Quote from: MoonShadow on November 20, 2013, 06:19:18 AM

Quote from: AnonyMint on November 20, 2013, 05:59:46 AM

Quote from: anth0ny on November 20, 2013, 05:41:13 AM

Quote from: AnonyMint on November 20, 2013, 05:30:04 AM

Quote from: anth0ny on November 20, 2013, 05:24:54 AM

1) Why bother withholding the transactions if they're free?

The other miners wouldn't process them any way (when coin rewards are near 0).

Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn't. Miners currently process zero fee transactions. Why would they stop just because "coin rewards" are near zero?

"there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free" - Satoshi Nakamoto

Whether they accept them or not is irrelevant. The relevant point is they won't receive any fees for those transactions. As the cartel grows, then more and more of the transactions will either be withheld from the other miners or sent to them with 0 fees offered.

At some level, those other miners go bankrupt. The cartel starving them of a portion of their revenue yet they still need to produce the ENTIRE difficulty of hashrate because the cartel is paying their own miners from either the non-free transaction fees and/or from profits of being a cartel. Cartels gain more size and thus economies-of-scale efficiency as well they can charge higher prices once they have eliminated the competition.

Nope. This is where your theory falls apart. Out-of-band transactions exist, and they exist because fee-less transactions are permitted.

Offchain activity is irrelevant to my attack. You can't predict the future. If offchain becomes the dominant mode of commerce, then my attack will be less useful. But it doesn't make my attack not exist for as long as onchain activity is the norm. You can speculate all you want about the future being not on the blockchain, but I deal with the reality as it stands today. Please don't argue this point further because I will ignore it as it is not relevant. It is a strawman.

Stay on topic please if you want me to discuss.

Quote from: MoonShadow on November 20, 2013, 06:19:18 AM

The cartel can't grow, because it needs to have a dominate position among miners to start with. It can't happen. Currently, the bitcoin network is more than a 1000 times faster than the fastest unclassified supercomputer on Earth. It would take nation-state level resources for Amazon to even match one of the top 10 mining pools, and they would have to commit those resources to this end for an indefinate period of time.

Nonsense. Amazon controls more servers than the largest mining pools today.

Besides that is irrelevant and shows you don't understand this attack well.

Amazon controls a significant AND GROWING percentage of global commerce (heck I even order from them from Asia), plus there are other large outfits they can merge with in other countries, and thus they can starve the network of transaction fees when the coin rewards are insufficient.

Thus they can shrink the hashrate that they have to compete against by starving the pools of income.

Please don't make me repeat this again. I've stated it too many times already upthread.

Quote from: MoonShadow on November 20, 2013, 06:19:18 AM

You refuted nothing of the sort. What you are describing is an intentional network split, although asyncronous. The small side of the split always loses, there is no exceptions. No cartel would be willing to commit the resources to acheive this end, because it would be a money pit until they hit 51% of the hashing. Over 58,000 Petaflops. The fastest supercomputer on Earth is 33 Petaflops. And that is now, what will it be in 20 years?

Incorrect. I will let you figure out why that is nonsense.

Quote from: MoonShadow on November 20, 2013, 06:19:18 AM

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The cartel can give 0-confirmation transactions to its customers, because these are going to be repeat customers because the cartel covers so much commerce.

Everyone can give 0-confirm transactions to their customers. That's a question of business risk, not capacity. It happens now. Please search for the fast-transaction problem and/or the vending machine problem.

Don't play dumb just to obfuscate the point.

The point is the cartel doesn't have delay transactions for its customers when it withholds them from the other miners.

Quote from: MoonShadow on November 20, 2013, 06:19:18 AM

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Only the non-cartel transactions get delayed, because the cartels miners won't include them when they win the blocks sometimes.

That happens now. No mystery there either.

It does not if the non-cartel includes a fee to pay miners!

You are just going around in circles in your arguments and forgetting the points of the attack.

If you intentionally waste my time again, I will ignore you. I don't have time for nonsense posts. Please try to think before you post. I know you are not stupid now.