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Domain: hackingdistributed.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to hackingdistributed.com.
Stories · 3
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Bitcoin (Probably) Isn't Broken
Trailrunner7 writes "In the wake of the publication of a new academic paper that says there is a fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin protocol that could allow a small cartel of participants to become powerful enough that it could take over the mining process and gather a disproportionate amount of the value in the system, researchers are debating the potential value of the attack and whether it's actually practical in the real world. The paper, published this week by researchers at Cornell University, claims that Bitcoin is broken, but critics say there's a foundational flaw in the paper's assertions. ... The idea of a majority of Bitcoin miners joining together to dominate the system isn't new, but the Cornell researchers say that a smaller pool of one third of the miners could achieve the same result, and that once they have, there would be a snowball effect with other miners joining this cartel to increase their own piece of the pie. However, other researchers have taken issue with this analysis, saying that it wouldn't hold together in the real world. 'The most serious flaw, perhaps, is that, contrary to their claims, a coalition of ES-miners [selfish miners] would not be stable, because members of the coalition would have an incentive to cheat on their coalition partners, by using a strategy that I'll call fair-weather mining,' Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, wrote in an analysis of the paper." -
Bitcoin Protocol Vulnerability Could Lead To a Collapse
First time accepted submitter stanga writes "Cornell researchers unveiled an attack on the Bitcoin mining protocol that enables selfish mining pools to earn more than their fair share. In a technical report the authors explain this attack can be performed by a pool of any size. Rational miners will join this pool to increase their benefits, creating a snowball effect that may end up with a pool commanding a majority of the system's mining power. Such a pool would be able to single-handedly control the blockchain, violating the decentralized nature of the increasingly successful Bitcoin. The authors propose a patch to the protocol that would protect the system from selfish mining pools smaller than 25% of the system. They also show that Bitcoin can never be safe from selfish mining pools larger than 33% of the network, whereas it was previously believed that only groups larger than 50% of the network were a threat to the system. The question is — can the miners operating today adopt the suggested fix and dismantle too-large pools before a selfish mining pool arises?" -
Cornell Researchers Unveil a Virtual Notary
First time accepted submitter el33thack3r writes "We've all wanted a trustworthy record of an online factoid, whether it's your official employment status, a tweet someone made or the hash of an open-source distribution to protect it from tampering. A group of Cornell researchers have just unveiled a service called Virtual Notary that can serve as a witness to online factoids. The service is useful for inventors who want to timestamp an invention disclosure, for people who are seeking an officially random number selected for a raffle or crypto protocol, for web services that want a record of a user's email address, and for many other use cases. The service is free and the researchers are seeking community input on other online factoids of interest. What would you like notarized online?" The concept is interesting, but some of the items they've chosen as examples seem well documented elsewhere, such as historical exchange rates and stock prices.