Quote from: CatKiwi on June 18, 2014, 01:10:16 PM

I would like to hear what Kosmost and Shaun have to say on the matter. So far there has been no official word from either of them about this here.

The announcement of this 'maybe/may not be' attack caused a significant dumping of coins while it was trending up again. That is not acceptable. The threat should have been proven beyond reasonable doubt before making a public announcement (on both here and reddit I see) and it should have been accompanied by proof for all to verify.

By all accounts it would appear that the threat had already abated before the members posted their announcement - all the more reason to privately inform Kosmost of the concern and let him handle it.

There are ways of dealing with things like this professionally, and although I'm sure the members who posted had no ill intention - it was not professional.

good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws
― Plato

Where there is value, there will be persons attempting to maximize their take, even potentially leading to outright fraud. Mintpal had some issues, they took corrective action by upping their confirmations to 200. Cryptsy did not have any problems and confirmations required is still at 3. This action taken by mintpal was done on their own, Kosmost was notified via email concerning the situation.

Personally, I do not believe this was an intentional attack as bitwho hypothesized as a possible scenario a few post back. To spend the money/power/resources to earn a few extra million Karma doesn't add up, IMHO. A double spend attack is essentially sending blocks they wrongfully mined on their own fork to an exchange. They use their own blockchain to confirm with the exchange that the Karms are good. Then eventually the real fork takes over and those blocks that were sent to the exchange become orphaned and are worthless. This is a known issue with the PoW system. Its not perfect but still is the best one out there ATM.

This could have been unintentional as the pools jump from coin to coin quickly.
This could have been to create a slow down at Mintpal and help another exchange.
This could have been part of a master plot to bring down Karma.
This could have been done to spend millions of Karma and gain LTC.

All of these are possible motivations. A large pool will want to return to Karma at some point and keep mining to make money, devaluing Karma doesn't make sense. We are one of the most profitable, if not THE most profitable, coins to mine right now and have been for sometime. Could this be a sinister supporter of Cryptsy trying to move business their way? Doubt it, but possible. Is this just a weak attempt to discredit Karma in general? Perhaps, but not going to work. Maybe it was someone trying to make a quick buck and exploiting a known vulnerability of PoW.

As we move up the coinmarketcap.com list, I expect we will see more of this. This is still the Wild West and there are people with vested interests competing with our baby. We need to keep all of our options open, potentially doing an algo tweak toward merged mining or other security fixes.

As the wise Norwegian Venture Capitalist, Olav Bergheim, said, "There are no bumps in the road, this is the road."