Quote from: viperjbm on September 07, 2011, 04:10:24 AM

P.S. and for the shame of it all I forgot to give any real credit and attention to namecoin. GREAT concept! But if I understand the implementation (because I'll freely admit, I haven't really dug in much on this one), it is very self-destructive because they destroy their own "currency" to perform domain registrations and maintenance and are also fixed at ?21 million? (am I correct in this understanding?)

AFAIK currency is destroyed only in the beginning to discourage domain name hoarding. Network cost of domain name registration goes steadily down as the time goes on, eventually going to zero.

Quote from: viperjbm

I'm also man enough to admit I got overly p'o'ed out here from the behavior on all sides and appologize for going too far. I make no apology for my attitude toward artforz however, I still believe what he did is immoral and disgusting and should be openly condemned by the community.

Something to consider is that what ArtForz actually did was not intended to have the consequences that it had, but was supposed to be more like a proof of concept of more serious attack. What ended up causing all the real problems was not the security vulnerability ArtForz was trying to demonstrate, but a previously unknown (to everybody) bug that caused uncontrolled database writes in a situation like that.

Quote from: ArtForz on September 06, 2011, 09:55:21 PM

Though I do regret not noticing the massive txdb journal growth earlier, or I would have stopped the "attack" a lot sooner than I did.

So when you judge the "morality" of someones actions, you should concentrate more on what the intent was, and less on accidental and unforeseeable consequences of those actions. Without that bug, the demonstration would have gone largely unnoticed, and served the purpose of showing the possibility of a more serious attack.

This database bug can be fixed with this patch:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/491

which you can use in Solidcoin as well.. You know, without asking a permission from ArtForz (who ended up fixing the bug for everyone's benefit) or anything.