Quote from: BitcoinEXpress on October 03, 2014, 10:23:32 PM

Quote from: TheFascistMind on October 03, 2014, 09:46:21 PM

Quote from: nioc on October 03, 2014, 09:32:33 PM

A direct question that has no hope of being answered directly.

Why are you attacking Monero?

Here is my guess...

He already told the devs with a public post that too fast of difficulty adjustment and throwing away 20% of the timestamps are weaknesses. The devs were given approximately 25 days to rectify those flaws, and thus far afaik have not done so. Perhaps the devs didn't see any flaws in those design decisions. I thus expended some effort to broad-stroke outline some ideas of potential attacks that require one of those weaknesses.

I understand you want BCX to walk them through an attack with more details, but you know even most very smart Bitcoin devs didn't think selfish mining was real after the white paper was published until they went and built simulations to disprove it and ended up proving it.

Denial and confirmation bias makes climbing the nice wall inefficient. The most efficient is action and demonstration.

I have experienced many times in my life the "not invented here" syndrome and it is very inefficient to fight hierarchies and vested interests to get something done. Much easier is to do what one can do without being dependent on some slow moving molasses.

The other possibility is that he wants to maximization the amplification of his reputation, since it was slandered here. Also I can't rule out the possibility that he has some level of distaste for the hierarchy of XMR and its public face (although that might just be me projecting my distaste for centralized paradigms), but for political reasons I doubt he would want to let that be known.

Hopefully he will answer you too.

P.S. BCX also indicated another of the weaknesses is a coin killer (something about anonymity and wallets), meaning it can't be fixed. So helping the devs in that case wouldn't be evolution, it would be delaying killing what can't live. I am not sure if he meant he would be attacking that weakness though. Maybe not. Maybe he is only trying to wake up the community. And maybe that "coin killer" weakness is only theoretical and hadn't been fully developed into a deployable attack. I lean to this interpretation because BCX has only mentioned TW like aspects in the past days and he confirmed a "decline in price" differentiated that from the other choice of "price to 0".

Edit: in most cases I agree with filing a bug report with the developers. But in the case that forced evolution is timely and a bug report would have to be prioritized, I might choose the former too. But I've never played the role BCX does. I would instead spend my time creating a coin without the weakness I found. If I was a developer for XMR, I would be attempting to change the design, but I would probably be met with some resistance since no attack has been demonstrated yet. Refer to the upthread exchange with fluffypony wherein he stated that until an attack was demonstrated, they could assume they could unwind any damage from a future attack, and that he had time to go think at the beach with his wife (the implication was that I was too stressful and paranoid).

There is nothing that teaches better than the shock of having one's confirmation bias shattered rather than giving one a long period of time to think they discovered and rectified their bias on their on volition.

Couldn't have said that better if I had said it myself!

~BCX~

LOL OK.

It seems then that the bonus question was answered.

Being that I have somehow missed the answer to the original question, the bonus will not be forthcoming at this time.