Quote from: Gandalf86 on December 13, 2018, 10:57:22 AM

Quote from: Learnalot on December 13, 2018, 10:33:17 AM

Hi Gandalf,

I got an email from Cryptopia about 51% attacks. I'll link their explanation below, which was quite enlightening for me.
I'm happy I moved my coins off Cryptopia some months ago, but it made me think about coins with a small marketcap, which TIT and TTC still are. The attackers can simply rent an ASIC computer system and then they control these small coins. As I understand it, this is possible with coins that use the original Bitcoin style Proof of Work. It's not possible with Proof of Stake coins. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
I think it's safer for small coins to not use Proof of Work, to avoid 51% attacks. If a 51% attack happens today, it can happen again anytime. Right?
I'm happy that TTC moved to Proof of Stake and thereby avoided the current attacks. Shouldn't your TIT do the same? Maybe the merger isn't that bad after all..?
Don't you agree?

Here's the link to Cryptopia's explanation, where they explicitly state "This is no problem for popular coins like Bitcoin, but for smaller coins, 51% of hashrate of some types of coins can easily be rented.":
https://support.cryptopia.co.nz/csm?id=kb_article&sys_id=91fc54cddbfc2b0052d2ef728a961948

I'm interested in your thoughts.
Best regards,

Learnalot.

Hey, thanks for your question! I am happy to explain the pros/cons of Proof of Stake vs. Proof of Work to you. The difference is that POW has a well researched and validated incentive model, while Proof of Stake has not. With POW, the party/group who is putting in the largest amount of money/mining power over time is directing the consensus during that time. With POS, the party/group who has the largest amount of coins once is directing the consensus at any time.

So for example, with POS, an attacker could accumulate a massive amount of coins while the coin is cheap, and carry out a double spend attack years later when the coin is worth much more. That is not possible with POW, because the difficulty will increase over time if the value rises. Therefore, having POS on a low-value coin is much more risky than POW. With POW, you can just increase the required confirmations (like Novaexchange did for Titcoin for example), and even if there is a 51% attack the damage is not so large. With POS, once someone has a too large balance the chain is effectively worthless.

Another problem with usual POS implementations is that the person who has the largest balance will increase their share on the network through exponential growth until they own >50% of the coins. A specific problem with merging with TTC is that the TTC devs must have a very large amount of TTC already (since they are offering a swap from a different coin etc.), so they have way too much power on the network and will profit the most from POS. A cryptocurrency should be as democratic as possible and not be controlled by the people who happen to have the largest amount of coins through shady swap practices. Wink

So Proof of Stake sounds nice at first but it has a lot of problems if you look closer, especially if you want the consensus to still be trustworthy when the value rises a lot.

Hello Gandalf,

I'm following this crypto for a long time, and I'm wondering about when it really splits from the original team.
Since they left this crypto and offered the swap, Is this not the right time to left this coin to the community who wants to go with it ?
Of course some of us will not swap for another one, so what they think about this ? What they want to happen with us ? Just gone into dust ?
Some time ago I was interested in the development of another coin, but I left this alone.
Right now I'm looking at you initiative seriously, may some development resources help the next step of this coin ?
How can I help you ?