When a government spends $20 million on a project, it needs to classify the project in the financial records and get an OK for that spending from a very high ranking official and get a sanction to it too (probably the president as it involves affect financial systems).

As we know, in this day and age of wikileaks etc... , this info goes out to the public at some time.
Once it goes out to the public, the media get hold of it and make it a headline for a week which is enough to multiply the bitcoin network by a few orders of magnitude in addition to causing bad publicity to the official/party that sanctioned it.

I think that would be enough to stop it, at least in democratic states.

Tell me such a rule in case of chain split that does not require authority. OK, caveden says "drop anything that is longer than the current chain by N blocks". Apart from creating a whole lot of problems in normal operation (you will have the very same situation every time you had a network outage and now you client sees much longer chains), there is no guarantee you have the right chain.

And what about "stepping stone attack"? Attacker inject longer chains by one block one at the time denying all transaction confirmations?


The core idea of Bitcoin is that it is completely decentralized. If you create a "Bitcoin central bank" that decides which blockchain is right and which is wrong, it's going to be not Bitcoin but something else.

With the overflow bug, it was obviously a bug so it was fixed. In case of 50% network attack, there is no way to decide what is right and what is wrong.

Have you heard about "mining cartel attack"? All kind of attacks can be performed with innocent participants.


What if you had a network outage and now you see a longer chain. You drop it and your Bitcoin client no longer works.

What about a "stepping stone attack"? The attacker only injects chains slightly longer but frequently thus denying all confirmations.


Consensus based on what? One person, one vote? Currently Bitcoin operates on consensus: "1 hash/s = one vote".

It is extremely difficult to gain from any >50% network attack. It is much more profitable to be honest. That's why I don't expect we will ever see "criminal double spending" because effort required to play this trick will be larger than any potential short-term gain.  But Bitcoin is completely vulnerable to DoS by a >50% participant. It's in its core. It is the basis of all Bitcoin operations and it is clearly described in the original Satoshi paper. Bitcoin can work only if >50% of the network hashrate is cooperating.

Seeing a longer chain is different from seeing a long block reorganization. The lenght that matters in the second case is the backward length, the number of blocks who had to be discarded. Network outages won't cause you this.


Again:


Who's talking about anything remotely closed to a central bank here? All I've said is that it's probably possible to prove with probability calculations that an honest block chain split will not be longer than a certain constant or that it would take several thousands of years for that to happen, so you could easily classify such kind of splits as dishonest.

Thank you ! That is what I wanted to know.

Then the short block reorganization will remain short. It's not the number of blocks added to it that counts, it is the number of discarded blocks. While you were offline, you didn't receive any new blocks in the bad chain, and people already started building on the other chain. The number of blocks that will be overwritten is small.

I think you're not clearing understanding what I mean by long block reorganization. I mean the number of blocks that will be overwritten. It's possible to mathematically determine a number for which the probability of it happening is completely insignificant. Honest block chains splits of such length will never occur.


I'm not planning into doing anything because I don't even think that will ever be needed. But I believe people would come up with a good plan if such thing happens. A whitelist of "transaction pools" to which every node could send their transactions could be a way to dodge the attack, maybe... If the attacker is only making transactions within his wallet in order to erase everybody else's and pause the network, such whitelist of transaction pools could show people which chain belongs to the attacker and which contain true transactions.


No you don't. You just need consensus, as there is consensus today that "the larger chain wins", as there's consensus today in the chosen inflation model etc.


Dude! I'm talking about a length that is impossible to happen honestly! That's surely much more than 5 blocks. In my first post I said of a week. But some good mathematician should do the calculus.

Why is that?

With a max block size of 1 MB and an average of ~250 bytes per transaction, aren't we stuck with ~4000?

I want to point out before I say all this, that it is written under the assumption that the code of bitcoin is as pure as it seems to be as a legitimate decentralized currency, and in no way brings to question the techies understanding of the code.

Now, IF the idea of decentralized currency was thought up originally by its ENEMIES who saw its implications, and they invested the necessary money/computers to eventually bring it down, then brought to the public as bitcoin via 'Satoshi Nakamoto'. They wait for the idea to draw in the techy individuals - like it has - who in turn spread the idea around to those who trust them as smart - like they have - this all with the aim of building up the popularity/reputation of decentralized currencies as a whole. Eventually, enough people trust and invest so that when this enemy of decentralized currency(also the creator of bitcoin mind you) pulls the proverbial rug out from under, the trusting collective loses the millions of dollars they have invested and the face of decentralized currency is now very ugly to the them, to the point where even if a new genuinely uncompromisable network were to emerge, we have the boy who cries wolf scenario on our hands (With the techies playing the part of the boy and the townspeople playing, well.. the townspeople. {For this metaphore to be truly accurate you actually have to see satoshi as the boy, and the techies would merely be the first townspeople that the boy gets to whom believe him, then themselves go on and unwittingly spread the boys lie, but potatoes, pototos, since as far as the townspeople are concerned the techies spreading the word are now untrustworthy, b/c to the simple mind, their money is gone, and their trust of the the techies is to blame}. This all having been done by the controllers of the money to keep their control of the money, by premeditating and attacking future honest decentralized currencies before their birth. This doesn't kill the idea obviously(since the idea is in essence the circumvention of gov't/banks, if these are indeed inefficient entities, efficiency (decentralized currency) wins long term, or so says evolution at least, efficiency can't be killed, its all there really is), it simply makes it harder for the future attempts to be able to take hold right away.

I have no idea if this is a valid point, or merely naive drivel which is easily refuted..

quote freemoney

"It's open source. People look inside at how it does what it does, it isn't a mystery or anything."


I'm aware, however, I was under the impression that both money invested and the earlier the attack began, the worse damage it could do. Is it not the case that those who have viewed and understand the code claim this?


how do you do those quote bubbles? I'm new to this..

BTC can be split down to 8 decimal places, you could have a healthy system with only like 100 BTC in existence.