Post
Topic
Board Archival
Re: delete
by
NewLiberty
on 02/10/2014, 12:12:14 UTC
You went above and beyond the call to debunk the Concern Trolling
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=concern+troll

I also tried to explain why this isn't important a few times myself, but seems they got carried away over the argument about the math to research the unnecessary concern.

Upthread an assertion that the 4 blocks in 1 minute event would occur ever hour was implied to mean "no evidence for" (and bring on the ridicule of BCX and premature celebrations of victory) and it was not admitted that it was "no evidence for nor against" (inconclusive).

I corrected the math to show there was indeed a rare event, but made no assertions of abnormality nor attack. My point in doing so was to point out that there is "no evidence for nor against" (inconclusive).

That is an extremely relevant concern. And I won the argument. Period. Until someone shows that they have a model that would signal an ongoing TW attack.

Edit: BCX pointed to that rare event implying it might indicate something is going on. But I don't think we can distinguish it from noise (i.e. BCX could be making vacuous points) due to the unreliability of the timestamps (and it is even alleged that network hashrate variance and propagation plays a role via orphan rate in the unreliability, although I'd want to quantify that before I made that assumption). One could try to write a script to do an exhaustive computation of all rarer events.

Edit#2: I know XMR people would like to see closure on this and want to say "if you haven't proven anything, then we don't have to prove anything either". Normally I would agree, but as I said BCX has met his word in the past and he did point me towards an anonymity issue and a dubious ring private key issue. That gives him some credibility. His use of vacuous points subtracts from his credibility, unless the full poker hand is considered.

You won the argument on the math.  I granted that in my initial post many hours ago.   But...
It isn't relevant, simply because it can't be relevant.   The time stamp of the miner's computer effects nothing because it isn't used for anything meaningful.  There isn't a security issue there.

Edit:  If anything BCX's commenting on it is evidence of "no attack" forthcoming.  Why bother with meaningless concern trolling if you have rocket launchers under your bed?