something that makes sense is if the individual has a mega ton of Bitcoins from the oldschool days (millions of dollars worth). That person can afford the opportunity cost of not using the ASIC to mine for bitcoins. And that person has an extremely strong incentive to stop competing coins eating into the market share of Bitcoin.

Actually there is a way to test this theory.  Using the latest TRC client, there is "banned IP" list of misbehaving clients suspected of hashing/relaying fake blocks.  Just match these sets of IP addresses to those found on BTC's Blockchain.info and you should see some overlap right away, since obviously 0.5 ~ 1 Tera hash/second hashrate would not just come out of nowhere.  Though obviously some of those on the banned list is likely innocent, since they are just relaying fake blocks from malicious attackers, or they could have been spoofed.