Quote from: jabo38 on May 21, 2014, 11:54:43 AM

Quote from: ThePurplePlanet on May 21, 2014, 11:35:35 AM

Quote from: jabo38 on May 21, 2014, 10:30:44 AM

Yes, it is possible for a a group or person to do a 51% attack, but is it realistic, even at 10%? Right now for a person to buy up even 10% of NXT would be, $4,000,000 and that is IF they could buy it at market value, but to buy that much would surely cause a huge spike in price as the buyer would be buying out all the sell walls, and new walls would go up at even higher prices. So in reality it would be much much higher than $4,000,000 to buy 10%, and then said buyer would have to offload their 10% which would cause a huge huge drop in price, probably crashing it to next to nothing. All this so that they could try to double spend a few coins when now the market is basically bottomed out. Does this make sense or am I missing something?

What you are missing here is that you dont need 51% of stake and a person doesnt need to buy 10% of the tokens. Just needs access to token history of some %.... PoS can be even attacked by even less than coins given enough trials since the attacked incurs no costs by just trying. This account mints 1 out of 4 blocks (last 100 blocks) http://87.230.14.1/nxt/nxt.cgi?action=3000&acc=4747512364439223888 Do you think this person does not have the power to double spend again and again and again with 25% of the minting power? He can keep trying. No cost if he fails thousands of times... That 25% minting power is just 5% of total stake.... Not sure if you understand the difference. Also using 5% to earn so small earnings for forging is probably uneconomical for the rational forger who will prefer to put the coins in better use... i.e. deposit them in a just-dice.com type of service to earn more. If such services/stock markets compete for capital you should expect the effective stake for forging to be much much less

Yes, that account is huge and I get the fact that he can double spend. It is in his power to do so. I didn't think it was possible to do, but this thread has convinced me otherwise. What I am wondering is, is it realistic for him to do so? Can he really gain if he double spends? If he were to do that, he would realistically need to dump all his coins first. Wouldn't that large of an account occur huge losses dumping like that? Then yes, he could go an double spend, he is technically capable of doing so, and do so with virtually no risk, but in doing so he crashes the whole system, NXT becomes worth nothing, and then there is no point in him double spending. Am I missing something? Yes, he has the technical ability to do so, but realistically doing so he would suffer huge losses. Right?

Also, I am confused still about the origin account. The public key is known. I myself have logged into it just for the fun of it, but while I did so, it essentially became mine. There are a lot of NXT haters. NXT has been under DOS attack many times, but why hasn't somebody made an alternate chain from the origin account? If what everyone is saying, that you just need access to an accounts keys to double spend, why hasn't it happened? Or do I need to dump all my NXT right now? I am really just a newbie, and I am pretty sure that 90% of the people discussing things on this page know more than me about crypto. Surely, I haven't figured out a way to bring NXT down. Or have I? Please tell me if I have so I can dump! :-)

I doubt that account will do it.. But why trust anonynous people? Is it a trustless system? Say after he sells off then he can come back and create competing parallel chain collaborating with other people to create a longer chain by having more stake.. In the future if he sells he might not have any interest in the coin and try to gain back the stake by reversing the chain from the point before selling.. after all the number of coins forging is getting less and less and it will be easier to do so..

I am not the one to tell you to sell your NXT. I am just saying it cannot be decentralized. If you are ok with that you can keep your NXT.. Bitcoin was a revolution because of decentralization. Solutions like ripple bitshares and PoS cannot remain decentralized and thats why I criticize them ALL.... I have no problem with people speculating with them to make some money. I have problem when people promote them as some revolutionary solution to the double spending problem.