Quote from: lovecraftian on March 17, 2014, 09:49:57 PM

Quote from: vesperwillow on March 17, 2014, 03:58:53 PM

* Public mining hashrate is not indicative of being popular
* Plenty of circumstancial evidence to show the 'wall of orphan blocks' was nefarious, and not a normal part of mining (especially in light of recent admittance of various attacks, and whitepapers on attacks on altcoins)

Low mining hashrate is a product of the debate about orphans that transpired in this thread, there seemed to be some confusion as to what the exact problem was with some people blaming Mark and his team but essentially these was no adequate conclusion. In fact, as you say, the evidence about orphan blocks was circumstancial. Links to your "admittance of various attacks" (careful with the English language there .. it's fragile) and "whitepapers on attacks on altcoins" would be nice.

You can go back and read all the posts where I mention this, but...

I believe there was direct network node manipulation, specifically targeting pools using time-warp attacks to drive another fork, then drop the fork on a node network, essentially wiping out the blocks with blocks that the attacker mines on a separate chain. The attack info can be read about here:

http://culubas.blogspot.com/2011/05/timejacking-bitcoin_802.html

If you search for "time-warp" or "time-travel" attacks in this forum, or others, you will find a lot of info pertaining to coins with 1 block difficulty retargeting, something that was introduced a month or so before the major orphan problems, and all have a common element of being done by a user with a considerable amount of hashpower who publicly announces that he is going to "test the chain" after implementation of Kimito's Gravity Well or other basic 1 block retargeting algorithms. I'm not saying this person is behind what happened to TAG, but it's a possibility considering he showed a lot of interest in the coin when the first major fork happened.

Now while his involvement is theoretically probable(and most certainly genius), I think the main source of the "attacks" were coming out of China. The volume of trade coming out of China, specifically on BTC38, is substantial. So either the attacker is in China, or has a way to move coins and money through the Chinese exchanges.

-Fuse