Quote from: smooth on July 28, 2014, 08:10:26 PM

Quote from: raid_n on July 28, 2014, 07:58:42 PM

1) The attacker can attempt a double spend
2) The attacker withholds a transaction to cause economic harm

Incomplete list, and you are ignoring some very important implications.

No that list is complete. Even your link just points out different nuances of using these two actions.
It is complete because these are the only valid actions that the protocol allows a miner to take. (we will disregard a >50% attack on running the protocol code because that effectively just forks bitcoin)

Quote from: r0ach on July 28, 2014, 09:26:37 PM

Please don't give me some primitive list off an FAQ.

I'm not talking about some one time double spend, I'm talking about how the pools are so large of an attack vector, that it's trivial for governments to take over or impose their will on the network. Also how it's supposed to be a decentralized network without trusted 3rd parties, yet the tiny amount of mining pools are the trusted third parties. The protocol never actually succeeded in it's stated goals, and is currently just a giant fugazi.

Do you remember the initial Bitcoin premise and intro to the world? When Satoshi types he claims to have figured out a way to create decentralized consensus without trusted third parties? Everyone gives him credit like he actually succeeded.

He never did succeed.

Again you post arguments based on your premises but not on hard facts.
It is trivial to see if the network behaves. All you need to do is have enough participants log broadcast transactions and from this you can derive if those transactions were put through.

Bitcoin has probabilistic consensus on the blockchain. Do you even know what this means? It means that the probability of a block not changing converges towards 1.
So unless you use checkpointing (which is basically consensus enforced through the protocol) you never have a 100% certainty that your transaction is stable.
That does not matter however as a very large probability is good enough for most use cases.

You do not have to trust third parties because you can observe their behaviour and decide for yourself if a transaction has reached a level of trust you desire.

Statments like saying bitcoin is just a "giant fugazi" just strengthens my assumption on your motives.
It is not so much about the security of bitcoin but more about you wanting another coin you deem more secure to succeed.

I think it is great that altcoins are exploring new routes and methods which can flow back into all other cryptos if they are valid and useful.
But lets face it. Altcoins need to inflate issues with bitcoin to give people an incentive to switch to them.

"Oh look, bitcoin is so horribly broken but coin xyz fixes all that and has free candy on top! who would not want free candy right*?"

* Disclaimer, I have large holdings in xyz coin.